Businesses may run a multitude of formal and informal forms of "projects" in their business life cycles without sometimes considering some important aspects of the project.
So says Diederik Jordaan, MD at Gen2 Enterprise Software, who notes that organisations should ask questions like: "Are you confident that you are getting the most out of every project rand spent? Do all of your projects fully support your business strategy? Are you certain that your projects actually deliver the business value they are supposed to? If not, how much of a return are you getting on your project investment? Should similar projects not be grouped into portfolios to better gauge overall (portfolio) success?"
Jordaan says project portfolio management (PPM) recognises that a portfolio's health is affected by the performance of all projects within the portfolio, as well as by the direct or indirect dependencies as well as availability of resources.
Business alignment
Combining project management disciplines with business and general management practices at the portfolio level, gives an organisation the ability to select projects and programmes that are aligned with the organisation's strategies and objectives, says Jordaan.
It also enables organisations to make the best use of available resources by having visibility into all projects including the highest priority projects; and to assess how projects and programmes are contributing to portfolio health on a regular basis, he explains.
To Jordaan, merging the disciplines also ensures that organisations take management action to keep the portfolio in compliance with business objectives; while effective use of project management disciplines at the project and programme levels improves customer satisfaction, reduces the number of risks and problems, and increases success, he says.
The goal of PPM is to realise these same benefits at the portfolio level by applying a consistent structured management approach, he states.
On this note, Gen2 Enterprise Software, in partnership with ITWeb, is conducting an online Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Survey during May to gauge and understand the current PPM landscape in SA and to gather information about the needs of organisations when it comes to project portfolio management.
"The main objectives of this PPM survey is to better understand the PPM landscape in SA in terms of the following; the readiness of South African PPM users to make use of PPM on a SaaS platform and to get an indication of the scale of use of manual or simple project management systems, such as Excel, or project management software," says Jordaan.
He points out that the survey is also aimed at getting an idea of the scale of use of more sophisticated tools such as PPM tools to manage project and portfolios.
Commenting on the benefits of PPM planning and use Jordaan says: "Closer alignment of IT with business is a benefit that offers an easily digestible, holistic view of an organisation's entire project portfolio, executives and managers can more readily understand where rands are being spent and which projects continue to be worthwhile."
Jordaan adds that better IT governance is another benefit where PPM helps managers monitor project progress in real time and provides detailed data to help satisfy project compliance requirements.
"Cost reductions and productivity are also a direct benefit as PPM helps managers identify redundancies and allocate resources appropriately; it enables them to make better IT staffing and outsourcing decisions, and to spot opportunities for asset re-use."
Predictable outcomes
According to Jordaan, organisations have the advantage of more predictable project outcomes when using PPM tools as a strategy bridges the gap between business managers and the practitioners who deliver the projects.
"PPM ensures consistent processes across projects and helps managers assess project status in real-time, predict project outcomes, and identify inter-project dependencies."
He says there are many downfalls to not having a PPM strategy in place, which include alignment of the portfolio to the corporate strategy not being understood, often overlapping projects, too many 'must-have' projects, ineffective prioritisation, failure to stop poor performing projects, business-as-usual projects being managed outside a portfolio, lack of effective reporting and many more downfalls.
With regards to new PPM developments taking place, Jordaan advises: "The PPM landscape is evolving rapidly as a result of the growing preference for managing multiple capital investment initiatives from a single, enterprise-wide system. This more centralised approach, and resulting 'single version of the truth' for project and project portfolio information, provides the transparency of performance needed by management to monitor progress versus the strategic plan."
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