Project managers are responsible for planning, initiating, controlling, and executing the working process of a team in order to help team members achieve their goals efficiently and effectively, and to ensure the results positively affect the bottom line.
In order to successfully accomplish that, a majority of project managers typically use spreadsheets to help them organize and manage their projects more quickly and easily.
However, a project portfolio management (PPM) solution is definitely a much better choice, since it can significantly accelerate their managing process.
If you happen to be a project manager who still relies on the use of spreadsheets or some basic project management software, take a look at the ten reasons why every project manager needs project portfolio management, so that you can understand its importance and the impact it can have on your business.
1. The Effective Utilization of Resources
The most common reason why many project managers fail to deliver a successful project is related to resources. Namely, employees are expected to take on many assignments and dedicate enough time and effort to each in order for every project to be successful.
However, more often than not, it happens that the resources within an organization are assigned more tasks than they can handle, making it quite difficult for them to actually execute the assignments with flying colors.
This results not only in the partial completion of all the assignments but also in overworked and overwhelmed resources that can become disengaged and demotivated. It goes without saying that it also leads to project failure.
Project portfolio management can help project managers utilize resources effectively so that they are always working on high-priority tasks first. It can help project managers identify overworked resources and, thus, allocate them properly in order to ensure the success of every project.
2. Project Alignment with Business Goals
As a project manager, you focus on the proper execution and delivery of every project in order to successfully achieve business goals. However, it is not enough to merely focus on completing the project in front of you. You must think beyond completion and execute each and every task with the end goal of your business in mind.
You must make sure your project is aligned with your business goals since that will help you understand why its completion is actually important for the business. It will enable you to know exactly which direction to take in order to deliver your project successfully and contribute more value to the entire workload.
Projects aligned with business needs can result in benefits such as a positive impact on your time and effort, increased recognition and internal visibility, reduced risk of project cancellation, and more internal support during project execution.
A PPM solution can provide you with dashboards, portfolio organization, scoring, and prioritization in order to gain more insight into the importance of assigned projects and their alignment with business needs. Quantitative and qualitative metrics provided by PPM can help you measure business alignment and successfully and effectively deliver your projects, thus greatly increasing the impact on your bottom line.
3. PPM for Project Managers: Creating a Culture of Accountability
Project managers are always accountable for the delivery of projects and they are the ones responsible for project failures, even if it was completely out of their control. This is why it is important to create a culture of accountability within your business organization so that every team member can be accountable for their own commitments.
A PPM solution can enable you to accomplish that, as it can provide you with reports on the current allocation of your resources, as well as help you create project milestones. That way, each and every team member will understand their responsibilities and expectations, which will significantly increase the chances of success.
4. Accurate Project Forecasting
The ability to conduct accurate project forecasting can greatly affect your reputation as a project manager, not to mention that it can significantly impact the success of your projects. A PPM solution can provide you with the tools necessary to create accurate project forecasts and, thus, help you deliver better results.
PPM provides you with dashboards for data-driven decision making, gives you access to real-time data for more effective communication, provides you with tools for capacity and demand planning of resources, as well as tools for planning what-if scenarios, in order to be able to analyze the impact of potential project changes.
5. Higher Delivery Rates of On-Time and On-Budget Projects
Whenever you are working on a project, you are certainly striving toward delivering it on time and on budget. Unfortunately, sometimes certain factors that are out of your control, such as strategy shifts, resource changes, and customer fallouts, can impact your project delivery and you can provide no justification for why a particular project was not delivered successfully.
A PPM solution can provide such justifications through dashboards and reports that offer real-time data, thus helping the stakeholders gain a clear insight into the process of project execution and delivery.
Therefore, by implementing a PPM for Project Managers solution, you will significantly increase the delivery rates of on-time and on-budget projects.
6. Establishing Credibility
Project managers have one great challenge and that is accurately forecasting the resource requirements of the business organization months in advance. However, what happens many times is that political or cultural concerns prevent them from accurately communicating the data to their stakeholders.
Such a situation occurs when project managers do not want to be viewed as complaining for no reason or coming up with an excuse for not completing certain projects on time. It also happens many times that they do communicate their concerns but are not taken seriously because of the lack of data to support their claims.
Portfolio management solutions can provide you with a system of records, helping you effectively communicate the data so that your stakeholders are able to understand the information presented to them. That way, you can showcase future resource requirements and point to any potential risks in order to be able to resolve various issues before they even occur.
Such a leading role within the organization will help you establish credibility and become a trusted advisor whose decisions will be taken seriously.
7. PPM for Project Managers: Better Communication with All Stakeholders
Many project managers seem to report out only when everything is going well, thus providing inaccurate data, which can hurt the entire business organization, since wasted efforts and red flags are being covered up.
Gartner’s research found that 80% of business executives think project managers should provide accurate data in their reports, while 33% think that project managers are doing well as it is.
It is important to communicate with your stakeholders, as they can provide you with proper guidance and add value to your projects. You shouldn’t miss out on the opportunity to pick their brains when certain projects are not going well, so effective communication is the absolute key to success.
A PPM solution / PPM Tool can provide you with dashboards and configurable reports to effectively communicate with all the stakeholders within your organization and bridge the reporting gap, thus greatly impacting the performance of the organization.
8. Increasing Business Agility
A lot of project managers are not flexible enough and have trouble adapting to certain business changes. Implementing a PPM solution can help them assess and react quickly to any change within the organization so that they can become more agile.
PPM can help you communicate the impact of resource changes to your team and how the changes would affect them. It can provide you with accurate data to showcase how a particular resource is critical to the entire team, as well as provide you with an alternative to any proposed reallocation.
By providing you with measurable metrics, PPM can help you increase business agility and, thus, help you always keep moving forward towards your goals.
9. Learning to Prioritize
As a project manager, you are certainly given directives to follow that sometimes have no business sense whatsoever, but you proceed with the work anyway, because you don’t want to say “no” and come off as if you are defying your stakeholders.
However, you should be able to freely express your opinion if you think that certain directives will not contribute to the success of the projects. That way, you can show the entire organization how to prioritize and focus on important tasks.
For instance, if the requested work is not both urgent and important, if you don’t have enough resources to complete a project effectively and successfully, or if a particular resource is pulled without knowing the consequences, you should openly talk to your stakeholders and help them understand the outcomes.
A PPM for Project Managers solution can provide you with data to demonstrate the impact of approving projects of low value, as well as the impact of pulled resources and resource capacity shortfalls.
10. Improving Collaboration for Project Managers
Collaboration is incredibly important for every business organization, so it is crucial that you increase the levels of conversation and collaboration with each and every member of the organization.
PPM solutions provide such capabilities so, by implementing them, you can greatly improve collaboration and increase it beyond your immediate project team. You can collaborate across your organization with your managers and stakeholders, as well as lines of businesses, instead of focusing only on collaborating with the members of your project team with the goal of executing and completing projects.
Conclusion
Hopefully, these reasons helped you understand the importance and potential of PPM for Project Managers, so stop using outdated project management tools and raise the bar with PPM. It will certainly help you hit the bullseye with your every project and make your every effort pay off in the long run.
If you’d like to learn more about how project & portfolio management solutions can benefit your organization or project – please visit www.ppm.express, read more about it in our blog, or download one of our ROI white papers. But if you are eager to save your company’s budget, time, and effort starting today – just give us a call or leave your message and we will do our best to see your issues sorted out.