In Part 3b of the PPM Master Class we continue to look at how to organise your business for Project Portfolio Management.  We begin by looking at the importance of understanding your resource capability and how your ability to deliver projects is vital to implementing a successful PPM process. We will also explore the importance of having real time resource visibility, implementing Project Governance and the role milestone management plays in the PPM process.

Do you know your businesses capability to deliver projects?

In order to implement a successful Project Portfolio Management process and to ensure you have the ability to deliver your project portfolio, having visibility of your resources is critical.

“.. Many organisations are often caught in a situation where project resource demands are coming at them from many different directions.”

Quite often organisations lack this information and do not even have a central repository of projects or a clear understanding of resource capability.  Here are three key questions to ask  your business:

• Do you have a complete picture of the demands being made on the business?
• Do projects come from nowhere and do you have the capability to deliver on them?
• Are you able to quickly re prioritise resources?

Central to Project Portfolio Management is the control and visibility over resources in order to ensure that the business has the right people on the right projects at the right time.

 

Understanding your Resource Capability

Key to Project Portfolio Management is understanding the organisations resource capability.  Project Portfolio Management is about the ability to view resource allocation within the portfolio and also to reallocate these resources to more critical activities and to factor this into any forward planning.

Key to achieving this is:

• A single integrated resource and skills database – this is essential in order for the business to effectively handle resource allocation
• ‘What if’ scenario & capability analysis – the ability for the business to model multiple scenarios will help fine-tune assumptions. ‘What if’ scenarios give the portfolio process the ability to match supply and demand
• Drill-up and Drill Down Visibility of Resources – provides the business with drill down/drill up capability management data, giving the business an enterprise wide view of their ability to deliver
• Real Time Reporting/Analytic’s – ensures you stay connected with how changes to the project portfolio and project delivery effect resource capability

 

Implementing Project Governance

Another key element of organising your business for Project Portfolio Management is to have a clear understanding of how to achieve project governance and how this can be embedded into the PPM process. Essentially Project Governanceis all about building a framework which will enable the business to deliver on its commitment and objectives, it instils best practice and builds a two way accountability between the business and the project delivery process. Project Governance ensures accountability is spread across all levels of the business, not just project managers – it ensures that the organisations projects are generating the required business value.

Project governance naturally follows from a formalised decision making infrastructure for managing the businesses portfolio of projects.

Embedding Project Governance within the Project Portfolio Management process is underpinned by three critical determinates:

• Formulation of a two-way governance and accountability contract between the business and the project delivery process
• The speed and reliability with which the business’s project delivery information is accessed and reported to the business
• How the business fuses these together and tracks the project delivery process via milestone management

Real time information, centralised data and role based visibility are key to achieving this.

 

Root and Branch Milestone Management

Enterprise-wide milestone management is key to embedding Project Governance into the Project Portfolio Management process.  Milestones provide an effective method of maintaining the two way contract between the business and project stakeholders and controlling what the business has agreed to deliver. In fact it ensures that decisions are made in the same way throughout the organisation and by the correct people.

Milestone Management is central to driving organisational accountability and project performance and provides an effective framework for holding strategic management and operational management to account.  This is key for distilling accountability through all layers of management, whilst retaining the ability to clearly identify where the accountability for those decisions lies.

Top- Down, Bottom -Up Milestone Management in turn helps to drive product delivery, by clearly aligning the project delivery process with the business strategy  this gives the business the ability to see:

• Whether projects are on time
• Why have they been moved
• Who moved them
• What is the impact of moving them

 

Coming up in Part 3c

In Part 3c of the PPM Master Class we continue to look at how you can organise your business  for Project Portfolio Management and discuss why gaining ‘Real Time Information’ is essential to implementing a successful PPM process by providing the business with speed and accuracy in its decision making.  To complete part 3c we look at the different information demands that different roles in the organisation place on the PPM process.

 

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