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02/11/08 Tip of the Week: Project Portfolio Management: Tip 4 - Use a proven PPM tool.

February 11, 2008 @ Project Management Tips of the Week from Mark Perry

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PPM involves tradeoffs of value, cost, resources, and risk. This can quickly become complex and requires software that can mathematically weight, balance, and optimize a portfolio in a seamless manner. In selecting PPM tools, organizations should look not only at the breadth of functionality the tools offer, but also at the vendor’s experience in PPM. With the evolving market for PPM tools and solutions, vendors who have the most implementation experience are the ones who are likely to have the most sophisticated and scalable solutions.

This article is syndicated from Project Management Tips of the Week . The original article is available here. Read more in PMO Tips, Project Management News .

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One Response to “02/11/08 Tip of the Week: Project Portfolio Management: Tip 4 - Use a proven PPM tool.”

  1. Anand Sanwal on February 15th, 2008 7:04 pm

    This posting is so off the mark I’m not sure where to begin. The only statement that is accurate at all is the first one - “PPM involves tradeoffs of value, cost, resources, and risk.” The rest of it is nice in theory but just misguided.

    There is no tool that can “optimize a portfolio in a seamless manner.” Unless I’ve missed something and artificial intellgence has emerged. A tool simply lets you get to data and that is where humans who understand investment valuation and evaluation have to be involved to help inform the resource allocation decisions and prioritize, fund and kill projects based on a thoughtful considerations of costs, financial and strategic benefits as well as risk.

    I led and built the corporate portfolio management discipline at American Express, and we got by with excel and a simple plug-in to a SQL dbase. And we had deployed portfolio management globally and across marketing, IT, R&D, sales, operations, advertising, etc. We had nearly 4-6000 investments which we evaluated quarterly. Yes, the database was useful in letting us collect the info but it was crude. The analysis was done by individuals who understood the tenets of portfolio management. And the portfolio decisions made required a focus on organizational behavior and culture.

    A fancy software with nice looking charts and other bells & whistles sounds interesting but is wholly unnecessary. Focus on the process & behavior. Once those are understood, you can consider whether a tool maybe an enabler of the discipline you’ve created. Don’t lead with the tool. After all, “A fool with a tool is still a fool.”

    PPM vendors for the most part show little understanding of the process and behavioral elements and instead aim to sell their portfolio management ’solutions’ as elixirs.

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