• The Challenge

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

  Companies sometimes do not even attempt to capture and accurately allocate project costs, especially internal labor, 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 used 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. At 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. However, a lack of project information integration can hinder their 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 alert capabilities to identify problems before they impact margins and customer satisfaction.
  

  
  Click on the image to enlarge them

  
  

  Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is a key management function whose success requires disciplined effort. 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 allows them to ensure that strategic investments are aligned with corporate priorities, delivered on time and on budget, and meet requirements and specifications.

  Back to top    Close

• The Solution

  SoftExpert PPM Suite is the most robust, functional and easy-to-use solution for prioritizing, planning, managing and executing projects, portfolios and programs. SoftExpert PPM solution is an integrated suite that allows organizations to seamlessly manage their services, projects, products and resources.

  Effectively prioritize and evaluate competing investments: SoftExpert PPM gives managers a real-time view into their organization's investments, initiatives and resources, and empowers decision makers to prioritize their investment based on key criteria such as benefits, timeframe, cost and risk to ensure better alignment with the organization's business strategies and governance policies.

  Develop the project management processes: Quickly and easily prepare detailed and professional project schedules complete with task descriptions, durations, resource assignments and task dependencies. Maintain a complete model of the organization's capacity and resource planning, skills inventory, total workload and resource demand, and identify, track, and plan how to mitigate risks.

  Execute and review the work defined in the project management plan to meet the project's requirements: Reduce project cycle time with the integrated workflow engine that automates and tracks the flow of all project work, including timesheet notifications and approvals, assignments and resource allocations, as well as document routing and approval. Effectively communicate project information through rich graphics and dashboards.

  Receive formal acceptance of the project, archive all project-related files and document lessons learned: Fully customizable workflow initiates project closeout to get approval from all required stakeholders and contract vendors. Checklists and scorecards help certify that the project was completed in accordance with the specified budget, schedule, scope and planned and actual outcome. Create a close-out report to describe and evaluate final project outcomes.

  Back to top    Close

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.

• 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.