Project Portfolio Management Software

Browse our posts by category or by author. Subscribe to RSS feeds by author, category, or all posts. We love comments, so let us know what you think.

How’s My Portfolio?

6 December 2010 - POSTED by Doug Den Hoed

TSN Turning Point

Our local sportscaster uses the phrase "TSN Turning Point" to highlight the pivotal play that enabled the win. In my Project Based Work, I use it to refer to that pivotal event when someone I’ve been coaching thinks of their own solution in a way I wouldn’t have. I always like to make a big deal of it, both to encourage them for taking ownership, and to celebrate their progress.

Chris Connoly, one of my @task clients, sent me just such a TSN Turning Point, and has given me permission to share it here.

My My My

@task has many "My" features built in to help users with Work Managment, such as My Tasks, My Reports, and My Issues. However, where Chris works, the emphasis is on the PORTFOLIO portion of the Project Portfolio Management Software, which doesn’t really mesh with the "My" concept. Here’s his story, and his solution:

We have all of our projects grouped into Programs and then Portfolios, and we have Program Managers and Portfolio Managers. It’s very easy to create project reports based on the Portfolio Manager or Program Manager since they are only one level up. However, it seems pretty much impossible to pull out task information based on those managers.

Since most of the information that we want to report on is generated in task reports, not being able to have a "My Program" or "My Portfolio" on task reports is actually a huge problem. And it annoys me that I can see who the Managers are in the view, and group by them, but not include them in a filter.

[One option would be to] create a filter that uses project IDs with an "IN", and then just include all the project IDs that you want. Not exactly useful for a large number of projects, and still doesn’t take care of the "My" part.

So what I ended up doing was creating calculated custom data fields at the project level (in my ever expanding "For System Use Only" section) for "Program Manager ID" and "Portfolio Manager ID", and using "Program.Owner.ID" and "Portfolio.Owner.ID" as the formulae.

I can now just use DE:project:Progam Owner ID=$$USER.ID for my filter, and I have the My Program filter, [without] even having to use text mode.

An Elegant Solution

In short, Chris was able to use @task’s Custom Parameters feature to point "up" to the data that he wanted, effectively extending the data model to suit his needs. I’ve always admired AtTask’s stance that (I’ll paraphrase) "We can’t think of everything, so we’ve included Custom Data so you can tailor @task to what you need". That’s a collabrative invitation that works.

0 Comments »

Get Some Professional Help!

18 November 2010 - POSTED by Doug Den Hoed

Logo Loco

If you’ve been using @task as your Project Portfolio Management Software for a while, you might remember the old layout, where you could put your own company’s logo in the top left corner. As the administrator, I used to keep a couple of versions of my logo handy. I’d set the regular one for normal operations, but set a black and white one when I was doing maintenance. It was a way of broadcasting to my team.

Although the top left logo is no longer an option — to be fair, that really is the primest location of them all — I’ve figured out a slicker way to broadcast announcements. And share Help Files. And get my logo back.

Click Help

There are lots of steps in this one, but if you scroll down to the screenshot, I hope you’ll agree that the end justifies the means.

Write your own help manual (e.g. in Powerpoint; you’re on your own for this one)
Create a new Project (e.g. Help Docs)
Attachments > New Document > upload your help manual
Attachments > View Documents > Click help manual > Hover on Preview for ID (e.g. 816046)
Paste Link into Helpdoc.HTML (e.g. see Internal Help Manual href)
Repeat previous 3 steps for Company logo (e.g. see img src)
Test Helpdoc.HTML (e.g. layout, links should work)
Attachments > New Documents > upload Helpdoc.html
Attachments > View Documents > Click Helpdoc.html > Hover on Preview for ID (e.g. 816117)
Create > External Page > Help Page, with defaults, plus URL (e.g. https://lumina.attask-ondemand.com/attask/documentDownload.cmd?boolean%28viewinline%29=true&ID=816117)
Create > Dashboard > Help Dashboard, with Help Page as the only report
Note ID of Dashboard from URL (e.g. 118321)
System Settings > Preferences > General Preferences > Help URL (e.g. https://lumina.attask-ondemand.com/attask/dashboardRun.cmd?ID=118321)
Click the Help link within @task to view your new Help Dashboard/External Page/Document

Download Details

You are welcome to download the simple Helpdoc.html file from this article and modify it for your own purposes. You could share status updates, broadcast upgrades and outages, link to a training video, or even make a virtual team bulletin board. Just remember that each time you upload a new version of Helpdoc.html, you’ll need to update the ID in your Help External Page. It took me six versions to get this one just right <grin>.

0 Comments »

What Can Project Leaders Learn From How Financial Planners Manage Risk?

11 October 2010 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

A balanced investment strategy has proven to be the most successful approach for maximizing return while reducing risk in an investment portfolio. Does the same approach apply to the successful management of an organizations project portfolio?

An experienced financial adviser will tell you that a balanced investment strategy is the most successful approach for maximizing return while reducing risk in your investment portfolio. The investor works to balance return and risk by diversifying investments in both high risk/high return and low risk/low return opportunities. Understanding each investor’s overall risk tolerance is crucial to crafting a meaningful investment strategy.

Successfully managing an organization’s project portfolio to maximize return while reducing risk requires the same approach—an understanding of the organization’s risk tolerance, and investment strategy that takes that tolerance into account, and an execution that aligns with the organization’s strategic and financial goals.

Although there are many organizations that believe it’s better to be safe than sorry, that might not be the case. Value-driven risk management acknowledges that some risks are positive opportunities to be pursued, while others aren’t worth worrying too much about, given the likelihood of occurring.

The first step to evaluating the viability of any project is to determine it’s potential value, based upon pre-determined metrics that reflect:

The project goals
The project costs
Th project’s alignment to the mission and vision of the organization
The organization’s risk tolerance
The project risks and any mitigation plans

Pre-determined metrics for evaluating project objectives, risks, business value, and alignment to organizational strategic and financial goals enable project decision-makers to manage technology and implement systems in a disciplined way that balances the need for positive return from investments with the costs associated with maintaining an innovative and productive line of business.

Maximizing project investments from the ground up depends on how successfully we can manage and lead project teams. I don’t believe that keeping people busy is the challenge—however, choosing the right projects is sometimes problematic for business leaders.

Poor decision-making leads to bad project investments. Much like how a skilled investment adviser makes decisions, the key to making good project decisions lies with pre-determined metrics for evaluating potential projects to validate initiatives from the ground up.

Project portfolio management software and work management methodologies that facilitate and encourage this type of evaluation before a project even starts will make the process easier to implement—however balancing risk and return is more than plugging numbers into a software program. It requires an organizational commitment to not only doing projects right, but doing the right projects.

How do you balance risk and reward?

1 Comment »

Going the Extra Milestone

22 September 2010 - POSTED by Doug Den Hoed

Choose Your Path

Most Project Management Software has the ability to mark certain Tasks as Milestones. Some PPM softwares also offer a set of customizable Milestones — a "Milestone Path" – to encourage standardization across Projects. A few sophisticated Project Portfolio Management Software packages even let you pre-assign a Milestone Path to Tasks in a Template, ensuring consistency across Projects.

However, what if the detailed Tasks required to support the work plan don’t align well with the Milestones the Project Management Office (PMO) wants to see? Or what if Projects encompass multiple, similar Milestones across large parts of work? Even in some of the most advanced Project Management Tools, the built-in Milestone features simply can’t accommodate these requirements.

Fortunately, there is a different technique that not only addresses these limitations, but opens the door to a whole new way of presenting Project Information in a Gantt Chart.

Trial Run

The screen-shot below represents a complex Project. There are lots of detailed Tasks required for execution, but in a way that doesn’t align very well to the Milestones the PMO needs to track. Furthermore, the Project plan Branches at Stage 2 into Parts 1, 2, and 3: similar sub-Projects with different timing and effort, but the same Milestones across them. A high resolution version and sample MS Project file are also available for download.

Going The Extra Milestone Example

The shaded portion at the top represents the normal Project Details. The bottom half is the new concept: a Project Summary of what people outside the Project most care about. In this case, it contains a summary "Highlights Task" for Part 1 (red), 2 (yellow), and 3 (purple). Beneath each Part are three "Milestone Tasks": PSum Stage 1, 2, and 3. Each has a token Duration of 0.1 Hours for percent complete calculations, and zero Work required.

The vertical lines highlight the trick. The PM drags constraints from the appropriate Tasks in the Project Details — regardless of where they are buried — to the corresponding Milestone Tasks. PSum Stage 1 and 2 are Start-to-Start constraints, and PSum Stage 3 is a Finish-to-Finish constraint. As the constraints snap the Milestone Tasks in place, they roll up and drive out the footprint of their Highlights Task.

This Project Summary technique offers several interesting effects and opportunities for you to:

Plan the Project Based Work as needed, decoupling it from the PMO Milestone requirements
Meet the need of some complex Projects to show repeating Milestones across sub-Projects
Quickly "collapse down" to a simplified view of the Project Highlights
Search for the Milestone Tasks alone across multiple Projects, and view them in Gantt format, removing the noise of the Project Details
Leverage the resulting predictable Percent Complete values (0%, 33%, 67%, and 100% in this example) to perform additional logic — in @task, for example, you could put Custom Data behind the Highlights Task and add a Calculation Parameter to compute which Gate each Part is at over time
Create additional Project Summaries based on other Tasks for different viewers

Crossing the Finish Line

I hope the Project Summary technique inspires you to rethink how you structure Projects in your Project Management Software. I should note that, in the case of @task, there is no built-in way for the Milestone Tasks to automatically complete when their controlling Predecessor completes. I’m working on it…but that’s another article.

1 Comment »

Project Portfolio Management – Projects Must Effectively Use the Firm’s Resources

28 July 2010 - POSTED by Jessie Warner

In my last article I talked about the need for projects to contribute to a positive cash flow. To continue with the series, I want to talk about some ways to effectively use a firm’s resources. Remember, for project portfolio management to be effective, projects must:

Be aligned with the firm’s strategy and goals
Be consistent with the firm’s values and culture
Contribute (directly or indirectly) to a positive cash flow for the enterprise.
Effectively use the firm’s resources—both people and resources
Not only provide for current contributions to the firm’s health but must help to position the firm for future success.

Projects Must Effectively Use the Firm’s Resources

In project management, resources are often referred to as anything required to complete a project task. This includes people, equipment, facilities, funding, or practically anything else capable of a definition. For project portfolio management to be effective, managers must learn to manage, allocate, schedule, and otherwise optimize the use of the firm’s resources.

Here are a few ideas to help your company manage resources better:

1. Use Project Portfolio Management Software

With such a broad definition of resources, you need to be able to quickly and effectively move around resources to meet the varying needs of each project. The best way to do this is to let project management software do the work for you. With project management software, you can manage multiple projects from a single location. Good software allows you to quickly create projects and task lists, organize teams, and better control the flow of information and resources, saving you valuable time and money.

2. Organize Your Resources

One of the big advantages of using project management software is that it lets you organize your resources in a way that is simple and intuitive. Start by creating a simple organizational chart. Identify every employee, assign job roles, list skills and talents, and enter their current work schedule. By correctly identifying every employee and their role in the business, you can simply drag and drop users or roles into the various projects.

3. Establish Processes

Now that your resources have been organized, it is time to create project templates and establish workflow processes. Project templates are an easy way to layout routine projects. They identify the tasks, job roles, and scheduling requirements needed to complete the projects. These templates can increase productivity and shorten the time it takes to setup and manage projects.

When establishing the processes, be sure to identify the job roles needed to complete the various steps. If your software is setup correctly, you should be able to simply drag a user with the given job role and place him/her into the process. That user is then automatically scheduled to work for a given period of time and the resource grid will show him/her as being unavailable during that time frame.

4. Manage Resource Conflicts

Resource Management Resource grids let you see in a calendar where your team is over- or under-utilized and where each team member is allocated. By seeing each team member, you can quickly identify resource conflicts and then resolve those conflicts with the Resource Leveling tool. With the click of a button, resources are reallocated and project completion dates are automatically adjusted to accommodate for the new resource restrictions. Additionally, the Capacity Planner lets you see the impact of adding to or changing your current plan. You can adjust the schedule or the resource budget and push your changes "downstream" to your project managers.

Conclusion

By following the steps listed above, your company will be in a better position to select projects that effectively use your firm’s resources. Project portfolio management is about choosing the right projects at the right time. As your company better understands and manages its resources, it will be in a better position to select projects that fully utilize its available resources.

1 Comment »

Can Financial Planners Teach Project Managers How to Manage Risk?

9 July 2010 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

The first step to evaluating the viability of any project is to determine it’s potential value, based upon pre-determined metrics that reflect:

The project goals
The project costs
Th project’s alignment to the mission and vision of the organization
The organization’s risk tolerance
The project risks and any mitigation plans

How do you balance risk and reward?

Trade Your Opinion for Swag

As we prepare to make the 2011 AtTask User Conference the best one ever, your opinion is important to us. Click HERE to complete an anonymous 12-question survey.

To thank you for your time, we’ll send you an AtTask t-shirt.

0 Comments »

Spiral Adoption

22 June 2010 - POSTED by Doug Den Hoed

Chasing the Rainbow

Today’s Project Portfolio Management Software packages have incredible features to help teams collaborate and visualize their project based work like never before. Some of the best are also intended to be customized to meet specific business terminology and events. Given that resources and schedules are often shared, this powerful combination of insight and adaptability can help companies reach an elusive goal that faces every PPM Software implementation: how can you increase adoption across related departments?

Provide and Conquer

This diagram illustrates "Spiral Adoption", a new techique I developed on a recent project. Here’s how it works.

Dept A licensed @task for their On-Demand Project Management Software, entered their data, and used it to generate the status of their Project based work. Several Related Departments relied on the Dept A data but for a variety of reasons did not have direct access to the Project Managment Software. To share the data, Dept A generated a Daily Extract to Excel and posted it on the network. The Related Departments pulled copies of the Extract, transformed it to suit their own needs (e.g. dropping certain columns and rows), added their own updates (e.g. new status values, revised dates, % complete), and created their own Excel based reports (e.g. pivot tables, summary tabs). Unfortunately, despite these best efforts, the process was time consuming, inefficient, and prone to wasteful confusion caused by stale-dated reports.

Given the realtime nature of the data and excellent reporting features, Dept A quickly became recognized as the most current and reliable source of Project information. Management wanted to consolidate both the timing and the format of their reports. They asked Dept A to add extra custom data fields to cover the key data points from the other departments. There were thousands of Tasks already being tracked and edited within the Related Departments. To minimize the impact on those teams and avoid data entry errors, we used a web-based applet that let Dept A users upload an Excel file of edits from the Related Departments straight into @task.

In short, the Project Management Software effectively widened to accomodate Dept A, B, C, and D, giving Management the comprehensive reporting they were after, but without substantially impacting how the Related Departments were performing their work.

Revolution

There were some very interesting and pleasant side effects to the Spiral Adoption technique:

Dept A now prepares for review meetings by exporting the rows and columns they need to Excel, editing on the fly in Excel during the meeting (faster, no internet required), and then uses the Excel Uploader to push up the changes
Dept B moved all of its data needs into the Project Management Software, became full fledged users themselves, and dropped their entire extract > update > Excel loop
Dept C created a tailored view of only their information and effectively owns and administers that data via the Excel Updater
Dept D has no immediate plans to change their processes, which is fine because…
Management now has regular, reliable, comprehensive reporting across the departments

The Spiral Adoption technique offers a way to consolidate data without duress, and instead win over additional departments on merit, over time. If you’d like to know more about the Excel Updater for @task, please drop a comment to this article.

0 Comments »

Corporate Objectives Meet Project Schedules

22 June 2010 - POSTED by Jessie Warner

organization structure In a typical business organization there are two levels of project management hierarchy. You have the Executives—the COO, CTO, CIO, CFO, or some other senior level position—and then you have the project teams, with project managers and team members.

Often these two levels never meet, rarely speak, and poorly align their objectives. The Executives define the strategies, set the objectives and goals, analyze overall business performance, and perform some high level project selection and resource management. On the other hand, project managers manage the planning and day-to-day activities of the individual projects. They manage the costs of the project, measure project performance, make sure the project is on schedule, and ensure that they have the resources needed to get the job done right.

Harvey Levine said it well in his book Project Portfolio Management, “A problem common to many organizations is that there is no connection between the operations and project functions and no structured, consistent, and meaningful flow of information between the two groups. The organization’s objectives are hardly ever communicated to the project office, and the periodic measurements made by the projects group cannot be related to these objectives.”

The disconnect between the Executives and the Project Teams cause each group to work in silos, focusing only on their own individual roles, without ever truly meeting the objectives of the company. Are the projects supporting the goals of the Executives? If a project is in danger, do the Executives find out about it before the project spins out of control or do they just perform damage control? Do the project managers have the knowledge and resources to balance schedules, cost, scope, and quality parameters?

Many of the challenges associated with projects could have been prevented had the Executives communicated with the project managers. Having a “structured, consistent, and meaningful flow of information” between the two groups will ensure that projects are completed on time, under budget, and within the project mix criteria set by the Executives.

One way of creating this alignment is to use a single project management tool that can be used by both project teams and executives. Executives see the big picture, while project teams focus on the details. Using an online project portfolio management software, such as @task, Executives can see every project proposed or in process and verify that each project meets the alignment criteria set by the company. Executives can select the projects that provide the greatest value to the organization and then push the objectives of those projects down to the project managers. Because the project is managed using the same tool the Executives use, the Executives are notified of problems as they occur and can quickly correct the problems before they become bigger.

Using the same tool, project managers are given the direction needed to successfully complete the individual projects. The PPM software provides the flexibility needed to create and edit project schedules, monitor costs, and align resources to meet the objectives set by the Executive team. The goals set by the Executives are the same goals by which the project managers are measured on, eliminating the confusion caused by poor communication. Project performance measurements are the same across all levels and if the goals are changed, all parties are involved in the change. The end result is that corporate objectives meet project team schedules.

0 Comments »

The Need for Project Portfolio Management

21 June 2010 - POSTED by Jessie Warner

The CEO of a company is typically responsible for implementing the strategic goals and objectives of an organization. He/She gives the direction and leadership needed to achieve the organization’s philosophy, mission, strategy, and its annual goals and objectives. Or in more simple terms, the CEO needs to ensure that the company is making profits!

And how do CEOs help a company make more profits? They hire talented executives and then give them the direction and vision needed to do their jobs. Each executive is charged with specific duties and is measured on a set of objectives. The VP of Sales, for example, is charged with driving more sales to the organization. To monitor his/her success, the VP uses a combination of software and othere tools to track the efforts of the sales department. The tools help answer questions like: How many phone calls were made this month? How many sales were closed today? What’s in the pipeline? CRM tools, such as Salesforce and ACT, provide dashboards and reports that help the VP of Sales do his/her job better, providing a bird’s eye view of the entire department.

In a similar way, the VPs of Operations, Marketing, IT, and other departments, need dashboards and reports that help them monitor the success of their departments. For a project-based company, such as a Website Design Firm or a Construction Company, the roles of a CEO and in particular, the role of the VP of Operations, are very project centric. The success of the company is based on the profitability of the projects it undertakes. With so much riding on the success of the projects, executives have shown an increased interest in how projects are selected and managed.

To ensure success, Executives want a standardized and automated approach to project management. They want to see projects that are on time and on budget. Project portfolio management (PPM) software, such as @task, allow project managers and executives to see an overarching view of all upcoming and current projects. Similar to the way a VP of Sales might use a CRM system, a VP of Operations can use a PPM system to monitor project deadlines, see budget and scheduling conflicts, and forecast the future profitability of projects. The PPM tool provides dashboards and reports that help keep all projects aligned to corporate objectives and ensures that each project is a profitable investment for the company.

Without the use of project portfolio management software, project managers and executives are forced to spend an unnecessary amount of time managing and tracking project schedules and budgets. They often lose site of the big picture, investing time and money into sunken projects or projects that were doomed to fail before they ever began. Harvey Levine explained, “In PPM, it is assumed that the enterprise positions itself for increased strength and profitability through its selection and execution of projects and ensures that it continues to thrive in a world of constant change and the threat of competition.”

The bottom line is that Executives need project and portfolio management tools to help the company make more profits. All CEOs, and especially CEOs of project-based companies, need a bird’s eye view of what’s going in their organizations. They need a PPM tool that compares one project against another and then makes recommendations on how to best proceed. Does the benefit outweigh the risk? Does the project align with corporate objectives? Should more resources be allocated to one project over another? Which project will provide the highest ROI? Project Portfolio Management helps answer all of these questions, helping CEOs do their jobs better, leading to higher company profits and happier customers.

project portfolio optimization

0 Comments »

Does Your E-Suite Trust Your Project Data?

7 December 2009 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

Are your project reports and dashboards accurate and up to date?

I know this is a sticky subject among project teams. I also know that most project managers are dedicated and motivated individuals who work very hard to make sure the information that gets pushed up to their executives is accurate and up to date. I know PMs who make the rounds every week asking, cajoling, begging, and imploring individual team members to update task status—and yet, they can still identify inaccuracies in the information collected.

Is there a solution to what appears to be a universal problem?

Over the years, project managment has become a highly-technical discipline. Did you know that next to accounting software, project management software is the second oldest? It’s been around for a very long time and has evolved into a sophisticated mix of capacity planning, resource management, and milestone tracking—creating project software so complicated that the average team member can’t understand it, let alone use it. Hence the need for begging and cajoling.

What’s more, easy-to-use collaboration tools that might be accpeted at the team member level don’t provide the robust business intelligence tools that are needed by executives to make informed project decisions. Capturing the critical data that leads to smart decisions demands that individual project team members are engaged in the process with something that doesn’t force them to jump through hoops or navigate a complicated maze of procedures.

Making it difficult for individual contributors virtually guarantees a "garbage in—garbage out" scenario. However, the same team members who struggle with updating task status in their company’s project portfolio management software will gladly update their accomplishments in Facebook, Linkedin, or Twitter. Giving individual team members an easy-to-use way to update their accomplishments and capture status will give project managers and executives confidence that the information they are looking at is accurate and up to date.

Would you like to learn more?

Click HERE to see what AtTask’s CEO Scott Johnson sees as the future of PPM software and the relationship between project teams and accurate data.

0 Comments »