Making It Simple

  Portfolio Management   Strategy  

I recently interviewed a manager who had just completed the first phase of a Project Portfolio Management (PPM) implementation.  They were at that point when the visibility is starting to yield results but there are still skeptics lurking about.  We started out by discussing the challenges they had been facing prior to making the move.  What problems were driving you to change what you were doing?  What was the pain?  The answer was pretty straightforward: Everyone was doing things in a different way.  The desktop toolset and the manual approach to projects were not working.

We dug a bit deeper.  Over the past few years, their business had grown at a steady pace, and the team was increasingly faced with managing multiple development centers and different teams in different time zones.  The more we talked, the more it became clear that their project environment had simply become too complex to manage.  This was no academic discussion of subtle gains in their Internal Rate of Return (IRR) and Net Present Value (NPV).

With overlapping schedules, distributed teams and conflicting priorities, the senior management team couldn’t get answers to questions like, “Who is doing what?” and, “Where are we spending our time and money?”  These are pretty basic questions, and they can challenge organizations with…

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