Your PPM Journey Foundation
As a PMO, EMPO, or executive leader using traditional project management methods, Planview’s project portfolio management solution creates a single source of truth for your organization and gives you visibility into projects and resource capacity at the portfolio level. This enables you to prioritize your highest value projects and deliver work on time, on budget, and aligned to your company strategy. Visibility into real-time, operationalized data enables you to enforce meaningful governance and make confident decisions about which projects to invest in. Business value is realized through the elimination of misaligned and duplicate work, improved resource utilization, and the reduced cost of project delays and failures.
To lay the foundation for your journey, Planview’s PPM solution begins with enabling work management and resource management capabilities. Once you have visibility into project details and resource availability, your solution value can be maximized by unleashing the power of Investment Capacity Planning.
Work Management
As a PMO, you are likely already using work management to gain visibility into all your projects and provide a single source of truth for reporting. Work management allows you to monitor all your project schedules, financials, and change management processes, so that you can deliver projects on time, on budget, and make real-time decisions.
Implementing work management helps PMOs solve these key business problems:
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Do we have visibility into a single source of truth for all our projects?
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Does our project plan have the level of detail necessary to support resource forecasting and planning?
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Do I have access to real-time data that shows me at-a-glance projects that are significantly over or under the approved budget?
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Do we have a standardized method for capturing and managing project risks, issues, and changes which can automatically be consolidated into project status reports?
Get started with work management processes and reports
Resource Management
Resource management allows PMOs to manage the non-availability of resources, reflecting the true capacity of the organization to deliver projects. This typically includes managing the assignments of named resources to work on projects, phases, or activities. This may or may not include time reporting for each resource.
Implementing resource management helps PMOs solve these key business problems:
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Am I able to track and manage the assignment of resources to work on projects?
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How can I determine the overall utilization of resource teams to better understand our staffing needs and requirements?
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How can I easily identify over- or under-utilized resources to better manage resource assignments?
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Am I able to track project and non-project time for specific resources?
Get started with resource management processes and reports
Additional Resources
Below you will find links to assets from across the organization that will be useful for both your self-learning and your work to implement the Project Management stage of the PPM Modernization Journey.
Unleash the Power of Investment and Capacity Planning
The next step in maximizing your solution is to unleash the power of Investment and Capacity Planning. Investment and Capacity Planning is a robust analysis and scenario-modeling tool that enables PMOs to analyze, rank, and prioritize investments. In the final step of Investment and Capacity Planning, administrators can publish the scenario as the official investment plan to share with stakeholders, enabling the automation of the project lifecycle governance process. Supported by the organizational funding, resource and capacity planning, and portfolio planning capabilities, Investment and Capacity Planning empowers PMOs to balance capacity against demand and make better business decisions about which investments to approve and prioritize.
Organizational Funding
Before you can leverage the power of Investment and Capacity Planning, the first step as a PMO is to implement organizational funding. This capability supports the need to balance and track your portfolio investments at the organizational level. As a PMO using traditional portfolio planning and funding processes, organizational funding is typically carried out on an annual basis. Portfolio managers can set financial targets to compare labor and non-labor costs to the benefits and revenue the portfolio must generate, then analyze the impact of new projects against capacity to determine which new investments the organization can take on and prioritize.
Implementing organizational funding helps PMOs solve these key business problems:
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Am I able to set financial targets by cost center or department against which planned and in-flight projects can be analyzed?
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Do I have visibility to labor and non-labor capacity targets?
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How do we know which new investments we have the capacity to take on?
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How can we prioritize new investments?
Get started with organizational funding processes and reports
Resource Capacity Planning
Implementing resource capacity planning is the next foundational step toward using Investment and Capacity Planning. This step configures the demand budgets so that you can balance capacity and demand. This includes forecasting the effort required to deliver both in-flight projects and potential new investments or projects. Once the capacity targets and potential demand investments have been estimated, you can start to model scenarios, rank and prioritize work, analyze different scenario options against capacity targets, shift investments to fit within capacity time constraints, and balance the investments against capacity, making trade-off decisions. Once above-the-line and below-the-line decisions are agreed upon, they can be published to the rest of the organization and work on the projects can move forward.
Implementing resource and capacity planning helps PMOs solve these key business problems:
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Are we confident in our ability to successfully deliver new investments within the constraints of our resource capacity?
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Are we working on the highest priority projects?
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Do we have the right mix of projects?
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Do we schedule investments across time to optimize the use of resources?
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What capacity constraints are considered as additional investments are approved?
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Do we have a process to reallocate resources to high priority investments?
Get started with resource and capacity planning processes and reports
Project Portfolio Planning
Project Portfolio Planning takes the foundational set-up for Investment and Capacity Planning one step further, adding in a consistent intake process for new requested work, additional project governance steps, and ongoing project monitoring and reprioritization in Investment and Capacity Planning.
Implementing project portfolio planning helps PMOs solve these key business problems:
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Do we have a consistent intake process for new projects which includes sizing estimation, description, and categorization?
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Do we have a governance process for new projects based on specific criteria which controls the progression of the project through delivery?
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Can we analyze the impact of new investments on capacity within the context of the existing portfolio of approved investments?
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How are projects performing and do they warrant continued investment?
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Where do we need to make trade-offs?
Get started with project portfolio planning process and reports
Additional Resources
Below you will find links to assets from across the organization that will be useful for both your self-learning and your work to enable Investment and Capacity Planning.
Next Steps
Aligning strategy to delivery is key to resiliency in an increasingly unpredictable market, and PMO leaders that use centralized, top-down, stage-gate or waterfall practices face barriers to business agility, such as teams delivering work using disconnected tools and approaches across departments, or reliance on spreadsheets to roll up status updates. To deliver the most value to your organization, solution owners must also be change enablers that embark on a journey to modern PPM, and this begins with a transformational shift in business operations from traditional to agile.
Once you've determined your organization is ready to take the next steps toward business agility, the next stage of the PPM modernization journey is to leverage your FLEX licensing. By turning on Planview's work management modules Project Teams and Team Kanban, you can empower your teams to deliver work aligned to strategic objectives by Getting Started with Team Foundation.
