Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) is a tool that is important for most organizations. Especially those that undertake on numerous projects to realize their objectives. From an overall perspective, the projects undertaken by the organization should have a positive impact on the objective of the company.
PPM is a process that ensures that your organization or departments in the organization spend its rare resources to make the most value in the achievement of their objectives. In a nutshell, here is why PPM is important to an organization:
PPM is significant in identifying potential obstructions that may occur on individual organizational projects and determine a comparative value for each project. This way PPM helps with prioritizing resource allocation for each project depending on their foreseen outcomes. This way resource allocation is pegged on the projects with the desired outcomes.
PPM also aligns the organization’s projects with the strategies and priorities set out by the organization’s executive. This way the organization can involve its managers in the project selection process as well as create an authorization procedure that is transparent.
PPM gives the organization a broad overlook of the projects it is undertaking. For instance, organizations using a PPM software forecast, they can see all the running projects. With this kind of information, the organization can see which projects are successful and those that need to be cut.
To sum it up, in regards to projects, PPM answers the following questions:
- Are you investing in the right things?
- Are you optimizing your capacity?
- How well are you executing?
- Can you absorb all the changes?
- Are you realizing promised benefits?
In-house or Outsourced PPM?
Having your own PPM department in the organization is a good thing. However, outsourcing PPM to a consulting company is the better option as such companies are involved in critically analyzing organizational projects and their worth.
Outsourcing becomes resourceful as your organization can use more of its time and resources in executing their mandate rather than wasting a lot of their time in analyzing projects.
Consulting PPM companies invest a lot of their time and resources to make sure that their clients are choosing and running the right projects for their goal optimization. Currently, competitive PPM consulting companies have come up with innovative ways to manage projects besides using software.
If your organization is going for a PPM consulting company, then it should consider a company employing different methodologies in project management. The most common are agile methodology consulting and waterfall methodology consulting. Others
However, if you get a consulting company that does both agile & waterfall project management , then they are the best choice.
Agile Project Management
This kind of PPM relies on an adaptive value-driven approach. The methodology’s objective is to deliver projects in an interactive, incremental and iterative manner. This is best applied in organizational environments that often exhibit changing requirements and priorities.
Waterfall Project Management
This is a traditional project management methodology that takes on a sequence step by step undertaking to the completion of a project. Once you complete one step you cannot go back and improve on it because the process is not iterative. Therefore, Waterfall does not react well to frequent changes.
