Published: July 24 2009, 06:16 PM | 1 Comment(s)
by Pradeep Bhanot

PPM systems provide value to organizations in many ways. These include improved staff utilization, improved financial management and better demand management. But for me these are not the most compelling ones.

The top three for me are:

Greater visibility. Having a single system of record for all projects is the basis for managing all your projects as a portfolio and a foundation for financial transparency.

Greater efficiency. Ties nicely into the whole notion of reducing wasted effort, which is a major principal of a Lean IT approach. PPM improves project management, by enabling projects to get started faster, by helping with the critical task of resourcing the project with the right skills and executed better.   

Portfolio optimization. Once you can see all your projects and are running them well the really strategic role of PPM is to help an organization select and execute the right projects or programmes. The portfolio optimization process is where decision are made that cancel projects that add little relative value, defer investments in longer term projects, all of which allows you to execute additional strategic projects that help customers and significantly improve revenues.

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Feel free to comment on your top three.

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Published: July 17 2009, 05:21 PM | no comments
by Pradeep Bhanot

On my way home from School, I used to drop into my friend Chris Ashley's house for a game of football in his back garden and a feast of little triangular peanut butter sandwiches which we loved. His Mum liked to make only the quantity we could sensibly consume. If we left any, we would we could expect less than we asked for next time.

My mind wondered back to those days, yesterday as I heard my colleague Jason Woo, tell us how Chicago Public Health, using PPM, saved $9M of unspent carry-over they could have lost, due to their inability to demonstrate 100% consumption.

This is a great use case for PPM as grants management is really just another form of investment management, with very specific reporting requirements.  CA Clarity Grants Manager On Demand  is a SaaS based product that provides the necessary ARRA reporting (providing a snapshot),  and goes further, by tracking the entire grants lifecycle process from making the application, to receiving funds, to managing the consumption against targets.

Grants management parallels the traditional project portfolio investment, in that you need to be able to perform "What-if" comparisons for different invest or request scenarios and you also need insight into the performance of existing projects to make the most of the resources available and minimise waste.

At last year's PPM Summit in Vienna, I spoke to large University who wanted to use PPM to manage a European research grants program that spanned many organizations across many EU countries. An On Demand PPM providing a central resource that all the grantee organizations could subscribe to was the ideal approach. It was a good fit because it required no large capital outlay by any one party, spread the cost in proportion to each organisations need and provided centralized reporting to the grantor.  The new Grants Management functionality extends nicely to this additional use case.

It's easy to request large grants, but the key to providing the public the most value from such programs is for everyone to only bite off what they can chew.                

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Published: July 03 2009, 04:26 PM | no comments
by Pradeep Bhanot

Today I came across an article at itpro.co.uk that discusses the severe impact on the airline industry of the current recession. This is a good example of balancing the business portfolio to better address the margin pressure being imposed by the current business climate. British Airways is not alone in this situation; many industries are deferring cash hungry projects with long lead times to value in favor of projects that promise faster returns that are needed now, as that can help carry them through the current economic turbulence. In this case BA cut an ERP project with returns expected in 2011 in order to favor a customer facing in-flight wireless communications project that will provide payback in a much shorter time.

 It is interesting to compare the case above to a more optimistic view, featuring Lean IT, expressed in the a recently published paper on preparing for the upturn from this recession, which you can download by clicking here. It does resonate with the ITPro article in that does underline the need for companies to set frivolous projects aside and focus only on those that clearly produce value for customers and shareholders.

The customer centricity and eliminating wasted effort are central elements of Lean thinking which both the paper and article are touch upon and are worth a read.  

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