Over the past two years the world economy has changed significantly. While there are strong signs of recovery, one trend that is likely to last is the requirement for greater transparency and accountability across an organisation. This is particularly true for complex corporate projects that cross the boundary between IT and the rest of the business.
In response, CEOs today are asking for a real-time, unified corporate view of all projects – not just those managed and funded by IT. The need to ensure that cross-organisational projects align with business requirements has become essential to containing costs while optimising resources and assets. Not surprisingly, we see both clients and prospects alike ask how they can best leverage a single, automated project and portfolio management (PPM) solution to manage both IT and non-IT projects.
After listening to our most successful clients, we’ve identified five key criteria to help organisations successfully implement and drive adoption of an enterprise PPM solution.
1. Secure and maintain executive management support
To gain and sustain project momentum, executives must support the automation of project and portfolio management processes that span multiple business units. Our experience demonstrates that the most successful organisations have leadership buy-in for a corporate investment management solution, like PPM, particularly from the CEO and other executive leaders. Conversely, organisations that do not have that support often struggle with implementations. As a result, these implementations falter or take longer time to deliver value.
To drive successful end user adoption, it is critical that everyone understands the benefits of working with the PPM system. Executive support and reliance on data from a PPM system quickly and clearly communicates the business value of the PPM system across the organisation. This helps other users, such as project managers and their teams, understand the value and importance of using a single system to regularly track, report and manage time and project status.
2. Gain visibility into the entire corporate project portfolio
Real-time visibility helps the project manager understand how project investments are aligned with corporate goals. Knowing which projects will add value to the business – and which will not – is a quick way to achieve rapid return on investment. The Gantry Group ROI Benchmark Study of HP PPM Center users demonstrated that in just one year, organisations that cancelled non-strategic projects saved nearly eight percent of their annual IT budget.
3. Implement and automate standard project methodologies
If an organisation is going to rely on data gathered by a PPM system, then it needs to ensure that the data is reliable and credible. Implementing standard project methodologies will provide much needed consistency to data capture, aggregation and reporting.
The project manager productivity can be greatly increased by implementing standard project management practices across the organisation. This eliminates the need to manually aggregate information from multiple, disparate sources. The Gantry Group 2008 ROI Benchmark Study of HP PPM Center users revealed that automating standard project and portfolio management practices decreased time spent generating status reports by more than 30% after just one year.
Standard project management methodologies also support implementation of best practice quality initiatives, such as Six Sigma and ITIL. Increasingly, we see our clients implement PPM to achieve and cost-effectively sustain these best practices.
4. Keep it simple
It cannot be overstated – don’t over engineer processes! Early wins are very important. If processes are over engineered or the organisation is pushed past its maturity level, users will abandon the project. It is best to stick to automating a process that will fix a known organisational pain point in as few steps as possible. Additionally, staying committed to process simplicity will make it easier to implement and adopt a PPM system.
The greater the adoption, the larger the return on investment. For example, The Gantry Group 2008 ROI Benchmark Study states that by automating project management processes, companies were able to avoid hiring new project managers to handle additional project load by doing more with the same number of project managers.
5. Measure and communicate (early and often)
It is very important to set benchmarks that will show business executives that the solution is delivering results. Success cannot be communicated enough in the early adoption stages.
It is best to start by determining a metric that needs to improve. A few examples include improved project timeliness or increased project manager productivity. Once the information related to that metrics is captured, it needs to be reported back to the management team at regular intervals.
Regular communications with the management team using real-time reports and dashboards is very important. This information can be used as the basis for decision-making. Doing so will help build credibility for the project, while keeping people informed. Discussions will be more focused on facts and less on emotion.
In summary, significant and long-standing economic turbulence has driven nearly every organisation to evaluate how it can cut costs but still remain competitive. Enterprise PPM solutions offer the opportunity to gain transparency and governance over all corporate projects – helping to align the project portfolio with corporate goals while decreasing costs and the risk of project failure.
