The 3 aims of project portfolio management

Project portfolio management aims to align strategy, operations and project execution. Companies of all sizes and in all sectors are accumulating projects, and need to maintain visibility over each of the three functional areas of a project: from feasibility studies to planning and monitoring, project management software is now essential for mastering all the aspects of project management. Your company's productivity and competitiveness depend on it.

See all software Project Portfolio Management (PPM)

Strategic management of projects to be launched

What do you want to achieve? What position can your project occupy in the market? How much will it cost to implement? Will it be profitable? What human and material resources do you need to mobilise? How long will it last? Do you have the capacity to structure, lead and coordinate the project? Do you have a repository, or feedback from experience within your company?

Think before you leap: that's the right attitude to adopt when managing a project. You need a tool that can integrate all your data to simulate the viability of your potential projects.

You can't do it all by hand - in fact, it's unthinkable! Out with the static Excel spreadsheet: opt for a solution that allows you to consider all the angles, to visualise all the perimeters, in order to define the right project or projects to launch, eliminating the risk of errors.

As contexts evolve over time, it's also a good idea to be able to capitalise on the experience you've gained in project portfolio management.

A major solution on the market stands out for the macroscopic vision it offers the project manager. Sciforma is project management software that automatically calculates and recalculates metrics based on integrated data: the solution provides a view that enables you to select the most appropriate projects in your portfolio in an intelligent and intelligible way.

These 6 key elements help you draw up the specifications for a viable project:

• Identify your ideas by structuring them;
• Customise your evaluation criteria;
• Launch your feasibility study accordingly;
• Estimate the capacity management required;
• Analyse the aspects of your investments;
• Simulate and compare your project portfolio.

Project planning or operational management

What can you implement internally? Who is going to do what? Should you outsource certain tasks? How should you distribute and allocate your budget? How can you manage time to meet deadlines? How do you calculate it? How can you anticipate unforeseen circumstances?

Here again, project management software is a great help in simulating schedules and adjusting them in just a few clicks, allocating tasks to each member of your team, exchanging and sharing documents, and centralising information. Your task management needs to run smoothly every day.

To ensure management at all levels, you need to define the responsibilities of each player: one decision-maker manages time spent, another validates milestones and different stages, for example.

Like any project management software worthy of the name, Sciforma lets you manage access rights and work as a team in collaborative mode. The project manager also has the ability to analyse risks upstream: where are they? What kind of risks?

The project manager can activate alerts to be notified by email. At the slightest deviation, the indicator "flashes" on his dashboard to warn him. He can react accordingly and adjust his project management.

These 8 parameters guide your project management:

• Project launch ;
• Task management;
• Managing your budget and costs;
• Managing your human resources;
• Managing your material resources;
• Risk management ;
• Change management;
• Document management.

See all software Project Portfolio Management (PPM)

Monitoring performance and expected productivity

What are you actually doing? Is the whole team "on track"? Is everything under control? Are you really sure? How can you be sure? Do you spend all your time on the phone with the whole team?

Obviously not. You use a dedicated dashboard to monitor the project as a whole, giving you precise indicators in real time so you know if you're running over time or over budget.

Of course, you rely on project management software that allows you to track the time spent per project, per task and per employee. And, of course, you receive an alert if you go over time or over budget.

On this point, Sciforma gives you greater visibility by providing consistent reporting, so you can make a finer-grained, more instantaneous analysis.

These 5 criteria determine your project monitoring:

• Calendar management
• Expense management ;
• Time recording and management;
• Demand management;
• Incident management.

Through 3 specific applications, project portfolio management encompasses multiple aspects. If you want to control your turnover from outsourced assignments or simply deploy a solution that allows you to subtly integrate all your internal processes and data, Sciforma is the obvious answer.