When Is An Organization Ready To Start A PPM Implementation?
This question came from a recent webinar, "Project Portfolio Management Simplified."
QUESTION:
How many projects does a company need to manage on an annual basis or what is the minimum dollar value of projects, before a company can expect to achieve enough value from Project Portfolio Management and a PPM tool?
ANSWER:
There isn’t a magic number to answer this question. Implementing Project Portfolio Management and a PPM tool really should be considered a kind of scalable set of processes rather than a heavy weight academic exercise or framework that is put in place.
For example, you can run the financials of a business on a spreadsheet, but at some point in time there’s just enough moving parts where you need to get a real financial system in place. I think the same would be said of your project and resource portfolio.
There isn’t a hard value for number of resources and projects, but if you’ve got 3 resources and 10 projects that you’re managing, in your group in a year, it is certainly a portfolio, but you might be able to manage that very loosely. You may have all the dynamics in your head but you get to a point where you have enough resources and projects going on with different dimensions and stakeholders that there is more than you can do at any point in time.
Those are all things that really contribute to the issues to know when you’re really ready for project portfolio software and PPM process. Rather than saying what is the size to achieve value from PPM implementation, understand your organization's main challenges and implement processes that are focused around that particular area.
This is where the academics might have a different view on this. There is a huge body of knowledge out there that can be very academic at times, that says if you don’t do project portfolio management in this way, using all of these skills, disciplines, knowledge areas and processes, you are not doing it right. But being from a PPM solution company, what we often see is that PPM implementations are over engineered.
It is more important is to look at the whole scale of a discipline if you’re a smaller organization that’s trying to achieve or get control of an area, for example resource management. Implement portfolio processes that are lighter weight and focused around that particular area and don’t worry about all the other aspects that might be included in some of the other portfolio process areas.
It doesn’t take long before managing many projects and number of resources in your head or on a spreadsheet becomes very challenging. Managing projects that way certainly isn’t accessible in a widespread way in terms of the organization and other stakeholders. What is important is to understand the value that you’ll get out of a PPM implementation, and to put a light weight implementation of PPM in place so as to not be completely out of step with the size and maturity of the organization.
There is no hard number, but I think PPM really should be considered a kind of scalable set of processes rather than a heavy weight academic exercise or framework to put in place.
If you're curious about how PPM software fits in with implementation, attend one of our free demonstrations of the Eclipse PPM tool.