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What is Project Portfolio Management? Challenges and Benefits

In today’s competitive economy, the effective management of R&D resources can make or break new product introductions, and delaying long-term or complex projects in IT organizations even by just one week increases costs and diminishes productivity. To manage high-value, long-term R&D or IT projects, companies must minimize the risks of assigning and maintaining the right mix of human and financial capital. An ongoing evaluation of requirements, resources, schedules, and employee capabilities is essential.

What is Project Portfolio Management?

Project Portfolio Management is designed to improve the execution of complex projects in research and development (R&D) and information technology (IT) organizations.

Project Portfolio Management integrates information from existing project management, human resource, financial, and time-tracking systems to provide a complete overview of an organization’s project portfolio. Project executives, project managers, resource managers, and employees can easily drill down from this high-level information to view more details.

What are the Challenges of Project Portfolio Management?

Forward-thinking companies are constantly evaluating new business opportunities based on emerging technologies and their own ability to take advantage of those opportunities. The primary challenge of enterprise program management is to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date view of the entire portfolio of company projects. Are projects aligned with corporate goals? Do they have adequate resources? Are the most skilled employees working on the most appropriate projects? What are the risks and impact of a delay? Timely answers to these questions are critical in determining which projects to pursue and which to cancel.

Without a centralized view of enterprise-wide data for complex projects, it’s difficult to understand the full extent of project risks and opportunities. Delays can occur as information is collected from the project management, financial, and human resources systems in an effort to understand and create the ideal mix of project resources.

However, the biggest challenge is assigning the right employees to the right project at the right time to benefit both the project and employees’ career motivations. Of course, happy employees are more productive, but they are rarely empowered to market their skills across the enterprise to search for career-advancing project assignments.

Portfolio Management consists of a dashboard of relevant project data including key performance metrics related to budget, schedule, and staffing issues. This centralized view of performing and at-risk elements is critical for managing your enterprise-wide portfolio of projects.

You may like to read: Project Portfolio Management Implementation Plan

What are features of Project Portfolio Management?

Project Portfolio Management unifies project management, time tracking, financial data, and employee skills information in a portfolio management paradigm. By integrating data from existing enterprise systems like human resources and financials, Project Portfolio Management presents relevant project data in a timely, role-based manner so executives, project managers, and team members can make smart decisions.

What are features of Project Portfolio Management

The main capabilities of Project Portfolio Management include:

Project Portfolio Management: Align your entire project portfolio with corporate objectives through simulation and prioritization.

Monitor the performance of your portfolio through increased visibility into projects across entire enterprise. Project Portfolio Management dashboard of relevant project data includes key performance metrics related to budget, schedule, and staffing issues. This centralized view of performing and at-risk elements is critical for managing your enterprise-wide project portfolio. You can classify projects as master projects or subprojects to help support programs. Various reports enable you to review factors such as project execution performance, budget and cost information. Other reports include an expected commercial value chart, strategic buckets and spending levels. Portfolio managers can also define critical success factors (CSFs) for their project portfolio or individual projects. These CSFs are then used as the basis for portfolio prioritization.

You may like to read: Project Portfolio Management Implementation Plan

Project Execution: Attain visibility into all projects of your portfolio make informed decisions.

Project Portfolio Management intelligently integrates data from disparate project management systems to create a complete suite of calendar information, to-do items, threaded discussions, document management, and role-based notifications across the entire project portfolio. In addition to supporting project management, Project Portfolio Management offers functions for project initiation, collaboration support, and enterprise-wide, role-based staffing.

Resource Management: Attain visibility into all projects of your portfolio to make informed decisions

Resource management consists of two key capabilities:

- Capacity Management: Capacity management provides a complete and consolidated view of resource supply and project demand, thereby enabling resource managers to get detailed, up-to-the-minute information about capacity across different organizations and job functions. This enterprise-wide view of resource capacity ensures that organizations are deploying their scarce talent in the best possible way. You can also identify key project and job functions and forecast the demand for these in advance. This forecasting ability enables resource managers to redeploy existing resources quickly and easily as the project portfolio changes.
- Project Staffing: Forecast resource demand Identify and deploy the right resources at the right time. Project staffing is all about getting the right person onto the right project at the right time. To support this, Project Portfolio Management provides a comprehensive account of employees’ capabilities and availability. Both managers and employees contribute skills, experiences, and aspirations – perfect for matching the right people to the right project roles.

You may like to read: Project Portfolio Management Implementation Plan

Skills Management: Project Portfolio Management uses assisted skills profiling techniques to maintain up-to-date information on the skills of project team members. Managers use Project Portfolio Management to discover sources of expertise within the organization. Employees use Project Portfolio Management to opt in to projects that advance their careers.

What are the Key Benefits of Project Portfolio Management?

Project Portfolio Management is a comprehensive new solution designed to improve the execution of complex projects in Research & Development (R&D) and IT organizations. Project Portfolio Management consolidates and organizes scattered data into a collaborative dashboard for project and executive leaders as well as resource managers and team members. By putting more information and advanced tools at their fingertips, Project Portfolio Management helps portfolio managers better choose and execute new sources of revenue.

It helps them answer questions like: Is the project aligned with corporate goals? Are the most skilled employees involved? What are the risks or impact of a delay?

What are the Key Benefits of Project Portfolio Management

Streamline redundant or inefficient projects
Align entire project portfolio with corporate objectives through simulation and prioritization
Monitor the performance of portfolio through increased visibility into projects and services across the entire enterprise
Make fact-based decisions utilizing KPI's for budget, risk, staffing and scheduling
Allocate time, money and resources more accurately
Forecast resource demand
Identify and deploy the right resources using skills matching
Share up-to-date employee skills profiles
Maximize return on existing IT assets
Improve team communication through collaboration rooms and workflow

What is Project Portfolio Management?

Project Portfolio Management is designed to improve the execution of complex projects in research and development (R&D) and information technology (IT) organizations. Project Portfolio Management integrates information from existing project management, human resource, financial, and time-tracking systems to provide a complete overview of an organization’s project portfolio. Project executives, project managers, resource managers, and employees can easily drill down from this high-level information to view more details.

What are the Challenges of Project Portfolio Management?

Are projects aligned with corporate goals? Do they have adequate resources? Are the most skilled employees working on the most appropriate projects? What are the risks and impact of a delay?

What are features of Project Portfolio Management?

Project Portfolio Management unifies project management, time tracking, financial data, and employee skills information in a portfolio management paradigm. The main capabilities of Project Portfolio Management include: Project Portfolio Management, Project Execution, Resource Management, Skills Management.

What are the Key Benefits of Project Portfolio Management?

Project Portfolio Management is a comprehensive new solution designed to improve the execution of complex projects in Research & Development (R&D) and IT organizations. The benefits include Streamline redundant or inefficient projects, Align entire project portfolio with corporate objectives, Monitor the performance of portfolio, Make fact-based decisions and many more.