The technological advancements have brought the world to our fingertips. If you’re hungry, you can open an app and with just a few clicks, the food is delivered at your doorstep. Feeling unwell? You can schedule a doctor’s appointment or a health checkup online, too. In a professional setting as well, if you’re facing challenges with your team’s dynamics or project workflow, leveraging an online project planning or resource scheduling tool can really simplify your operational processes. Project portfolio management or PPM tools and techniques come in handy for project managers and drive project success. It’s important to remember that stakeholder and customer satisfaction relies directly on the quality of the product or service offerings, project efficiency and resource management. In this comprehensive guide, let’s understand what project portfolio management (PPM) is and what is PPM resource management.
Resource management signifies a set of tools, techniques, and approaches leveraged to actively allocate resources in a project, program, or portfolio. Implementing a resource scheduling or management tool helps to manage multiple employees, teams, workspaces, and projects on a single online platform. With such a tool, project managers can ensure that the most suitable resources and assets are assigned to various projects. The right scheduling and allocation, balanced workload distribution, and efficient management of resources ensure that your projects begin and are completed without any roadblocks.
Project portfolio management (PPM) is a tactical approach leveraged by businesses to prioritize various projects, optimize resources, and align all initiatives with key business goals. According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), PPM aims to do the right projects at the correct time by choosing and managing various projects as a portfolio of investments. From a business strategy perspective, it fundamentally differs from program and project management, which focus more on managing execution and delivery.
Project portfolio management involves assessing possible projects based on their expected returns, resources needed, and alignment with the key business goals. It’s basically an approach crafted to ensure optimal project efficiency, effectiveness, profitability, and project success by managing an entire portfolio of several projects as a single entity.
PPM resource management includes systematic planning, effective resource allocation, and resource optimization across an organization’s project portfolio. This incorporates the strategic management of resources, such as human resources, tools, technologies, and machinery, as well as financial resources, time, and facilities to ensure that various projects are implemented efficiently and successfully. This process necessitates a comprehensive understanding of the competencies and capacity of the employee base. Additionally, it’s important to have a clear understanding of project schedules, budgets, and various dependencies.
The key goals of PPM resource management include:
Project portfolio management (PPM) provides multiple benefits that can improve an organization’s ability to accomplish its strategic goals:
PPM ensures that all the projects being executed are aligned with the critical strategic goals of the business. This alignment enables you to make sure that all the resources being used in the projects that contribute directly to the long-term objectives, are used instead of being scattered across less impactful projects. Additionally, strategic alignment helps organizations focus on their fundamental values and mission while selecting and executing projects.
By offering a clear view of how resources are allocated across the entire portfolio of the business, PPM resource management helps to balance workloads and optimize resource utilization. In addition, this also prevents resourcing gaps and bottlenecks, and you can ensure that all critical projects have the resources needed to succeed. This also minimizes the idle time and enhances the overall productivity.
Implementing PPM resource management also enables businesses to find and mitigate project risks at the business or portfolio level instead of at the project level. This bird’s-eye view enables better forecasting of potential challenges, enables the execution of effective risk mitigation strategies, and improves the organization’s capability to absorb and handle adverse impacts in case they happen.
Project portfolio management enhances the way you plan your projects by integrating it with the critical business objectives and the resources at hand. Detailed project planning in a portfolio context enables better harmonization of projects, optimized resource scheduling and better stakeholder communication. This also helps to plan projects based not just on their individual advantages but also on how each of them aligns with the larger business goals.
With PPM tools and techniques, you can easily create data-backed dashboards and reports in real-time. PPM also provides a clear view of various project and portfolio’s status and profitability to the stakeholders. This clear visibility helps in monitoring the progress of each project, which further enables making amendments if needed and ensuring that all the projects stay aligned with the organization’s strategic objectives. Better transparency also facilitates seamless and open communication across teams and departments, resulting in a more collaborative and informed work environment.
Project portfolio management also offers the right techniques, frameworks and tools that help to enhance your decision-making capabilities. If you are able to prioritize the project execution and deliveries as per the forecasted impact and alignment with business goals, then as a decision-maker, you can optimize your returns and minimize the risks. This type of prioritization also enables one to decide which projects need to be executed faster, delayed, put on hold, or terminated.
Effective workflow management through project portfolio management ensures that various processes across multiple projects are working efficiently. If you standardize work management, you can reduce complexity and bring down the errors while also speeding up project execution. This also helps sustain quality control throughout the project and program lifecycle within the portfolio.
PPM also enables effective change management as it offers a structured approach to managing and going through any change requests and amendments. This structure also makes sure that changes are evaluated and implemented in a manner that reduces disruption and it aligns with the key business objectives. Effective change management in PPM also helps maintain the project scope, schedules, and estimated budgets, even though the conditions may be changing.
PPM offers robust forecasting tools that aid in predicting the results and benefits of various projects within the portfolio. Such foresight is important for any future planning and for anticipating the requirements of the business in terms of resources, time, and finances. Precise forecasting helps to set feasible objectives and expectations, which largely impacts strategic planning and organizational decision-making.
Project portfolio processes are crucial components of PPM that enable companies to manage their project portfolios effectively. By implementing PPM tools and techniques, businesses can ensure that their portfolio aids their planned direction and optimizes their return on investment (ROI). Read on to explore some examples of various PPM tools and techniques.
1. Project selection: PPM includes assessing potential projects based on various factors, such as their alignment with strategic goals, feasibility, and possible returns. This process enables project managers to look for projects that are most likely to be advantageous for the organization and align with its objectives.
2. Prioritization: As a project manager, you may have multiple projects that you are managing. In such a case, prioritization becomes imperative as that also helps allocate resources in an effective manner. PPM tools and techniques aid project portfolio managers in evaluating each project's likely benefits, possible risks, and resource requirements to decide the priority within the portfolio. Companies should ensure that their best and most limited resources are efficiently leveraged for the most critical projects by setting a priority for projects.
3. Risk Management: PPM includes finding and mitigating possible risks related to various projects in the portfolio. The project managers typically collaborate closely with teams to track the project progress, spot any red flags, and take proactive actions to address or mitigate them. This pre-emptive strategy enables reducing the impact of various risks on project outcomes.
4. Seamless Communication and Reporting: Effective and open communication is important for project portfolio management and project success. The managers provide updates on status, possible risk factors, any deviations, corrective measures, milestones achieved, current resource utilization, etc. regularly. This enables all the stakeholders to gain a clear insight into the portfolio's performance and profitability and make well-informed decisions about the current and future projects.
5. Resource Management: PPM also includes effective resource allocation and resource optimization. If the project managers analyze resource availability vis-à-vis the project demands, they can ensure they schedule resources efficiently. This helps organizations avoid resource bottlenecks and optimize the project delivery process.
6. Cost Management: Managing the costs effectively is important to ensure the financial balance and health of the project portfolio. This involves creating feasible budgets, forecasting, and monitoring the financial resources that are allocated to projects. By tracking project costs, profitability, and revenue, businesses can make well-informed choices about resource allocation and prioritize projects in a manner that is beneficial.
7. Change Control Management: This incorporates tracking and controlling all project changes within the portfolio. Change control management ensures that any amendments to the project scope, key objectives, or established requirements are properly assessed, approved, documented and finally implemented. This process enables maintaining project alignment with the key strategic goals and reduces the impact of such changes on project outcomes.
Technological advancement has given organizations an edge to automate their processes. Various PPM tools and techniques help drive project success. A PPM resource management software not only enables implementing efficient resource management strategies but also effective resource allocation, capacity planning, and project efficiency. Did you know that about 77% of organizations globally leverage PPM resource management software? What’s more? Around 87% of these are high-performing organizations!
Nearly every aspect of an organizational process is enhanced by implementing PPM resource management software. Project managers may observe an improvement in team collaboration and communication, while resource scheduling, project planning, and resource tracking become seamless. It becomes easy to aim for top-quality deliverables that are within the budget and deadlines. Whereas on the demand side, you can aim for better customer satisfaction by implementing PPM best practices.
When selecting the best project portfolio management software suitable for your organization, you should keep in mind various important factors. Considering these factors will aid you in making sure that the chosen tool is aligned with your organization’s challenges and the key capabilities, allowing you to enhance the project selection process, project planning, resource management, capacity planning, and resource tracking activities.
1. Check the features and functionality: It is important to evaluate the features and functionalities of the PPM resource management software. Find a tool that provides comprehensive capabilities, including project portfolio analytics, resource tracking, risk management, resource scheduling, and agile project management support. Ensure the software is customizable to fit your company's specific requirements and processes.
2. Ensure the tool is scalable: It’s also important to check whether the tool you are choosing is scalable. Also, check if the tool can be integrated with your existing systems. Your PPM resource management software should also be able to manage the size and intricacies of your project portfolio, thus ensuring seamless operations when your organization’s business grows. It is important for the PPM software to be able to integrate with other software and systems, such as resource management tools, billing or time-tracking tools, project management software, or CRM systems for smooth data exchange and collaboration.
3. Suite of applications: PPM resource management software is typically a suite of applications that includes resource management, cost management, risk management, capacity and workflow management, resource tracking capabilities, and data analytics. These software and systems have to be integrated to offer a complete solution or platform. Without integration, businesses will need to manually align their data to meet their project management goals.
4. Monitoring progress and compliance: If your organization deals with government contracting and needs to comply with certain guidelines and regulations, then you’ll have to ensure that earned value management is sustained. When you are choosing the right tool, make sure that it can import cost and timeline data, monitor progress, assess variances, and successfully export data and customer reports.
5. Schedule management: PPM resource management tool is the foundation of project management in project-based firms. Project success hinges on feasible and well-maintained schedules. And therefore, it is important for the tool to be able to create feasible schedules, track the project schedules, send automated alerts and notifications for any upcoming timelines, and manage overall schedules.
6. Intuitive and easy to use: Another important factor to look out for is how the user feels about the tool. The PPM tools you choose should be simple to use and navigate and have an intuitive interface. A user-friendly interface facilitates user adoption across the entire organization. However, there still should be training and support available to assist the teams in setting it up as per your requirements.
7. Reporting and analytical capability: The PPM tool you choose should offer strong reporting and analytics capabilities. Such functionality helps to monitor and measure key metrics like productivity, project performance, resource optimization and utilization, and the overall portfolio health. Comprehensive reports and dashboards are important to empower the organizational leadership to make data-driven informed decisions and lead strategic initiatives.
8. Customer support services and reviews: Finally, also check the vendor's reviews, reputation and if they offer customer support services. Try to find a trusted provider who has a track record of successfully executing PPM tools and has a record of satisfied customers. Ensure that the vendor offers dedicated support and regular software updates so that the tool can stay up to date with the industry’s requirements and best practices.
Imagine being able to spot the possible red flags in your project early on. How would it be if you could leverage technology to your best advantage to increase project efficiency? What if you could reduce or eliminate the manual tasks, manage effective resource allocation, and apply the right resource management strategies to bring resource optimization and project success. Sounds impossible? No, it is not. Implementing resource management software streamlines your project portfolio management to a great extent. Additionally, with all the advantages that the right resource management tool can offer, it’s the right choice to leverage it to enhance your processes and streamline your operations.
Gone are the days when heavy files or spreadsheets were used for resource allocation. How will you look for an employee’s availability or what they are working on in a spreadsheet? You can use filters to find an individual’s data but finding best fit for a project as per various factors such as availability, expertise, skill set, and experience is very cumbersome with a spreadsheet. However, with technological advancement, resource management tools offer a cloud-based platform that becomes your central repository to store all types of employee and project data and enables you to do resource scheduling and effective resource allocation in just a few steps. By using advanced filters and drag and drop functionality, it becomes easy to move resources from one project to another. Such an intuitive tool provides a hassle-free way to allocate and schedule resources on various projects.
Imagine not having clarity on resource availability or allocations and assigning extra tasks to team members. Over-allocation or overbooking leads to burn out and shoddy work. People may also end up quitting their jobs or being frustrated. That’s why it’s very important to implement resource management software to track your current projects, what resources are assigned to them, and how they are progressing. A visual plan, detailed report, and dashboards provide you with an overview of who is doing what and when. Also, if any changes happen in allocations, such a tool is updated in real-time and reflects the current allocations and status. Such tools also allow you to communicate on the platform, enabling you to keep a track of all changes that are made to the original plans and instantly let the team know about it through the same platform.
With a cloud-based PPM resource management software, you can reduce your project planning time to half and streamline processes such as resource scheduling, project portfolio management, resource tracking, and capacity planning. Imagine creating a detailed project and resource plan in just a few steps. A plan in such a tool considers all important factors, such as the right resources, feasible schedules, capacity planning, etc. Such an online platform makes project planning a breeze. You can pull availability reports, utilization, and how each project and team is performing in real-time.
By implementing the right resource management software into PPM, businesses can effectively schedule and allocate resources and optimally utilize all the team members. Ensuring that all the different projects are assigned the required number of employees, time, and the right skill set, this approach helps to balance workloads, avoid resource bottlenecks, and set the right priorities depending on the available capacity. Consequently, projects are implemented more smoothly, and all the timelines are met successfully. In addition, the project teams can proactively resolve the potential issues before they can escalate. The tool’s real-time visibility helps make data-driven and informed decisions, helping stakeholders to spot the potential risks and thereby allocate resources strategically.
With a PPM resource management software, organizations can create a list of all comprehensive skill sets in an inventory for the entire organization. This enables us to efficiently identify the competencies and expertise needed for each project in the portfolio. The tool helps to map the capabilities of their employees and strategically align resources as per their specific skills. This helps to ensure that all the projects can benefit from the right expertise. Many PPM tools also enable the monitoring of competency development and expertise levels. This enables organizations to find the skill gaps and accordingly invest in the needed training programs.
In a multi-project environment, how will you track the productivity and performance of your staff members? At times, adding more resources to a particular project also doesn't guarantee better productivity. For higher productivity, you have to leverage your resources for productive and billable work so that their time is used well. This also includes reducing the bench time and distributing the workload efficiently. Having said that, tracking this is not easy. Leveraging a PPM resource management tool such as eResource Scheduler, tracks your resource utilization accurately and automatically. This aids in ensuring that all employees perform at their best and that their optimal potential is not over or underutilized.
If you wish to streamline your resource planning, project tracking, delivery, productivity and profitability management, and project portfolio management, implement the top-rated resource management tool, eResource Scheduler. This user-friendly, cloud-based, intuitive tool boasts of brilliant features and a very competitive pricing. Not only does it outshine the competition when it comes to effective resource allocation, but it also makes multi-project planning and execution a seamless task. It also enables designing feasible schedules, facilitates better team communication for remote and distributed teams, and offers efficient capacity planning. The tool also offers capabilities from workload distribution, utilization tracking, workflow scheduling, and profitability analysis. By implementing this top-rated solution, you can advance your resource utilization by 18 to 30%. So, figure out the tool’s benefits yourself by taking a free trial before investing in it.
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