Managing strategic goals across a portfolio can be challenging for project managers and senior management, as you try to monitor the progress of multiple projects of different sizes and at different stages. To do so effectively, you need the right project portfolio management (PPM) tool.
PPM software allows you to evaluate projects according to potential risk and outcomes, enabling you to manage your workforce, capacity planning and resource management so that your assets and resources generate the maximum ROI across the organization.
Project portfolio management software allows you to evaluate potential projects by success and risk, allowing you to plan staffing allocations, resource utilization, management resources, and timelines to maximize organizational performance.
Project planning is essential to keep everyone focused on your organization’s high-level goals and objectives. As you evaluate current project status, new projects, and capacity planning, your project and portfolio management platform will consolidate everything to centralize operations. PPM solutions provide the foundation for efficient resource planning and collaborative work management.
How Do PPM Tools Produce a Better ROI?
PPM tools produce a better ROI by aligning individual projects with strategic objectives, and by helping you to manage your portfolio of projects more effectively.
As you evaluate your current projects, possible projects and your pipeline demand, your PPM platform will centralize your data, consolidate all your operations and streamline your processes. So instead of working in siloes, your departments and business units work together, towards the same ends.
As well as giving you a granular view into every stage of an individual project, a PPM tool allows key stakeholders to visualize how projects, programs and portfolios align with organizational goals. This keeps teams focused on the big picture and helps connect project milestones to broader goals.
Improve Capacity Planning and Resource Management
To successfully manage project scope, you need to decrease the risk of wasted or under-used resources by ensuring effective sequencing, so that you can leverage available resources to successfully meet your deliverables. What that requires is improved coordination between teams and business units, and better communication between team members.
Maximize Productivity
When team members understand the importance of project tasks and how they relate to the overall value they provide to the organization, they become more productive. This gives you a competitive edge. A recent Gallup report reveals that companies which have a highly engaged workforce are 21% more profitable.
Increase Agility
As the past few years have demonstrated, agility is key. Anticipating changes and dealing with unplanned events can be the difference between growth and stagnation. You need to be able to assess scenarios promptly, make mid-course corrections and change direction to meet evolving strategies.
As obstacles arise within projects, or external forces dictate a pivot to new goals, the right PPM tool will help you manage that change and help you adapt quickly.
Improve ROI
All of this adds up to better ROI. Project portfolio management software keeps things running smoothly to meet your goals. It significantly increases the likelihood of finishing projects on time and within budget to provide the greatest return on your investment.
You can calculate the potential ROI utilizing Cora PPM tools with this Project Portfolio Management ROI Calculator.
Why Projects Go Over Budget
There area number of reasons why projects can end up behind schedule or over budget. Companies are afraid of getting left behind, so they take on projects without properly assessing whether they have the capacity to deliver them.
Alternatively, having taken on a new project they fail to properly take into account the changes to scope that inevitably follow. You need an effective mechanism to evaluate the impact of scope changes, both on individual projects and on your overall portfolio.
Another common mistake is the failure to conduct timely project reviews, either because people are afraid of what a review might reveal or because they simply don’t have the time.
The same thing is true for the portfolio as a whole. It’s vital that senior management conduct regular audits on the health of the portfolio as a whole, to ensure that the current projects and any proposed projects will deliver on the organization’s strategic objectives.
A PPM Tool Standardizes Everything
It’s these pain points that PPM software has been designed to address.
It centralizes all your data and documents to that everything is kept permanently up to date, in real time. And gives everyone immediate access to everything they need, regardless of where they’re working. With the result that everyone works off the same facts and figures, in the same standardized way, and using the one, central system.
Project Controls
There are a number of functions that a PPM tool gives you that are designed to prevent projects from going over budget or from getting delayed. One of the most useful of which is project controls, which allows you to track and monitor any changes to a project as they occur.
By integrating costs, schedules, budgets and forecasts, and by ensuring that any changes are constantly updated, in real time, project controls help you to avoid unnecessary delays and to reduce costs.
This improved visibility will also produce more accurate forecasting. By comparing planned with actual and committed costs against budgets, you can more accurately forecast the impact of potential changes and delays. This allows you to respond more quickly when project problems arise so you can take prompt, corrective action.
Budget Management
By integrating budgets into individual project tasks, you can calculate the cost and quickly look at variances. Used as benchmarks throughout the project, this provides transparent data and that single source of truth for senior management, and for all connected stakeholders.
Risk Management
The earlier you can identify risks and manage them, the more smoothly your project will run. Project controls allow you to continuously monitor risks and develop contingency plans for mitigation.
Resource Management
Another of the functions that the right PPM tool gives you is Resource Management. In order to ensure a project is delivered on schedule and on budget, it’s vital that you assign the right people to the right projects and for the right length of time.
The resource management functionality allows you to produce a skills set inventory so you can assess your available skills set capacity. This will enable you to perform a strategic workforce plan which will give you insight into whether you’re going to need to hire new people, or whether it would make more financial sense to use outside contractors.
Cora PPM
Cora PPM integrates all your systems and any existing software into the one central system. By streamlining all your processes and centralizing all your documents and data it makes you the control tower, so you can precisely orchestrate all your activities.
Everything is kept permanently up to date, in real time and is immediately accessible. And because Cora is a no code low code platform, it’s easy for you to configure your personalized dashboard for yourself, so that you can instantly see whatever is of most importance to you.
Everything is visualised using easy to read Gantt charts and graphs that are dynamically updated, and can be rolled up from project to program and portfolio view. Allowing senior management to explore what-if scenarios that get automatically updated across any of the relevant fields.
This provides you with valuable insight that will ensure your portfolio and each of its individual projects generate the greatest possible ROI.
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