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The previous article on effective project portfolio management (PPM) tips provided tactical tips 1 through 5. The following five tactical tips provide additional recommendations to make your PPM implementation a more effective one.
Tactical Tip #6: Establish an organizational change management plan and involve the project managers in user acceptance testing. As PMs, we are familiar with change management plans; however, when IT projects are implemented on behalf of IT, organizations sometimes risk circumventing their own processes. After all, the project is just for IT and not an internal business customer. This dangerous line of reasoning can cause havoc in your PPM system implementation. PPM implementations need an effective change management and communication plan to be successful. Implementing these solutions has a direct impact on the project managers and other project team members executing projects in the portfolio. Project managers need to buy into using the solution and the PPM implementation manager needs to listen to the feedback from the PPM community. PPM implementations risk being viewed as unnecessary administrative overhead if the solution is implemented without significant PM involvements. If PMs are included in the change management plan, user acceptance testing and receive frequent communications on how the PPM solution can help their projects, they will be more receptive to the new change.
Tactical Tip #7: Configure the PPM tool to enforce required fields. In one PPM implementation, the project team decided not to customize the software for required fields specific to the company’s project management process. The end result was a PPM system with missing data. The company implemented a process band-aid by having the PMO contact each project manager to update the missing fields every month. This approach was a temporary bandage on a technical issue that could’ve been fixed with a software customization. If the PMO requires the “issue target resolution date” field populated, it should be a required field enforced by the system, not a process. There are benefits to the PMO as well since they don’t need the administrative follow-up to ensure the required fields are up to date in the PPM solution. IT teams are often reluctant to customize commercial packaged software since it affects testing and future upgrades. When the company upgrades the software, they should perform sufficient regression testing. Adding a few fields into the test case to ensure the required fields are indeed required is a low-level customization that doesn’t present a large threat to version upgrades.
Tactical Tip #8: Adopt schedule development standards first before PPM project schedule integration Implementing project schedule integration across the portfolio using tools like MS-Project Server or Clarity is often viewed as the administrative Holy Grail for project schedule management. The ability for the project team to update the project schedule with actual hours, work remaining and forecasted finish dates allows the project manager to review and accept the data instead of manually capturing project schedule updates. Before leaping to a central publishing solution, make sure the organization has standard templates and they are adopted by the project management organization. Every project may have different project details at the lower levels of the WBS, but common milestones and portfolio level tasks should be integrated in the project schedule template. A common example is gate review milestones. Every project should follow a common project management process, and using templates that provide common milestones ensures consistency across the portfolio. Even if the organization doesn’t adopt a Web-based project schedule repository, it can benefit through standard project schedule templates.
Tactical Tip #9: Before publishing the project schedule to the PPM solution, ensure the tasks have a descriptive WBS that relates to the summary level task. Project schedules are frequently developed using a work package hierarchy like Figure 1: Figure 1: Common Work Package Definition The problem with the naming convention is when the tasks are published to the PPM software and displayed by resource, the resource only sees the specific sub-task and not the high-level summary task. Figure 2: Common Work Package Definition Resource View If the resource is lucky, the PPM schedule view is displayed in a hierarchical view with the related summary task or a WBS ID is provided. However, it still is difficult to read and interpret which report the user was supposed to be designing or testing at a given time. A better example is to use descriptive work tasks that incorporate the work product in the task description as in Figure 3. Figure 3: Descriptive Work Packages The descriptive task at the lower level in the WBS takes a little more effort for the PM to enter the task; however, the descriptive task is communicated better when integrated with a PPM solution as in Figure 4. Figure 4: Descriptive Work Packages Resource View Even if you are not using a PPM solution, the resource usage view would be improved for the user since they will have descriptive tasks and don’t have to guess which task they are updating in the project schedule.
Tactical Tip #10: Support PPM implementation with process guides, job aides and PPM coaches. Providing PPM coaches and process guides to support the implementation supports the project managers using the solution. Project schedule integration may appear easy to do with one-click publishing. However, data integrity problems can arise. In one case, publishing to the repository multiple times created duplicate tasks rather than updating existing tasks. This mistake could’ve been avoided if supporting documentation and process experts were available to support the integration. Staffing the PMO with knowledgeable PPM coaches will aid project managers attempting to use the PPM solution. Providing process guides and instructions on the complex features of the solution also help adoption.
The past two articles focused on effective PPM implementations. If you have any additional tips, suggestions or hints for effective PPM implementations, drop me a line at
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. Your ideas and helpful tips could appear in the next article!
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