Larger organizations face problems
which are usually recognized but which in practice often remain unresolved.
These organizations spend tens or hundreds of millions on projects
and change programmes that do not deliver the required results.
- Senior managers can hardly accept the slow progress of entire
portfolios of projects where sizable investments have been made.
- Budget Committees lack the proper mechanisms for effectively prioritizing
change initiatives and running scenarios for understanding the impact
of their decisions.
- Programme managers feel powerless, because they have insufficient
insight in and control over their entrusted projects.
- Project managers feel frustrated since dependencies and influences
from other projects manifest themselves often too late and project
members lose their motivation when they discover their efforts are
idle because the organization doesn’t do anything with the
delivered results.
The Challenge
It is often difficult for an organization to manage
projects with their interdependencies and to continuously keep them
aligned with the organization goals and objectives, especially because
dynamics in the environment and in the organization cause regular
changes of strategies and plans. The difficulty lies in managing the
complexity of the various parameters influencing the success of the
total portfolio.
The Implication
The result is that many change initiatives turn out
to be very costly, often need unforeseen budgetary adjustments, are
characterized by long delays and in the end only partially lead to
the desired performance improvements. This is caused by:
- The sheer number of projects involved
- The lack of transparency in the alignment and effectiveness of
the total project portfolio
- The existence of duplication and fragmentation due to the lack
of insight in the scope of the projects
- The lack of reuse across the portfolio and the obscurity with
regards to the priority of new and existing initiatives often cause
lack budget, resources and management attention for the things that
really matter.
This immediately translates into insufficient “return
of investment” of the sizeable budgets, missing out on opportunities
and market share and a reduced lack of motivation of important employees
working in projects or acting as business owners of projects.
The Solution
Together with its partner Resilient, Adaptive provides
the Project Portfolio Manager (PPM) adaptation, built on Adaptive
Foundation™. Due to the inherent information management technology,
this application is perfectly equipped to manage the complexity of
organization change initiatives, programmes and project portfolios
in conjunction with all relevant external factors. The entire project
portfolio gets administered where each individual project is managed
and updated by the responsible business owner and project manager,
either directly through intuitive and easy-to-use web forms or though
integration with existing project management tools, such as Microsoft®
Project®.
In the repository, every single project gets linked
to the organization goals and objectives it contributes to and is
compared to existing strategy and architecture principles and standards;
this way, the priority of each project versus the others can be established
in a rational way and the impact of changing organization strategies
or architecture principles can be analyzed, in order to be able to
kill or adjust projects that no longer contribute to organization
effectiveness. Projects get scoped against each other on products,
processes and applications they impact or deliver in order to avoid
duplication and fragmentation across the portfolio; interdependencies
with all other projects get flagged and managed automatically on a
continuous basis. Important changes are notified immediately to whoever
needs to know. Scenarios can be run to find the optimal structure
of the portfolio.
The “heart” of the Project Portfolio Manager
is the Project Portfolio Planner Dashboard to support the role of
the Project Portfolio Manager and Budget Committee: all project decisions
are taken on one screen, showing impact by scenario. Impact is assessed
for each new project charter, each new project and each change request
of a running project against the entire portfolio. Graphical gauges
show the progress of the Portfolio against business case or strategic
objectives as well as important indicators for risk, strategy and
architecture. The status of the entire project portfolio as well as
each individual project can be reviewed from a single point at any
moment in time.
The complexity of the entire portfolio is hidden to
its users by supporting the end-to-end portfolio management process
by means of workflow technology across organization roles where in
the background the application controls all necessary (additional)
complex connections between large numbers of project attributes and
relationships.
The Result
The benefits of the Project Portfolio Manager are:
- Focus of the organization effort on what is really important
- Lower cost of organization change initiatives by reducing duplication
and fragmentation
- Shorter “time-to-market” and therefore faster delivery
of new products and services
- Continuous alignment of individual projects with each other and
with the organization goals and objectives
- Improved decision making with regards to starting, adjusting and
stopping projects
- Efficient allocation of people, budgets and other resources over
the entire project portfolio at all times.
- The program of change becomes very transparent and predictable
and leads to an optimally functioning organization, in control of
its destiny.
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