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Five Portfolio Management Implementation Tips

February 27, 2008 from Raven's Brain: Project Management

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gannthead has a good PPM post with five tips on implementing a solid portfolio management system: Effective Portfolio Management Implementation Tips. You can read the article to get all the details and proper context, but here are the five tips discussed:
Tactical Tip #1: Manage portfolio operations reviews using the PPM Tool.
By establishing a weekly or monthly process to update the tool, managers will encourage users to incorporate the PPM system into their daily, weekly or monthly routines. If the PPM solution is tracking project actual hours, users can update the project schedule in the tool daily. Implementation managers should emphasize the importance of using the tool to develop the operational reports required to manage the IT portfolio....
 
Tactical Tip #2: The project manager will only update the status in one system.
This tip may seem obvious given Tactical Tip #1, but organizations have been know to implement a PPM system only to ask the project manager to complete a new form or template with the exact same information. Instead of wasting the project manager’s time with redundant administrative tasks, encourage the PMOs to generate reports using the data the project manager updated in the PPM system. Managers want “one version of the truth” and populating data manually in two or more repositories further obscures accurate information.
 
Tactical Tip #3: Implement functionality in phases.
MS-Project integration, dashboard reporting, workflow, collaboration, Web-based change, issue and risk management all look incredibly attractive on the vendor’s demonstration system. Implementing all these features in a real-world environment and ensuring the data is kept up to date requires more than a technical implementation. Change management, training, organizational support all need to be in place to support a full PPM system....
 
Tactical Tip #4: One PPM System, One Project Status Report.
Project status reports tend to change depending on the target audience. Frequently, managers are asked to provide one status at the project or program level and then provide status in a different format for another targeted audience. Regardless, if the organization needs two different status reports, the data needs be maintained and updated in one system. If the project manager is required to enter data in two places, the PPM system hasn’t helped the PM; instead it added to the PM workload....
  
Tactical Tip #5: Ensure the project teams have enough software licenses to use the solution.
Effective PPM solutions benefit from collaboration. If the user base is limited to just project managers, the solution quickly limits itself. Effective PPM implementations allow all project team members to enter risks, log potential changes requests, update issues and provide updates to the project schedule. If the user licenses are just licensed to the project managers, the PMs become a bottleneck for administrative updates. During contract negotiation, flexible user license arrangements can be built into the contract. If the tool doesn’t allow the entire project team to leverage the tool, it will quickly become a seldom used tool during project execution.
 
Read more here: http://www.gantthead.com/article.cfm?ID=240168
Note that a few of these tips have been truncated and additional detail and content is available in the complete article. If you're working in a PPM environment or moving to a project portfolio system (or software application) this is a great, informational article to help understand some of the challenges and difficult aspects of moving to/working with a Project Portfolio Management solution.
 
Some related reading on PPM:
 

Posted by Raven Young at Raven's Brain under Project Management
Technorati tags: Project Management, Project Management Article, Innovation, Project Management Blog

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