Project & Portfolio Management solutions HELP ORGANISATIONS to have a clear and precise view of the investments on progress and the ones being planned, as well as to have an investments log file to avoid repeating errors.
Working with a Project & Portfolio Management solution comprises the entire life cycle of a project portfolio, from the initial idea and the business plan development, to the risks and costs evaluation; going through the project prioritization, resources management, monitoring and reporting actions and project closing.
Project & Portfolio Management solutions, allow an organization of any commercial profile to integrate the management of services, projects, personnel and financial aspects all in the same web application.
POTENCY
the most efficient management for the business with limited resources
IT ORGANIZES
the portfolio in an effective manner, it shows the set of financial data
IT BOOSTS
the project & portfolio management of the organisation mitigating its risks
IT ALLOWS
better alignment between technology and organization strategic objectives
PROJECT & PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT: AREAS OF KNOWLEDGE
PPM solutions have a module which allows the organization to manage the set of demands from the project strategic management (through portfolio) to the operational and not planned through incidents and service requirements.
Apart from that, users can manage their innovation processes through the generation of ideas which later can be transformed into products, services or projects.
- Manage the strategic demand holistically
These tools gives a holistic vision of all the necessary elements, included in the project work, service work and the requests generated by incidents reaching a dynamic balance between them. At the same time, it is linked with the financial and resources management modules to provide complete information about the time spent by the employees (internal or external) on the project and the work oriented to the service. The result of this system is that it generates the precise requirements for the resources projection and a better control over the cost of the existing systems.
- Manage effectively the operational demand
Often, requests are prioritized without having a general vision of its effects on the organization work. As a result, unplanned work often consumes more resources than the initially projected.
PPM Solutions facilitate the unplanned work control. After registering the incidences and the services requests from the technical support department, it evaluates them to identify their effect, urgency and priority. The requests meeting certain criteria can be transformed into tasks or new projects and then be manage with PPM tools, that also register the cost related to this unplanned work. That allows IT department to issue a charge-back to the companies submitting the requests.
- Identify the cost of the demand
PPM Solutions use an exhaustive financial management to obtain in detail the analysis of the incidences costs and other unplanned works. Through a rates matrix system, the tool automatically calculates how much you are spending on works due to incidences and other requests on the basis of the allocated resources.
Information about costs and incidences provided by PPM tools link services costs -as well as the number of incidences and requests- to the corresponding IT investments such as applications, assets, products and services which allows portfolio managers to take the best decisions about IT investments, including the ones that have to be boosted, maintained, consolidated or withdraw.
- Compile and evaluate ideas systematically
Ideas management is the key for an appropriate business management since it will provide you with a register solution, classification, evaluation and approving products and technologies, as well as projects and initiatives requests in an early stage which can be applied to the whole of the company. Organization users can introduce ideas through forms and established fields which register the correct information and send it to the relevant editors for its evaluation and utilization. Once ideas are approved, users can turn them into the appropriate project, asset, use or register of the product. At this point, portfolio planning, resources allocation and costs and times monitoring can start at the requested time.
PPM tools allow clients to define portfolio structure to adapt it to the existent business practices in a way that the structure and the department hierarchy are reflected. Costs and benefits analysis, financial analysis, risks analysis, business alignment, budget comparison, timeline (chronogram) and planning based on “what if…” scenarios are used for the evaluation of its functionalities and comparison of its portfolios.
Users can establish a parameter set to define resources and risks financial tresholds. PPM solutions can calculate automatically a set of possible portfolios based on a series of investments. Furthermore, it allows workflow configuration for the portfolio management, helping the client to make sure all the stages are performed on a consistent and transparent way, including the initial idea, requests, development of the business case, portfolio evaluation and prioritization, portfolio balance, project approval and portfolio initiation and monitoring.
The objective is to facilitate the decision making thanks to a structure environment to decide which projects, programs and initiatives should be funded, which should be maintained and which should be finished. Portfolio management with PPM tools provides executives with detailed information capable of answer key questions:
- Which is the project support and the available resources for the strategic initiatives?
- Does the set of potential projects guarantee long term growth and the return of the investment to the company
- Is the current project portfolio reaching the operative objectives and the desired performance?
Resources planning is a fundamental question for the current business environment, since companies try to obtain the best performance from their project portfolio. This PPM tools module helps you to establish profiles based on abilities for different roles, organize them hierarchically and use bank resources to assign the roles.
Planning of portfolio scenarios will use this information to optimize the use of the existent resources and to locate where the lack of resources is or a deficit of certain abilities required for a project. Users present a series of individual parameters at the level of roles, abilities, availability or organization breakdown structure. It also allows the workflows configuration by request for resources and assignment with the possibility to include multiple and scaled assignments and notifications.
Combine people with projects
Whether your organization uses a formal or informal personnel application process for IT projects or other IT works, PPM solutions contribute the flexibility you need to work the way you wish. The resources locator promotes the personnel selection process allowing you to find and select resources quickly to later explore the specific information of each employee: abilities, current resources assignment and individual schedules. You can also consult charts to identify who is being under or over-used making easier for you to find qualified personnel available in all the organization.
Time sheets available in PPM solutions allow team members to register time and resources investment on projects, requests and incidences. Once the time sheet is sent, managers responsible for the times approval can verify it is complete and correctly completed before approving it. Great report creation functions provide precise information about time invested by all the resources in the work done.
Balance resources capacity and project demand
“Capacity planning” PPM tools function provides you with data about organization portfolio, showing you the relation between global work (demand) and the total resources availability (capacity). You can see summaries grouped by organizational structure (OBS), hierarchies such as geographic location, departments, type of project and resources functions. Strategic planners can analyse hypothesis about projects changing projects attributes to simulate different possible projects. For example, they can exclude lower priority projects that have been not approved yet or change project dates and resources assignation to see in which way project requirements change.
Identify and monitor abilities and experiences
In an environment of continuous personnel training, development and rotation, the company should meet the challenge of identifying, classifying and organizing personnel abilities. Abilities management tool allows the quick identification of the optimum resources available for each project. CA PPM offers a method to understand personnel abilities, allowing to monitor their development, experience and level of interest.
Financial management in PPM solutions means budget information handling, from the financial planning to the transactions and chargeback processes:
- Financial planning: have at your disposal financial summaries to know in detail the budget information. Manage your investments using financial indicators such as VPM and ROI. The objectives to achieve are:
- To calculate and predict costs and benefits for future investments
- To know accurately the costs and/or benefits origins in a short period of time.
- Depending on the different grouping criteria or attributes considered appropriate the costs and benefits can be disgregate.
- To fit your budget to your business needs.
- Transaction processes: transactions are used to obtain the total cost of the labour, material, equipment and other incurred costs made for investments. All will be reflected on the financial plans.
- Chargebacks: chargebacks are used to represent transfers between accounts of the investments or services costs to the departments.
In short, financial management in PPM tools is able to administer all the budget of the organization in real time establishing a set of parameters that allows us to know daily the deviations we are incurring.
Projects are the base of the programs and portfolios and constitute the mode of transport for the execution of almost all strategies. An incorrectly planned or estimated project can have a negative impact on: results, products, organization costs, credibility and employees motivation. Project management Software makes it possible to ensure that:
- Best practices and corporative methodologies are met:
- Appropriate planes are created
- All the barriers in terms of communication are removed reaching a precise and efficient execution of each project
PPM software provide, in detail, everything expected from a project management tool, including:
- Project plans construction with Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
- Time register
- Workflows definition within the project
- Templates based on best practices, libraries and tasks allocation
In terms of a project planning, PPM tools include an interactive Gantt chart that offers Project Managers the possibility to edit interactively and use free software like Open Workbench or alternative tools like Microsoft Project.
Programme your projects rapid and efficiently
PPM solutions allow to easily programme key tasks and landmarks, to manage project schedule and resources, as well as to group together several sub-projects in programmes to obtain a programming aggregation which allows an easy portfolio creation. Users programme project plans on the basis of the available resources and not on tasks duration obtaining a more realistic plan in less time. It also allows the creation of provisional schedules, to make changes, and to publish the schedule in the register plan without downloading any software or taking care of it. The solution also allows to assign transactions of projects funded internally to business units and departments in order to distribute the costs equally (what we call virtual bill).
Plans from methodologies and recommended practice templates
Instead of starting from scratch, project managers can make their plans from methodologies and predefined templates and include them in PPM tools. Answers to questions about project profile generate automatically key tasks and landmarks or a whole breakdown working structure, including deliveries and selected recommendations of their own recommended practices methods. Project templates expedite the project creation process and facilitates the reuse of previous work. Templates take advantage from the wide functions of PPM solutions workflows and they mean for the managers a way to shape the organization development process within the application.
Pre-configured content to expedite the ROI
Recommended practices of PPM accelerators offer to the organizations PPM content immediately, designed to reduce the risk and the costs of implementation and at the same time it contributes to expedite its adoption by the final user. Some PPM solutions users can use the advantages from both PMO accelerator and PRINCE2 accelerator.
With more than 50 panels, reports and inquiries, the PMO accelerator allows the organization to expedite project and portfolio management operations. These panels and analysis focused on projects are integrated in PPM tools and allows all the project management team to quickly adopt and use the recommended practices and perform project tasks more efficiently. The final result is the ability of executing projects and programs in a controlled, predictable and punctual way in accordance to the budget programme to satisfy the user at all times.
PROJECT & PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT: FEATURED SOLUTIONS
PPM AND AGILE EVALUATION AND CONSULTANCY REPORT
Our solutions model presents a wide offer of multidisciplinary services related to PPM with competitive prices that assure the quality, the optimal development times and the deployment of the solution. Our consultants have an extensive experience that allows them to identify the way to maximize the value that your PPM tool adds to your organization.
For the PPM and Agile Analysis and Consultancy Report we set up the following process:
PPM – AGILE MATURITY EVALUATION
A PPM or Agility maturity evaluation is conducted, comparing leading practices with the client’s existing processes and systems, in order to determine the degree of maturity of their current Project & Portfolio Management or Business Agility capabilities.
INFORMATION COLLECTION
Inputs are gathered from business executives, project managers, business analysts and other stakeholders to conduct the evaluation and drive the creation of a realistic roadmap to help the company move through PPM or Business Agility maturity.
REPORT AND RECOMMENDATION
As a result of the evaluation process, the client receives an Evaluation and Recommendation Report, both for PPM and Agile, which includes a proposed roadmap to improve the mastery of both the Project & Portfolio Management methodology and Agile.
ANALYSIS PPM – AGILE
We offer the possibility to conduct a FREE EVALUATION of the solution to all the professionals on the project management field that still do not know the PPM tool. For a trial period of one month, the interested users will be assisted by one of our consultants who will provide them with all the help needed to familiarize with the PPM tool leader on the market.
PPM and Agile maturity evaluation
Definition of a methodological implementation roadmap to accompany the company in improving its PPM or Business Agility competencies.
Consultancy Services
Our consultants have extensive experience that enables them to identify how you can maximise the value that your Project Management brings to your organisation.
Recommendations and advice
Tips and recommendations to ensure quality and optimal timing of development and deployment of methodological implementation
