In today’s business world, a leader can no longer look at individual project siloes or use outdated information and intuitive gut feel to make informed, proactive decisions. A leader is required to have a strategy that accounts for all aspects of your business, accounting for areas under your control, and informed by as much data as possible.
Business leaders all over the world have started using project portfolio management, or PPM, to analyze and make decisions to implement new projects and maintenance of current projects utilizing simple approaches and practices.
If you are not using a PPM strategy in your role, you need to start learning how PPM can integrate to your existing solutions and day-to-day operations to streamline your entire organization’s business and improve the bottom line.
PPM has numerous benefits over traditional project management methods including:
- Comprehensive integration
Projects cannot be treated as individual programs with separate inputs and outputs. A PPM approach will provide a holistic view that shows the impact of one project lever of the organization on another area of business. You need to have visibility into all aspects of the business, including how you can make projects work together and optimize costs that can be shared across teams. - Analyze across your portfolio spectrum
A PPM approach allows you to weigh the costs and benefits of projects across your portfolio spectrum. How does supporting a new project impact existing ones? Which of the multiple project requests should be approved and what are the analytical factors as to why to choose one from another? - Data at the right level
One of the advantages of a PPM approach is that it creates the links between different projects and keeps important information from staying hidden on a spreadsheet. By presenting details to each role appropriately, users can make informed decisions. - Cross-team transparency/alignment/knowledge sharing
PPM properly aligned across the entire organization increases transparency, allowing all teams to see the big picture and move towards a united set of strategic goals laid out by the organization. Finance, business, sales, and IT, can better understand the impacts of choices being made, and factor them into decision and requests. - Take advantage of finite resources and capacity
Ensure your team is getting bang for the buck and is able to provide reasoning for decisions in terms other teams understand, using their or common languages.
Organizations that don’t use PPM are falling behind in today’s competitive corporate environment. Using project portfolio management along with the appropriate tools will simplify your processes and enhance your team output. Based on interviews with business leaders, we have seen the impact of using a simple and effective PPM solution results in 8-12% in operational cost savings. Is that enough to impact the bottomline?