Responding Quickly in Times of Change

PPM Pro Video Series:
Tactics to Respond Quickly in Times of Change

At times, especially recent times, you and your organization may need to re-plan and re-work in order to react quickly to changes that impact your business. You and your PMO may find yourselves asking questions such as:

“How do we ensure work continues in times of change when all our people are working remotely?”
“How do we temporarily suspend work on one project or set of projects?"
“How do we represent fewer available work hours for our people?”
“How can we re-prioritize existing and incoming work requests?”
“What work should we temporarily suspend to meet our new business needs?”
“How do we visualize all these recent changes?”

The goal of this video series and accompanying articles (for those who prefer the written word) is to provide you with ideas and actionable how-tos. You can leverage PPM Pro’s robust features to respond quickly to these and other questions related to projects and tasks, resources, financials, work prioritization and scoring, work planning, and visualizing the impact of all these changes.

Video 1: Ensure Work Delivery Aligns to Strategy as Projects and Priorities Shift

This video discusses how to ensure that work continues in times of change and disruption by supporting new and different ways of working that include virtual teams and remote work collaboration. Just as important is to ensure that the work delivered, while evolving and changing, stays aligned to the business strategy by:

Exploring dynamic work delivery tools for virtual teams and project collaboration
Rolling work information up to project portfolios to provide visibility and alignment

Video 2: Adjusting PPM Pro Project and Task Work

This video demonstrates ways to handle deferred and canceled project and task work, and discusses why you might want to consider some of the following techniques:

Removing or moving project associations to portfolios
Changing project status and schedule from dates
Re-planning project staffing allocations
Creating project baselines
Adjusting task constraints and dependencies
Making tasks inactive
Changing task properties such as start dates, target dates, and duration
Shifting tasks

Video 3: Accounting for Changes to People Resource Availability

The goal of this video is to demonstrate ways to assess and address the impacts of your people if/when they become unavailable to do their work. Topics include:

Seeing the effect of unavailable people via impact analysis
Using “What If” to analyze potential resource changes
Updating various calendar properties, such as work hours and events
Allocating to (reduced) available capacity by assigning resource to a special project
Making users inactive or setting termination dates
Reassigning and rebalancing work via resource workbench

Video 4: Managing Financial Changes

This video highlights different methods to capture and manage your work and resource financials. When budgets become tight and revenue slows down, you can consider:

Updating portfolio revenue and budget costs
Updating project financial entry forecasts (cash inflow and outflow)
Adjusting role and resource internal rates

Video 5: Re-Prioritizing and Re-Planning for New and Existing Work

The goal of this video is to help you understand your options for re-prioritizing and re-planning work when your original priorities and plans get disrupted, such as:

Creating new fields - including calculated fields - to represent new priorities
Re-scoring and altering request or project scoring profiles
Updating and creating request categories specific to current times
Using change requests to update and re-prioritize in-flight work
Re-planning with predictive portfolio analysis

Video 6: Visualizing the Impacts of Change in PPM Pro

This video focuses on various ways you can test, document, monitor, and ensure that you and your stakeholders are aware of changes to work and people, including:

Setting up a sandbox, or taking advantage of your existing sandbox
Taking advantage of Notes, Status Comments, and Attachments
Taking advantage of Project Logs for risks, issues, changes
Taking advantage of KPI trend fields
Analyzing capacity and demand
Tracking time spent on critical and less critical work
Building key reports and dashboards

Additional References

Contingency Plan Template and Files

If you would like a reference for general activities and tasks to be done by and for your organization in times of disruption, Projectplace created a "Planview - Contingency Plan Template" workspace template that should be available to all Projectplace users. If you are using Projectplace, please take a look as it has some well thought out activities and cards, such as "Guidelines for Staff onsite", "Make sure website can handle additional traffic", and "Make sure employee emergency contact info is up to date". AND further, one of our excellent Consulting Managers created both an Excel file and an MSP file task work breakdown structure that includes all the ideas represented in this Projectplace template. You can copy/paste from either of these files into a PPM Pro project task's Spreadsheet Editor, or import the MSP file into a PPM Pro project's tasks.

If you have any questions that we haven’t answered, please let us know by reaching out to PPM Pro Customer Care, your Account Executive, Success Manager, or Product Management.