The Forrester WaveTM: Project/Program Portfolio Management, Q4 2012

January 14, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Forrester Inc. came out with its much-awaited Forrester Wave report on Project/Program Portfolio Management in December 2012.  As expected, the report highlighted some key industry trends that are redefining the scope of PPM and shed light on what to expect going forward.  As per the report PPM now has two distinct segments: Planning and Execution. Here are some excerpts from the report:

Demand for Business Agility Drives Change to BT Governance Processes: Accelerating demand for business agility forces firms to adapt. Manual data entry and ponderously slow feedback loops from planning-as-usual don’t enable firms to pivot as business conditions change. Today’s organizations need to see and trust information as it develops to make decisions that will help them outpace their competition.

The PPM Tools Market has a New Dividing Line — With Key Features on Both sides: The need to support Lean and Agile processes makes today’s PPM tool choice more difficult. Above-the-line tools support strategic planning focused on value, risks, and benefits. Below-the-line tools focus on managing demand and day-to-day work. Several vendors have functionality that straddles the line, but few vendors are strong across the board.

One-size-Fits-all is No Longer Relevant — It’s Time To Take a Layered Approach: As firms turn to Agile and Lean practices, a single PPM tool may not make sense. Think more in terms of constructing a “layered approach” to PPM. Seek flexible solutions that handle the day-to-day work for both waterfall and Agile projects (below the line) that also convey aggregated information to more strategic (above-the-line) planning.

The report further deep dives into the changing face of the industry and highlights that demand for business agility will continue to fuel adoption of Agile development techniques that can deliver differentiating business technology (BT) solutions within accelerated time frames. Organizations that fail to adopt governance processes that span traditional waterfall and Agile will struggle. Also, while PPM has historically been seen as a tool for either top-down forecasting and planning or for project management, organizations rarely use a single tool for both purposes.

In this report, Forrester Research, Inc., evaluated 10 of the most significant PPM vendors against 68 criteria in two segments: above-the-line strategic planning and below-the-line work execution.

To access the complete report, click here.

Filed Under: Official Daptiv Blog Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Why is team collaboration not enough?

January 7, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Expanding beyond team/social collaboration to business collaboration

The term “collaboration” has become one of the primary hot topics for businesses and analysts throughout the industry lately.  At its most basic level, “collaboration” simply means “working with others in a coordinated fashion toward a common goal.”  But few actually attempt to define what it really means in the context of business and PPM.

If you ask most people what capabilities define collaboration in the workplace, they generally talk about the sharing of information within a given team:  document management, threaded discussions, activity feeds, instant messaging, shared calendars, task assignments, facilitation of problem solving and idea development, communication of decisions and meeting minutes, etc.  This is all good, and certainly helps a team move forward in coordinated fashion toward the common goal of completing a project or specific unit of work.  Nearly all PPM solutions provide functionality to address each of these needs within the scope of a project.  SaaS PPM solutions are particularly well-suited to providing this level of team collaboration since, by their very nature, they are accessible to all team members regardless of geographic diversity and the information they contain is always available in near real-time.

I would argue, however, that this limited view of collaboration is incomplete.  Looked at from a broader perspective, an entire organization can be viewed as a collection of units which must all work together in a coordinated fashion toward the common goal of alignment and execution against the business’ corporate vision and strategic objectives.  Thus, business-level collaboration is necessary to establish the direction for an entire organization.  “Business Direction” includes the definition for the organization’s Vision, Goals and Strategies.  By sharing and collaborating on the Business Direction, the business teams will be better prepared to drive the various work efforts.  True business-level collaboration therefore depends on the free flow of information between the project teams and the outside world – management, other departments, executives, stakeholders, etc. – to facilitate proper alignment and effective decision-making throughout the entire organization.  It is this level of “business collaboration”, as opposed to individual “team collaboration”, which is often missing from a company’s collaboration strategy.  All too often, anyone not on the core project team is actually excluded from access to the system of record for project performance and must therefore depend upon periodic status updates or word-of-mouth communications to understand, participate, or make critical business decisions on project information.

Business collaboration provides a level of transparency and visibility to project details throughout an organization.  At its heart, business collaboration makes heavy use of enhanced dashboarding and powerful reporting capabilities to expose appropriate project information to those who are outside the core project team.  Ideally, facilitation of business collaboration also provides processes and methods for these external resources to submit inquiries and participate in discussions, access project documentation, and all of the other traditional collaboration capabilities as well.

When examining the collaboration strategy within your organization, be sure to keep the big picture in mind.  Team-level collaboration is certainly important.  But enabling collaboration across departments and across levels within a larger organization can often be even more critical to the success of the entire business.

Filed Under: The Business-Driven PMO Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Top-5 Predictions for Project Portfolio Management in 2013

January 3, 2013 By Leave a Comment

As project management gains wider visibility and recognition in organizations around the world, PMO’s will now develop new tool-sets to serve a broad spectrum of users. Organizations have recognized that projects are a major aspect of their business and more of their people are working on projects and using project management processes. Because projects are a major vehicle by which companies grow, improve and meet their business objectives, the need to successfully complete projects has never been greater. Daptiv forecasts top five PPM trends for 2013 and they are:

  1. PPM will Continue to be the Fastest Growing Category of SaaS - According to the Dataquest research report, “Competitive Landscape: SaaS Project and Portfolio Management Software, Worldwide,” PPM is the fastest growing category of SaaS enterprise software, increasing at a 41% CAGR for the 5-year period of 2009-2014. In 2013, even more organizations will embrace SaaS-based solutions to manage or transform their portfolios. In the PPM world, the benefits of this approach versus traditional on-premise software products include: Rapid deployment, team collaboration, reduced risk of failure, tighter vendor/customer relationships, and reduced cost of implementation and support.
  2.  PPM will Cross the Chasm From IT-Driven to Business-Driven - Organizations have come to realize that much of their growth and future sustainability comes through projects. Projects are vehicles of change, and the best way to improve the management of them is through PPM tools. PMO’s are getting more strategic about where PPM principles can add value, and they are finding green field opportunities for PPM in places that didn’t previously exist. In 2013, we will see an increased emphasis to “projectize” work in different business functions, such as line-of-business divisions, sales, marketing, and human resources. As such, more organizations will begin taking into consideration the business intelligence generated through PPM systems to refine their overall business strategies.
  3. Putting IT back in control of the BYOD explosion: PPM goes Mobile - Smartphones and tablets are poised for dramatic growth, especially with the arrival of new devices from Apple, Google and Microsoft. According to a Forrester report, 66% of employees now use two or more devices every day, including desktops, laptops, smartphones and tablets. As the mobile market continues to grow and with the increasing BYOD trend, enterprises/project managers will look at IT and the PMO to help implement new applications to ensure secure access across dozens of disparate platforms and handsets/tablets being used by the company across multiple regions.
  4. CFOs Give Green Light to PMOs - According to PM Solutions research, 65.8% of high performing organizations have enterprise PMOs. As companies begin to quantify the financial benefits of having a PMO,CFOs will be the ones leading the charge for the implementation of PPM solutions in the year 2013. This in turn will have a positive impact on creating an effective portfolio management operation, and it will be viewed as a way to bridge strategy, operations, and finance. Portfolio management will stimulate the interest and attention of the CFO, as PPM services become a proven method of improving system quality, and project and service delivery levels across the organization.
  5. Economic Uncertainty Drives Need for ROI Accountability - Given the continued uncertainty of the economy, cost management and efficiency will continue to top the list of priorities for most CEOs. In this environment, companies will remain cautious, and we will find companies leaning more heavily on PPM as a way to measure the ROI of their investments. In 2013, PPM will be recognized as a crucial change agent that will help companies’ transition out of recession-area thinking, towards driving innovation and business transformation initiatives at companies both large and small.
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Principles of Scoring Models

December 11, 2012 By 1 Comment

When I was running the IT-PMO at PeopleSoft we faced an interesting dilemma. As we finished work on the integration of JD Edwards there was a ton of unmet demand for IT work from all corners of the enterprise. This ranged from tweaks to the purchasing system to an all-new global training environment. We quickly realized even our ability to analyze the demand would be swamped by the incoming flood of work.

So, we devised a scoring system. Why? There were three main reasons, all of which really comprise some fundamental principles when creating a scoring model.

First was the need to analyze and separate the wheat from the chaff quickly. Our primary driver was to be able to make an initial cut from 120+ requests to something more manageable for more in-depth analysis. So we needed a way to make quick judgment calls to find the top 20-30 project requests with the most merit.

We further realized that any analysis that came up with a specific number (like $300K for changing the purchasing program), even with a caveat of +/- 100%, would become sticky. That is to say, if the $300K estimate was later revised to $400K – well within the +/- 100-% – the executives would still want to hold us to the $300K! “I thought you said $300K 2 months ago – what changed!” was a familiar refrain. Scoring models, on the other hand, place estimates in ranges. So as long as you don’t exceed the top range it’s all good.

Many project-driven organizations today face this same dilemma on an ongoing basis. Scoring models meet this challenge well. So, to create a scoring model that will quickly find the projects with the most merit without being nailed down to estimates too early, keep these key principles in mind:

  1. Group your scoring criteria into around three buckets – these will be used as axis on a bubble chart later. My favorites are benefits, cost/size, and risk. Others include impact, and for product development groups may include market share, technical feasibility, and margin.
  2.  Scoring criteria should comprise ranges.  An example would be a 1-5 rating of potential revenue increase, with 0 = none, 1 = less than $1 million, 2= 1-5 million, 3 = 5-10 million, etc. Same goes for project cost or other financial metric. For criteria like risk, an example would be a rating on project familiarity with 1 = very familiar with this type of project and 5 = never done this kind of work before. Make sure all the criteria produce the same range of scores (e.g. 0 – 5) so you can create weighted averages for each group and a weighted average total project score.
  3.  Scoring criteria should fit the company’s strategic direction and business needs. A retailer will be concerned about increasing market share, while a SaaS company like Daptiv is concerned with customer satisfaction.
  4.  Bubble charts are a great tool for graphically envisioning which projects will produce the most bang for the buck. While the simplicity of a single chart is more efficient, I have seen new product development organizations with up to 6 criteria groupings used on 2-3 bubble charts.
  5.  Back test the model. Take the scoring model produced and score the current slate of active projects. When I did this with a major retailer a couple of years ago, we knew we had it right when the only current projects that wouldn’t have made the cut turned out to be problem children that should never have been launched.
  6.  Always analyze requests in cycles. Applying a scoring model to each request as it comes in negates the comparative process. It also leads to new priorities interrupting live projects, which results in project and resource churn. We typically recommend quarterly cycles. Monthly can work in an environment with larger quantities of shorter lifespan projects. Generally annual cycles are too long as too much work comes up in the interim. However, an annual planning process for the larger, more strategic work can be coupled with a quarterly cycle for the smaller work.
  7.  Scoring models work best when there is a cross-functional team empowered with the ability to make decisions. This means they will be high enough level in the company to not be second-guessed by colleagues or superiors.

Once requests are reviewed and sorted using a scoring model, decisions can be made about which should proceed for further analysis. Those that pass muster then pass into the more traditional initiation process for projects, ensuring that valuable analysis time is not wasted while allowing the focus necessary to properly present the best projects for funding.

 

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