For an organization to remain
competitive it is essential that the right portfolio of projects is selected which
would ensure current and future profitability. Projects are selected based on
the fitment with the strategic goals of the enterprise. During the initial
stages of the project, the project manager's key responsibility is to prepare
and present the business case to showcase the projects fitment against the long
term strategy of the organization. Only after approval from the key
stakeholders the project is selected for execution in the organization.
However, during execution of the project
often the project team decides to monitor progress using a new set of
parameters like margin percentage, revenue, and Schedule Variance, Cost
Variance and quality standards. The link
is lost with the organization strategic objectives the very reason project was selected.
The best practices in project management suggest a uniform set of parameters
during the entire project life cycle from Project Initiation to Project
Closure.
Fusion Project Portfolio Management bridges
this gap and provides the corporate, portfolio and project manager with a
dashboard to monitor the portfolio progress on a real time basis based on
uniform set of parameters across the organization - Key Performance Indicators
(KPI's). The dashboard provides a snapshot of projects which are On Track, At
Risk and Critical. The portfolio managers can immediately focus their attention
on projects which are at Risk and Critical thus enabling them to manage
projects by exception.
For example, a KPI can be defined that non-billable
costs should be less than 10 percent of the overall project cost. The user will
be able to immediately identify the projects in the dashboard which do meet the
criteria and for a detailed analysis can drill down to the project transactions
to analyze the reason. The applications come with embedded analytics that would
help the user to identify the potential reasons. In this scenario it might be
possible that the field users on the projects have not submitted the timecards
for last week and once the timecards are submitted the project will be back on
track. The project manager's observations can be captured as a note which can
be viewed by all the stakeholders.
Projects are no longer managed and executed
in silos. To ensure profitability and sustainability of organization,
portfolios needs to be managed dynamically and PMO should be able to derive
reports and trend indicators with a click on button in the modern application. Fusion
PPM also helps the portfolio managers to suggest corrective action to bring the
non-conforming projects back on track and make a rationale decision to
terminate projects based on current and historical KPI's.