A project’s progress and change invisibility is the hidden enemy of any organization. How are your critical business processes performing? If you don’t know the answer to this question, it could be affecting your bottom line. Each time a project starts to experience delays or teams encounter difficulties, you could be losing money. And each time you don’t have enough data to make a decision on how to deal with those delays and difficulties, it increases the overall cost of ownership of your assets. That’s why visibility is crucial to all of your PPM efforts and gives your management team important insights into the portfolio health and performance of your projects.
Why is Portfolio Visibility Essential to a PMO?
A PMO is responsible for many moving pieces in the project portfolio management “battle plan” – defines strategy and guidelines for project and portfolio management, leads processes, and defines methodology. From initiating projects and setting objectives to monitoring progress, a PMO needs consistency to do their best. Many PMO don’t have real-time visibility into what their colleagues are doing and “how projects are doing”; it may also be equal to not having a PMO at all. This can result in a very time-consuming, manual tracking of projects and a lack of insight. The success or failure of a project directly impacts the success or failure of the portfolio, which influences the success of the enterprise greatly.
Gaining visibility across all projects establishes a solid PPM foundation for understanding what your organization could do and what’s missing from your PPM process. Visibility delivers the right combination of options for each step of your PPM journey. Gaining visibility ensures success in portfolio governance, allows to swiftly choose from best-practices, establishes a framework and set of guidelines to effectively create, control, and deliver all types of work, enhances accountability, and optimally aligns strategy. These processes should be continuously refined based on empirical data and lessons learned to improve, while assuring the quality of the products delivered.
This kind of clarity can help align strategic goals and objectives with various projects inside an enterprise. It also allows for optimization, highlighting places where improvement is needed. Without it, it’s extremely difficult for PMOs to do their jobs successfully. In this era where business is powered by software, being agile allows businesses to adjust their high-value product delivery to the continually-evolving business dynamics. What is required is a fully integrated, extensible project portfolio management solution that enables the enterprise to fully address the project and portfolio management challenges while enabling both developers and managers to effectively work in a truly agile manner.
Gaining visibility allows organizations to deliver strategic results at the speed of innovation and assure executives that every project is on the right track, with the right priorities to ensure business success. Visibility is critical to any company’s success because of the frequent change of business priorities and related processes. Visibility facilitates management in assessing the state of things in real time and subsequently speeds up the project’s completion. PMOs strive for collaboration and integration, and this can only be done with visibility in place. Portfolio visibility can help reduce risks by shedding light on any concerns before they become major issues.
Express comes in. PPM Express is an SaaS platform that empowers an organization with a full portfolio and project visibility. It happens via aggregation of project-related information across groups, portfolios, and systems. It is a lightweight and flexible tool that suits the immediate needs of teams and business entities starting with 20 people, to the extent of large companies of hundreds to thousands of employees.
“Transparency Coefficient”
The transparency factor can be divided into “external” and “internal.” The “external transparency coefficient” is the ratio of a real and declarative need for PPM results for regular partners, stakeholders, and clients. The “internal coefficient of transparency” is the difference between the real and declared need of the subject in the tools that provide transparency. These parameters must match. With a significant difference between the real and declarative need for transparency, a conflict of interest arises. The main reasons for the emergence of such a difference are that all parties have not established communication or do not have the necessary tools.
PPM Express provides enterprises with a comprehensive set of data that can be aggregated from a number of portfolio management tools. It connects to your data, providing unique levels of visibility across all the projects and portfolios of your enterprise. It also helps align the strategic objectives across the enterprise to create the strongest portfolio possible. With this kind of visibility in place, PMOs become invincible and bring exceptional efficiency and success to the enterprise. Portfolio visibility is essential for PMOs for the health of the portfolio. And with a modern PPM solution in place, the PMO is free to develop and evolve the portfolio with increased productivity and decreased inefficiency.