Project and Portfolio Management

Challenge

In order for organizations to successfully compete globally, they must both select the correct project portfolio and execute their programs and projects effectively.

Project Selection Challenges

Organizations often identify numerous project ideas, but fail to capture project information in a central location and complete the necessary business cases for each project.  In some organizations, projects are selected without a clearly defined analysis process or selection criteria.

Project Tracking Barriers

Identifying the total number of active projects and their status within the company portfolio is difficult or cumbersome.   Resource allocation in many organizations is either performed ad hoc, or in an inefficient and imprecise manner.

Capturing and accurately allocating project costs, especially internal labor, is sometimes not even attempted due to difficulties in user adoption.  For many organizations, project, program and portfolio reporting is manually intensive, delayed and subject to error.

Obstacles in Project Collaboration and Management

Collaboration among project team members is often ad hoc and usually involves unstructured management of issues, risks, action items and document review processes.  Project management practices are often not utilized consistently across an organization, and program tracking often involves labor intensive, manual roll-up efforts.

Solution

The Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution helps organizations select the optimal project portfolio and execute projects and programs more effectively, thereby improving performance, reducing costs, and increasing return on investment. The Microsoft EPM Solution includes Microsoft Project Server, Microsoft Project Portfolio Server, and Microsoft Project Professional. Free online trials of the Microsoft EPM Solution and Microsoft Project Professional are available through the product tour links on this page.

Demand Management

Using the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Solution for demand management enables organizations to easily capture all project requests in a central repository, develop detailed business cases, providing the information necessary to make informed portfolio decisions. The Microsoft EPM Solution also includes workflow capabilities enabling the effective governance of the project portfolio.

Portfolio Selection

The Microsoft EPM Solution enables portfolio selection by providing the ability to easily incorporate an organization’s strategic portfolio decision criteria and to aid in the development of the criteria weighting. The Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Solution also provides sophisticated algorithms which automatically determine the optimal project portfolio selection under budget, resources and other constraints.  By enabling the organization to select the project mix that provides the most value, the project portfolio’s potential ROI is maximized.

Resource Management

Human Resources are usually the most valuable asset within the organization and are often the most expensive component of projects so resource management is crucial.  The project teams both inside and outside of the organization can also become one of the key project constraints.   The Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Solution helps organizations effectively allocate and utilize resources providing a higher return on human assets.

Time Reporting

The Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Solution provides a flexible and easy-to-use web-based time reporting and approval mechanism that is integrated with project scheduling, task status tracking, and reporting and analysis capabilities.  By capturing and reporting the time for all project activities, operational work, administrative activities and non-working time, resource utilization and costs can be analyzed to effectively and more easily keep projects on schedule and on budget.

Reporting

The Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Solution provides many types of beneficial, dynamic, near real-time reports that enable project managers to more easily track projects and analyze many types of items including: schedule variances, resource utilization, cost metrics, quality trends, earned value metrics, etc.  All of these powerful reporting capabilities help keep projects on schedule and also support governmental or organizational reporting requirements.

Collaboration

The Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Solution encourages project team members, project managers and other staff to collaborate by sharing information in a timely and effective manner.  Documents can be jointly developed, reviewed, approved and shared.  Issues, risks, and action items can be submitted, developed, altered and managed in an open yet controlled environment.  By increasing collaboration and the communication of important project information among team members and other staff, project execution is improved.

Project Management 

Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007 empowers project managers to effectively plan and edit their schedules.  And, when used in conjunction with the overall Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Solution, even greater project management benefits can be realized.  The Microsoft EPM Solution provides many capabilities for managing the schedule, cost, scope and other aspects of project management within an enterprise environment.

Program Management

A program is a set of related projects that benefit from being managed together in order to better achieve the overall program goals.  The Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Solution enables programs to be identified, prioritized, and managed in concert with the underlying projects.  By allowing the project, program and portfolio relationships to be correlated, the Microsoft EPM Solution enables program management to more easily keep projects and programs aligned with the organization’s strategic objectives.

Earned Value Management

The Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Solution provides managers with the Earned Value Management (EVM) processes and metrics to identify project technical performance, schedule performance, and cost performance within a single integrated methodology. With the Microsoft EPM Solution project portfolio managers can prevent cost overruns and scope creep, maintain team progress and task completion and quantify project performance.