by admin on October 18, 2011
One of the key processes in a PPM solution (project portfolio management) is project selection – ensuring you do the right projects. A PPM approach requires tools to help decision makers evaluate, grade and prioritise project requests.
The starting point for project selection is to create an inventory of all your current approved projects and the projects being requested.
Then during the project selection phase you should evaluate projects on the following criteria:
- The value and benefits of the projects.
- Perform a risk assessment of each project.
- Rank or prioritise projects.
- Analyse resource supply against project resource demands.
In this series of blog posts, we are going to review three common techniques that you can use to help with project selection and support the evaluation steps above.
- Net present value (NPV). Net present value is a financial technique that helps you understand if a project will provide a positive return on its investment.
- Strategic alignment. Using strategic alignment as part of the project evaluation process helps you understand which projects most closely align to your organisation’s key drivers. The technique uses scorecards to evaluate each project against standard criteria giving an overall score for the project.
- Resource capacity and demand analysis. Finally, resource capacity analysis helps you determine if you have sufficient resource to undertake the desired projects.
Next: using NPV (net present value) to evaluate projects.
by admin on September 8, 2011
Organisation: Hutt City Council (HCC) 
Download Case Study
Website: http://www.huttcity.govt.nz/
Staff: 60 IT staff
Region: New Zealand
Industry: Local Government
Implementation Partner: 3SixtyNZ (http://3sixtynz.com/)
Business Need
With the ever increasing challenges of delivering IS solutions within the organisation, HCC needed a better understanding of how their projects, business as usual (BAU) and IT work were being managed and reported.
Having to manage five major portfolios – HCC’s PMO resources were being overwhelmed. Added to this pressure were the demands from public projects, internal maintenance, internal support and introducing projects to create efficiencies. With over 100 projects running concurrently across the portfolios, the fragmented systems were proving difficult to maintain and provided a serious challenge for new members of the team.
Solution
HCC decided to evaluate market leading project portfolio management (PPM) solutions that would align and help deliver on their IS PMO strategy. After a rigorous evaluation process, HCC chose iPlanWare PPM and selected our New Zealand based product partner 3SixtyNZ (http://3sixtynz.com/) to implement the solution.
Benefits
- Streamlined and effective platform for prioritising projects
- Major improvements in communication and status tracking
- Real-time status of projects and the status of council initiatives
- Now able to make strategic decisions on what project work to approve
- Simplified production of key project metrics and project updates
- Improved resource capacity planning
“The iPlanWare scoring, capacity planning and project approval process helps HCC ‘s PMO prioritise projects as well as release resource from not so critical activities. This was something that we could never do in our old systems. Having a total project overview and BAU view is ideal for a PMO.
The customised dashboards provide the department managers with clear and accurate visibility of resource allocation and resource costs – something that was never possible with our legacy spread sheets. The ability to manage inter-project dependencies has enabled us to understand the real deliverables within real timeframes, providing a win win for our managers and our stakeholders”. Tony Skerrett Manager, IS Projects
by admin on July 19, 2011
The new release of iPlanWare PPM has a number of features that make portfolio modelling, analysis and project selection even easier.
Project scorecards form the cornerstone of a portfolio review and approval process. The latest release of iPlanWare makes scorecards faster to complete and review. In the new portfolio scoring area you can quickly score your projects and evaluate them relative to other competing initiatives.
What if scenario modelling has got a whole lot more powerful. When reviewing requested projects alongside already committed projects, organisations will often need to evaluate different portfolio options. The new scenario management features let each portfolio managers create multiple scenarios and evaluate each in turn. Scenarios can be evaluated based on metrics such as project score, risk, reward and resource capacity.
Separate risk and reward scores can now be calculated for project scorecards. Prior to this release projects were scored on a single project score dimension. Allowing projects to be additionally scored on risk and reward provides greater visibility into project priorities. Project can be evaluated on the investment map using risk and reward scores.
Select projects based on risk and reward
PM-Partners Group Partners With iPlanWare as Reseller for SaaS PPM Software to Enterprises In Australia.
iPlanWare today announces that PM-Partners group has been appointed a reseller of iPlanWare’s PPM software in Australia.
iPlanWare is committed to being the PPM solution of choice for organisations wherever they are based, and the agreement with PM-Partners moves this vision a step closer. By leveraging PM-Partners services including PMO start up assistance, managed PMO and managed portfolio in conjunction with iPlanWare PPM, organisations in Australia now have a compelling option when looking to develop and optimise their project and portfolio management processes.
About PM-Partners group
PM-Partners group has helped Australian organisations achieve better business outcomes for 15 years. PM-Partners group are Australia’s most highly certified project management specialist, and each year assist in the delivery of projects valued at over $500 million. PM-Partners group talented team of over 100 experienced consultants, project managers and facilitators work with organisations throughout Australia, Asia, Europe, and the USA, managing over 300 client engagements and projects in various industry sectors each year.
For more information about PM-Partners group, please visit www.pm-partners.com.au.
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