Organizations invest in programs to instigate change and reap substantial benefits in return for their efforts. Still, recent studies confirm that a staggering 80% of all projects deliver less than 50% of the benefits they were meant to contribute. A strategic gap has opened that current program management techniques cannot fill. Benefits management is the crucial discipline of actively managing the set of portfolio or program outputs and outcomes to ensure they add up to the benefits proposed in their business cases. Only in embedding benefits management can programs reduce the risk of investment failure and discharge the expectations executive managers have of their operational functions.

Many organizations struggle to realize their strategies, either wasting investment in the wrong change programs or poorly executing the right change. Portfolio Management is the emerging corporate competence used to get this right. Done well, Portfolio Management optimizes your portfolio by providing the ability to maximize return on investment and to realize corporate strategies through the right programs and projects.

Companies invest substantial amounts of their annual budgets into projects and programs to achieve lasting change. They need to assure that their investment of constrained resources in projects and programs yields the expected results. Portfolio Delivery Management provides an objective mechanism for matching supply with demand, identifying duplication, resolving resource conflicts and challenging low value projects. It guarantees a continuous delivery process across a set of projects and programs and ensures ongoing selection and investment in the right projects and programs.

Is your company managing its strategic initiatives on a SPREADSHEET?

A Project Portfolio Management (PPM) system is an essential tool for collecting project requests, building business cases, managing approvals and prioritizing your company’s strategic initiatives. But PPM systems can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take months to implement. Project Solutions Group has teamed with Microsoft to develop a Software as a Service (SaaS) approach to PPM that drastically lowers the cost of ownership, giving management the information they need to effectively align project investments with corporate strategy.

“Microsoft has raised the bar in the Project Portfolio Management marketplace” – Forrester Research, August 2006