Project Portfolio Management Strategy Guide

In today’s business landscape, project portfolio management (PPM) has become an increasingly crucial practice for project-oriented firms. For those businesses looking into the approach, this Project Portfolio Management Strategy Guide aims to clarify the difference between project and portfolio management, cover PPM basics like methodologies and capabilities, and offer insights into effectively implementing PPM. Serving as a valuable resource for project teams, leaders, PMOs, and executives, it addresses challenges, provides an overview of PPM tools, and introduces the next step — Enterprise Project Portfolio Management.

Tips for Implementing Project Portfolio Management

Implementing project portfolio management practices and solutions into your workflow is no small feat. This is not to say it’s impossible or intimidating, but that it can made much easier with a structured plan. The following strategies for implementing project portfolio management into your organization can help you get started.

5 Strategies for Implementing Project Portfolio Management

PMOs looking to improve their PPM should consider the following PPM tips to improve their project portfolios :

1. Establish your Portfolio Dashboard

To get an overview of all their projects, it’s essential for PMOs to set up a dashboard. This way, they can easily anticipate budget overruns, delays, and risks. It’s important to define the right KPIs for the dashboard and ensure that projects align with the company goals. Better yet, you can even set a health score to evaluate the status of your projects with a single indicator.

2. Create a Culture of Prioritization

By implementing uniform evaluation methods, you can select the projects bringing the most value based on the company’s overall strategy. For effective portfolio management, the process itself must be deeply rooted and prioritized in a consistent manner throughout the organization. From the leaders to the members of the project, all the actors must think in terms of priorities.

3. Hire PPM Experts and Set Up a PMO

Creating a PMO is a great way to solve the issues and performance gaps that may hinder your business. PMOs help capture and maintain the quality data that will enable accurate planning, predictions, and informed decision making. They will also go a long way towards driving cost efficiency and optimizing budget planning. Finally, having a PMO will help improve project selection in order to secure and maintain long-term competitive advantages.

4. Align PPM to Your Business Strategy

Calculating the potential ROI of projects is well and good. But such quantitative metrics won’t necessarily reflect the actual impact of the project on the organization. A program with a comparatively lower ROI but greater alignment with the organization’s strategic priorities may create more overall value, hence the importance of having capabilities to combine PPM with strategic planning.

5. Use the Right PPM Methods and Tools

The best way to optimize your PPM is to use the right tools and adopt the best practices. To save time, implement a PPM software like Sciforma. Our PPM tools support successful execution and monitoring by centralizing information and improving communication. From time tracking to resource allocation and organizational change management, Sciforma has the capabilities your organization needs to oversee projects without hassle. The first step toward implementing project portfolio management is, funnily enough, a project in and of itself. Choosing and learning to use a PPM software can seem daunting, but Sciforma strives to make your experience as seamless as possible. Through additional services like strategic advisory consulting, managed services offerings, and eLearning and training services, we ensure that every member of your team feels confident about how they can use Sciforma to their advantage. We’re also here to help you address concerns specific to your strategic goals or organizational operations and guide you through selecting the PPM tools that make the most sense for your needs. Don’t leave your PPM strategy to chance; choose Sciforma for project portfolio management software that’s built to be scalable and adaptable to your organization.

Teams and Functions that Particularly Benefit from Implementing Project Portfolio Management

Information Technology

The IT department is a key function in today’s organizations. But the growing importance of IT activities comes with challenges. Chief among them is the efficient management of large sets of complex IT projects in a strategic manner. To achieve that, it is vital to have a robust standardized PPM process and to follow PPM tips. PPM assists IT departments in prioritizing project ideas, allocating the right resources, and executing at speed. Additionally, the ability of PPM to improve stakeholder communication tends to boost executive buy-in on IT projects.

Research & Development

R&D projects are among the most complex to manage. As opposed to other types of projects, they rarely start with well-defined objectives and schedules. As they can span years, changing market conditions, and unexpected challenges and opportunities, they require ongoing adjustments. They also typically involve many different stakeholders, each with their own priorities. In this way, the cross-organization visibility that PPM provides can significantly facilitate the successful delivery of such long-haul, complex initiatives.

New Product Development

New product development (NPD) is all the more crucial in a complex, volatile economic landscape. Fresh market players, new technology, digital transformation, all combined force companies to innovate in order to keep their footing. PPM enables organizations to accelerate the time-to-market and quality of their new products and innovations. Through automated consolidation of project data, rapid feedback, real-time portfolio tracking, and more, PPM helps product companies to reduce new product development time cycles while securing each of the required steps and supporting consolidated cost and performance tracking.

Alongside the benefits to particularly teams, PPM is also particularly beneficial to some industries like Banking and Insurance, Pharma and Biotech, and Manufacturing.

Project Portfolio Management Strategy Guide

Table of Contents

Tips for Implementing Project Portfolio Management