How quickly an organization responds to new market and customer demands says a lot about its ability to deliver business results. But with different projects being undertaken by different teams, ensuring visibility into progress, financials, resources, and risk across all projects and work, no matter the execution method, doesn’t come easy. 

Moving from a state of chaos to a state of control requires organizations to streamline project execution with robust project portfolio management (PPM). 

Read on to uncover the growing importance of PPM and how you can efficiently manage projects, improve productivity, and drive business value with solutions such as Planview’s Project Portfolio Management.

Common Project Portfolio Management Challenges

As businesses expand across geographies and as customer needs get increasingly complex, organizations find themselves managing an array of complex and time-sensitive projects. Spanning various locations, teams, and time zones, managing these projects has become a Herculean task for most. Challenges include: 

• Assessing and ranking projects based on their alignment with strategic objectives, potential return on investment (ROI), and resource availability.
• Efficiently allocating and managing resources across various projects to avoid overutilization or bottlenecks.
• Overcoming the problem of resource constraints and availability in a way that doesn’t impact project milestones or delay execution timelines.
• Identifying and assessing potential risks associated with individual projects and the portfolio as a whole and minimizing their impact on the organization.
• Establishing metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor the progress and success of projects in the portfolio.
• Regularly evaluating projects, identifying underperforming ones, and making necessary adjustments.
• Ensuring that each project within the portfolio contributes to the organization’s overall business goals and supports the company’s long-term vision.
• Establishing a robust decision-making framework and governance structure for different projects to oversee project selection, execution, and monitoring processes.
• Regularly reviewing and refining the portfolio management processes to adapt to changing business conditions, technological advancements, and market dynamics.
• Ensuring project decisions are made in a transparent, consistent, and informed manner and find the approval of all project members. 

The Benefits of a Modern Project Portfolio Management Platform

As a strategic approach to managing and prioritizing projects in a systematic and effective manner, project portfolio management helps improve the efficiency (and success rate) of projects. By optimizing the allocation of resources across time, money, and personnel and mitigating risks, it ensures the alignment of projects with their overall business objectives. 

Intelligent project portfolio management software, like that offered by Planview, empowers organizations to seamlessly manage all their projects using one single platform. They can connect top-down/bottom-up planning and enable the hybrid execution of their projects while adapting to new trends and changes. Planview also enables organizations to prioritize projects, manage a surge in demand, and ensure teams deliver what matters most to the business.

1. Prioritize Efficiently

Planview PPM offers real-time visibility into projects, allowing PMO leaders to efficiently plan and prioritize tasks. They can establish a prioritization framework and specify prioritization drivers to deliver projects within budgets and targets. As new requirements or changes emerge, these leaders can quickly reprioritize and easily reallocate funding and resources – ensuring adherence to milestones and timelines.

2. Eliminate Bottlenecks

Planview’s built-in analytics capabilities analyze data in real-time and pinpoint bottlenecks in projects. Right from resource scarcity to lack of automation, using Planview, PMO leaders can identify and eliminate project roadblocks, delivery delays, and demand overload. They can also minimize inefficiencies stemming from manual processes and improve the turnaround time of projects. 

3. Improve Visibility

With Planview PPM, you can centralize all your project tasks in a single location and gain real-time visibility into projects and portfolios. You can get deep insight into the status of different projects, including resource gaps, dependencies, and bottlenecks as they emerge. You can also carry out self-service analytics to slice, dice, and drill-down data and turn it into actionable information. Further, you can share the reports of your choice with key stakeholders and collaborate on issues for quicker resolution. 

4. Optimize Costs

Planview’s PPM solutions deliver comprehensive insight into allocated, actual, and forecasted budgets, enabling teams to manage costs efficiently. By gaining a complete understanding of project investment, they can optimize workflows and resource utilization, minimize manual labor, and curtain unnecessary costs and efforts. 

5. Accelerate Project Completion

With Planview PPM, project managers can deliver more value by ensuring resource capacity supports committed plans. Through efficient prioritization, resource allocation, and continuous management, they can ensure projects are completed on time and comply with necessary standards and requirements. 

Summing Up

As organizations struggle to manage and complete projects on time, project portfolio management delivers much-needed control and efficiency. Through strategic alignment of projects with organizational goals and objectives and careful resource allocation, PPM tools help businesses contribute to their overall mission and vision. PPM also helps organizations assess and manage project risks across their portfolio and improve accountability and project success rate. 

If you are looking to drive the best results from your projects, explore the range of Planview products today! Connect with the enreap team of Planview experts to get the right guidance.