Project portfolio management (PPM)

The key aims of Project Portfolio Management can be summarized as follows:

• Prioritize the right projects and programs: PPM can guide decision-makers to strategically prioritize, plan, and control enterprise portfolios. It also ensures the organization continues to increase productivity and on-time delivery – adding value, strengthening performance, and improving results.
• Eliminate surprises: formal portfolio project oversight provides managers and executives with a process to identify potential problems earlier in the project lifecycle, and the visibility to take corrective action before they impact financial results.
• Build contingencies into the overall portfolio: flexibility often exists within individual projects but, by integrating contingency planning across the entire portfolio of investments, organizations can have greater flexibility around how, where, and when they need to allocate resources, alongside the flexibility to adjust those resources in response to a crisis.
• Maintain response flexibility: with in-depth visibility into resource allocation, organizations can quickly respond to escalating emergencies by maneuvering resources from other activities, while calculating the impact this will have on the wider business.
• Do more with less : for organizations to systematically review project management processes while cutting out inefficiencies and automating those workflows and to ensure a consistent approach to all projects, programs, and portfolios while reducing costs.
• Ensure informed decisions and governance: by bringing together all project collaborators, data points, and processes in a single, integrated solution, a unified view of project, program, and portfolio status can be achieved within a framework of rigorous control and governance to ensure all projects consistently adhere to business objectives.
• Extend best practice enterprise-wide: organizations can continuously vet project management processes and capture best practices, providing efficiency as a result.
• Understand future resource needs : by aligning the right resources to the right projects at the right time, organizations can ensure individual resources are fully leveraged and requirements are clearly understood. A PPM software also allows an organization to establish complete project capacity.