The 3 aims of project portfolio management
Project portfolio management aims to align strategy, operations and project execution. Companies of all sizes and in all sectors are accumulating projects, and need to maintain visibility over each of a project's three functional axes: from feasibility study, through planning, to monitoring, project management software is now indispensable for mastering all project management objectives. Your company's productivity and competitiveness depend on it.
Strategic project management
What do you want to achieve? What position can your project occupy in the market? How much will it cost to implement? Will it be profitable? What human and material resources do you need? How long will it last? Do you have the capacity to structure, lead and coordinate the project? Do you have a reference framework, or feedback from experience gained within your company?
Think before you leap - that's the right attitude to adopt when managing a project. You need a tool capable of integrating all your data to simulate the viability of your potential projects.
You can't do it all by hand - in fact, it's unthinkable! Out with the static Excel spreadsheet: opt for a solution that allows you to consider all angles, to visualize all perimeters, so as to define the right project(s) to launch, eliminating the risk of errors.
As contexts evolve over time, it's also a good idea to be able to capitalize on experience acquired in project portfolio management.
A major solution on the market stands out for the macroscopic vision it offers the project manager. Sciforma is project management software that automatically calculates and recalculates metrics based on integrated data: the solution provides a view that enables you to intelligently select the most opportune projects in your portfolio.
These 6 key elements help you draw up the specifications for a viable project:
- Identify your ideas by structuring them;
- Customize your evaluation criteria;
- Launch your feasibility study accordingly;
- Estimate the capacity management required;
- Analyze investment aspects;
- Simulate and compare your project portfolio.
Project planning or operational management
What can you implement internally? Who will do what? Should you outsource certain tasks? How do you allocate your budget? How do you manage time to meet deadlines? How do you calculate it? How do you anticipate the unexpected?
Here again, project management software can help you simulate schedules and readjust them in a few clicks, assign tasks to each member of your team, exchange and share documents, and centralize information. Your task management needs to run smoothly every day.
To ensure management at all levels, you need to define the responsibilities of each player: one decision-maker manages time spent, another validates milestones and different stages, for example.
As with any project management software worthy of the name, Sciforma lets you manage access rights and work as a team in collaborative mode. The project manager also has the ability to analyze risks upstream: where are they? What are they?
The project manager can activate alerts to be notified by email. At the slightest deviation, the indicator "flashes" on his dashboard to warn him. He can react accordingly and adjust his project management.
These 8 parameters guide your project management:
- Project launch ;
- Task management ;
- Budget and cost management;
- Managing your human resources;
- Managing your material resources;
- Risk management ;
- Change management;
- Document management.
Tracking performance and expected productivity
What are you actually doing? Is the whole team "on track"? Is everything under control? Are you sure? Really? How can you be sure? Do you spend your whole life on the phone with the whole team?
Of course not. You use a dedicated dashboard to monitor the project as a whole, with precise, real-time indicators of whether you're on time or over budget.
Of course, you rely on project management software that lets you track time spent by project, by task and by collaborator. And, of course, you'll receive an alert if you're running over time or over budget.
On this point, Sciforma offers greater visibility by providing consistent reporting, enabling finer, more instantaneous analysis.
These 5 criteria determine your project tracking:
- Schedule management ;
- Expense management ;
- Time recording and management;
- Demand management;
- Incident management.
Through 3 specific applications, project portfolio management encompasses multiple aspects. Whether you're looking to control your outsourced sales, or simply to deploy a solution that subtly integrates all your internal processes and data, Sciforma is the obvious answer.
Article translated from French