Increase Revenues by 15% with Project Portfolio Management (PPM)
Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is a framework to create, plan, execute and optimize projects. Projects that sit in excel spreadsheets or in Microsoft Projects run into multiple risks. A centralized PPM system will mitigate cost overruns, improve efficiencies with people and equipment, improve profits, increase client satisfaction and aligns project members and stakeholders. Out of the box PPM solutions may vary in complexity and integration. Managing and closing out tasks is one function but it must also have the capabilities of integrating to other systems to perform transactions to provide a holistic solution.
Disadvantages with Managing Projects in Excel or MS Project:
Audit controls are not in place. Line items get edited and changed. Approval workflows do not exist and in complex projects where there may be multiple change orders, tracking can be daunting. More often than not, change requests sit in a separate help desk ticketing system or even in an email residing in someone’s inbox. With all these disparate touch points, errors can occur. Document versioning control can also be an issue. Project Managers (PMs) own the master document and upload the files to sky drives or emailed to team members. Each member may have different software versions running on their laptops and syncing updates can become a headache to manage. The expense to maintain multiple user licenses can become costly for I.T. upkeep, as well as, the financial cost for individual licenses.
A Centralized Web-Based PPM System has Several Benefits:
- In this scenario, Project Managers would create their projects in MS Project and import the files to the PPM system. Team members would access the project via a web browser. Team members would no longer need licenses to MS Project and they could plan, manage and optimize their tasks and deliverables directly in the PPM system. The system would have bi-directional syncing capabilities to update the master MS Project file with updated tasks.
- The PPM system would have Project Management functionality: project planning – budgets and estimates, costing, requisitions and risk management
- Workforce Management functionality: capacity planning, resource assignment, task management, scheduling resources time and expenses
- Issue or incident tracking of bugs, change orders, etc.
- Billing triggers to create invoices based on milestones achievement, percentage of project complete or other billing scenarios pertaining to that project
- Integration to financial and other systems for specific transactions
- Analytics to provide real time information on revenues, margins, profits, costs and project details
- Role based dashboards to provide real time, relevant data
An IDC Report – How Project and Portfolio Management Solutions Are Delivering Value to Organizations summarizes that:
- Cost per project was reduced 37%
- Project failure rate dropped 59%
- Payback occurred in 7.4 months
- Increases in revenue as high as 15% attributable to PPM
To find out more about Fieldpoint’s PPM features or contact us directly. We’re all ears!