Project and Portfolio Management [PPM]

One of the common problems faced by project-oriented organizations is having too many projects relative to their capacity.

Identifying the total number of active projects and their status within the company portfolio is difficult or cumbersome. Most of the time, resource allocation is either performed ad hoc, or in an inefficient and imprecise manner.

Capturing and accurately allocating project costs, especially internal labor, is sometimes not even attempted due to difficulties in user adoption. For many organizations, project, program and portfolio reporting is manually intensive, delayed and subject to error.

Collaboration among project team members is often ad hoc and usually involves unstructured management of issues, risks, action items and document review processes. Project management practices are often not utilized consistently across an organization, and program tracking often involves labor intensive, manual roll-up efforts.

Organizations often identify numerous project ideas, but fail to capture project information in a central location and complete the necessary business cases for each project. In some organizations, projects are selected without a clearly defined analysis process or selection criteria.

Organizations are also looking for solutions to optimize their project portfolio management processes, but a lack of integration of project information can impede the ability to properly analyze the entire project portfolio. This also presents a problem for IT departments, which are often tasked with the time-consuming effort of gathering and rolling up data for reporting purposes.

Managing the above challenges requires project management capabilities that simply cannot be supported by pen and paper or first-generation software tools. Innovative project management solutions must be able to encompass all project team members and automate multiple critical management tasks. They also must provide analytical and alerting capabilities to identify problems before they impact margins and customer satisfaction.

Initiation, Planning, Execution and Control

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is a key management function that requires disciplined effort to ensure success. To be effective, project managers must be able to continuously monitor projects, portfolios and programs to ensure that several key actions are taken. They need a tool that enables them to ensure that strategic investments are in alignment with corporate priorities, delivery is on time and on budget, and what is delivered meets required needs and specifications.

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SoftExpert PPM Suite Solution provides both business and technical managers with the visibility and control they need to effectively manage projects, portfolios, and programs. It centralizes data for analysis and reporting and automates the capture of project data to minimize errors. Standard, re-usable process templates and work products help project managers create consistently higher quality project plans, which in turn, allows them to generate project best practices that can be repeated again and again.

In essence, SoftExpert PPM Suite - Project and Portfolio Management - allows you to manage a portfolio of projects much as you would manage a portfolio of any diverse investment, such as stocks, bonds, real estate, etc. By maintaining a balanced project portfolio, you can reduce the risks of individual projects and produce an overall higher rate of return.

SoftExpert PPM Suite allows corporate executives and managers to proactively monitor their project portfolios for alignment with business objectives and planned costs and schedules. They can then regularly review entire portfolios, spread resources appropriately and adjust projects to produce the highest departmental returns. SoftExpert PPM Suite also allows them to identify project risks and quickly address them.

Portfolio Management, Plan, Execution, Closure

Most important, SoftExpert PPM Suite is broadly consistent with international standards, such as ISO 9000, ISO/TS 16949, ISO 20000 [ITIL], PMBOK, COBIT, FDA, CMMI, BSC, among others.

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Return on Investment in Project and Portfolio Management

Traditionally when enterprise professionals discussed the ROI of an investment, they were mostly thinking of the “financial” benefits. Today, organizations must also consider the “non-financial” benefits of an investment.

Financial Benefits include impacts on the organization's budget and finances, e.g., reduced costs or increased revenues.

Non-Financial Benefits are the so-called “intangible”, “soft,” or “unquantifiable” benefits of an investment. Unlike financial returns, there may be no widely-accepted metrics for organizations to apply. However, the SoftExpert solutions present undeniable potential for producing positive impacts on business performance and mission results. These include improved customer satisfaction, more precise information and a shorter cycle time.

The SoftExpert Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) solution offers the following benefits:

 

Financial ROI:

Annual Savings

  • Increase productivity: Optimized business processes; project templates; structured project management planning, execution, and control will make your staff achieve better results, in less time.
  • Reduce operational costs: following the benefits outlined above, by automating some applications, it will allow your business to reduce the effort to implement and control each project, which allows room for reducing overall personnel costs.
  • Get the right people on the right projects at the right time: SE PPM delivers robust resource management to bring balance between requests for projects and the supply of talented people. It gives you one place to manage your resource pool including a skills inventory.
  • Reduce resources applied in non-value-added projects: SE PPM allows a well planned and resourced project, with clearly defined and realistic expectations, clearly defined products and resulting outcomes, and an effective scope, time, cost and quality management, which will undoubtedly increase the chances of benefits be clearly linked to project outcomes.
  • Increase visibility across your organization:  Powerful dashboard reporting gives executives and project management leaders quick insight into what projects are taking place across the organization and their status, saving several hours per month in project follow-up.
  • Easily manage, evaluate and execute on your demand:  Capture, classify and prioritize demand at a glance; where you can quickly identify available resources; and where you can conduct "what if" analysis to determine the appropriate mix in your project portfolio, delivering only those that add most value to the organization.
  • Deliver on time and under budget: SE PPM allows you to establish financial and work goals at the onset of a project. Project plan views make it easy and quick to create schedules with key tasks, milestones, and owners, saving considerably time in planning and controlling, reducing administrative effort.

Investment

  • The investment in SoftExpert PPM will depend on the business unit size and implementation approach.

Return on Investment (%)

  • (((Total Annual Savings x n years) – Initial Investment) / Initial Investment) x 100.

Payback Period (years)

  • Initial Investment / Total Annual Savings.

 

Non-Financial ROI:

  • Easier to achieve strategic objectives due to improved project management maturity and corporate culture.
  • Improved customer satisfaction due to more effective customer need management and quality control tools that achieve the established goals, guaranteeing an effective project outcome.
  • Improved customer satisfaction generates a better customer retention rate, reputation, market share and revenue.
  • Improved regulatory compliance. SoftExpert allows the organization to integrate compliance management skills with current business processes.
  • Less paper work and less paper needed to print out reports, due to the scheduled reports, customized views and user-friendly dashboard.
  • Guarantee of effective team work and cooperation. Resources are coordinated, giving them a straightforward way to get together and resolve the task at hand, including the procedures to be used, the delegation of tasks among the team members and timeline. The project team will conduct its activities with a greater sense of professionalism and self-confidence, ensuring staff retention.
  • Reduced project start-up time and shorter learning curve for project team members, since the processes, procedures and templates are created and reused.
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BSC
CMMI
COBIT
PMBOK
Six Sigma
Related Products
SE Action
SE BI
SE Competence
SE Document
SE Performance
SE Portfolio
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SE Project
SE Request
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SE Workflow
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Project and Portfolio Management [PPM]