What are the benefits of adopting project portfolio management? There are many, especially for larger companies with multiple projects, and Jennifer Bridges, PMP, shows you five in this video.

Here’s a shot of the whiteboard for your reference!

In Review – 5 Benefits of Adopting Project Portfolio Management:

Project portfolio management (PPM) is the management of a collection of projects, Jennifer said. By grouping them together, and by generating various reports of objectives, risks, costs and resources, it’s easier to make better business decisions whether you’re a PMO or just anyone leading multiple projects in an organization.

What Is PPM?

Before she got into the benefits, Jennifer spent a bit of time further defining what PPM is and why businesses manage related projects under a portfolio umbrella.

Project portfolio management software gives managers the tools they need to organize a series of projects or programs into a portfolio, allowing them to gather pertinent data across many related projects. This provides needed insight into the projects and resources in the portfolio, which then allows the management and the executive team to review the overall progress across projects in an organization. Reviewing metrics from a project portfolio can help when making important financial and business decisions, as well as make sure teams are aligned with business and organizational strategy.

So, project and program portfolio management minimizes risks, maximizes resources, sets the stage for repeating past successes and leads to better decision-making. In short, it’s an excellent process to better execute your projects, for better strategic alignment and to prove project value to stakeholders.

Benefits of PPM

As you can see, there are many benefits of managing a group of projects together. Jennifer listed five in the video, which follows.

1. Alignment of Projects to Business Goals: It’s not always a priority to make sure your project fits within the scope of a company’s strategic plan, but that’s a crucial aspect of any project.
2. Communication of Project Insights to the Executive Level: While you might report to stakeholders on an individual project, you’re mostly just detailing project progress. When managing a portfolio of projects, you can gather more advanced data to provide more profound insights that executives crave.
3. Allocation of Resources: Just as you reallocate resources in a project, you can do the same with a project portfolio. Except with a portfolio, you have a broader view of where resources are being over- or under-allocated.
4. Identification and Correction of Performance Problems: When managing a project portfolio, any problems that may arise over the course of running many projects can be readily identified via portfolio analysis, which allows you to identify and address them promptly.
5. Identification and Assessment of Project Risks and Impacts: What are the risks inherent in your portfolio of projects? How can you identify them if and when they show up? And, then, what are you going to do to resolve their impact on the progress of your project? All these questions should be asked so you can answer them when you’re managing a project portfolio.

Pro-Tip:  Managing a project and program portfolio without the proper tools can be daunting. Trying to store, analyze and report on that much data with make-shift and legacy tools is a recipe for disaster. When you’re managing a portfolio of projects many online ppm tools can help your team. One of the most important PPM tools you should be using is a real-time PPM dashboard that offers accurate data across all projects in your portfolio.

Thanks for watching!

Transcription:

Today, we’re talking about the five benefits of adopting project portfolio management. You may have even heard it called PPM. But before we start talking about the benefits, I wanna stop and clarify what we mean by project portfolio management.

So, when we talk about a portfolio, we’re basically talking about a collection of projects. And what this enables is the executives and business management to pull reports based on objectives, cost, risk or even resources associated with this portfolio, and helps them to make better business decisions.

So, when we talk about this portfolio they’re specifically segmented in certain ways. They may be segmented by markets, maybe even by business units within the company, could be by customers, or even according to the project managers.

So, when we talk about the benefits, the good thing is that these projects within the portfolio are aligned to the business goals. And when they’re aligned to the business goals they get better buy-in from the people on the projects. It helps them understand the priority of the projects and how they really relate to the company, and what the company’s doing.

It also helps with the communication of the project insights to the executive level, because the executives can take a look at all the projects within that portfolio to see how they’re performing individually and collectively.

It also helps them to look at the allocation of the resources. This way…can better see when certain resources are over allocated or maybe even underutilized. So, if they’re underutilized, maybe they can be moved around where they’re needed on other projects.

It also helps for the identification and the correction of performance problems. So, if you’re looking at these again as a collection, you can see, maybe, where a project may be stuck, maybe it’s in jeopardy or in the red. So, you can look at what needs to be done to help the performance of that project.

It also helps you for the identification and the assessment of project risk and impact. So, again, when you’re looking at the projects according to the collection, you can see if changes are made, if priorities are changed, how it impacts the other projects, which is very beneficial.

So, ultimately, we’re looking to make better decisions, minimize the risk, maximize the utilization of your resources, and set up repeatable success. So, ultimately, we wanna prove the value of this portfolio to the stakeholders.

So, if you need a tool that can help you with your project portfolio management, then sign up for our software now at ProjectManager.