• As portfolio manager, you’re responsible for supporting the intake of new project requests, providing visibility into the portfolio of in-flight projects, and helping to facilitate the right approval and prioritization decisions.
• You need a project portfolio management (PPM) tool that promotes the maintenance and flow of good data to help you succeed in these tasks. However, while throwing expensive technology at bad process rarely works, many organizations take this approach to solve their PPM problems.
• Commercial PPM solutions are powerful and compelling, but they are also expensive, complex, and hard to use. When a solution is not properly adopted, the data can be unreliable and inconsistent, defeating the point of purchasing a tool in the first place.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

• Your choice of PPM solution must be in tune with your organizational PPM maturity to ensure that you are prepared to sustain the tool use without having the corresponding PPM processes collapse under its own weight.
• A spreadsheet-based homegrown PPM solution can provide key capabilities of an optimized PPM solution with a high level of sophistication and complexity without the prohibitive capital and labor costs demanded by commercial PPM solution.
• Focus on your PPM decision makers that will consume the reports and insights by investigating their specific reporting needs.

Impact and Result

• Think outside the commercial box. Develop an affordable, adoptable, and effective PPM solution using widely available tools based on Info-Tech’s ready-to-deploy templates.
• Make your solution sustainable. When it comes to portfolio management, high level is better. A tool that is accurate and maintainable will provide more value than one that strives for precise data yet is ultimately unmaintainable.
• Report success. A PPM tool needs to foster portfolio visibility in order to engage and inform the executive layer and support effective decision making.