Business and IT alignment through effective Project & Program Portfolio Management

Editor's Notes

• #4: Automate manual activities… Achieve this via workflows Information is in one place Generate reports
• #8: By centralising project portfolio information in Telelogic FOCAL POINT you can escape from the chaos of coping with multiple different formats and media, by enabling business units to submit project requests, and project managers to submit project status information, through a simple, configurable web form. Data can also be imported from spreadsheets and automatically parsed from emails to the FOCAL POINT server. Using FOCAL POINT role-based views and filters you can easily organise information and produce overviews that enable you to quickly interrogate the database to provide up to date information on the status of new project requests and in-flight projects.
• #11: [While animation building] You probably have tens or hundred’s of feature requests from which to select the requirements to implement. On what criteria do you make those decisions? Organisations are usually looking to select those requirements that deliver the maximum value to their customers and the business in relation to the time and resources to implement them. But this isn't simple – there are also many influencing factors like competition, market research, requests from existing customers you want to keep happy and technology advances that you think you should take advantage of. With all these factors to consider its hard to see the ‘forest through the trees’ and select the right requirements. But what if you had a way to more easily select requirements according to customer or market value and visualise the results in a way that makes the best requirements stand out. What if you could easily see which requirements delivered the most value … (CLICK TO ANIMATE) in relation to the time and resources estimated to implement them. This simple visualisation would enable you to select the right things out of all the things you could do and on the basis that you will maximise value to your customers and to your organisation. And rather than, as is often the case, having a decision making process based on the customer or salesperson who is shouting loudest at the product manager, you have a more effective and structured basis on which decisions are made, and even if it doesn’t remove the shouting – at least you have a way to justify why the decision were made.
• #14: This is the basis for the decision-support. Unless you provide the prioritisations, Focal Point can’t help you make decisions. But the procedure is extremely straight-forward and simple to use. And it’s based exactly on what we humans are good at, relieveing us of all the things that we may not be so well equipped for. [click] First of all, we compare two alternatives at a time. That we can handle. In case we need detailed information about the alternatives, it’s all there for us. [click] We also stick to one criterion at the time, so we don’t mix up cost, risk, value for X and value for Y. We break these wicked problems down to a level where we can handle them. At any time you can of course select another criterion if you want to. [click] Focal Point employs relative comparisons. Unless there are actual figuers involved, we don’t want to introduce any false sense of precision. Besides, it’s usually a lot easier to get a consensus around where to put a dot on a scale without figures – otherwise you may end up in discussions like ”Does 4 really mean twice as valuable as 2?” (Cf. Is 90 degrees twice as hot as 45?) A lot of scales arent suitable for this type of task. [click] The number of comparisons is kept to an absolute minimum by a scientifically validated (published) algorithm.
• #20: With Telelogic FOCAL POINT you get real-time portfolio status overviews – you don’t need to create reports, you just simply go to the FOCAL POINT view that provides the information you want – its always up-to-date with the latest information in the repository. Automatically generated statistics enable you to see, for example, what % of the budget is being allocated to which types of project. Updated views can show you how your projects are performing against estimates and automatic email notifications can be sent to management if, for example, the actual cost of a project exceeds the estimated cost. Gannt charts provide an easy to interpret overview of projects and milestones and enable the PMO to monitor, and if required, level out peaks and troughs in resource utilisation. Each user role can have its own dashboard as the first view seen when logging in. For example a project manager might only see information pertaining to the projects they own, but a PMO director would see higher level information about the complete portfolio. Having an up to date view of what’s going on drastically reduces time spent on reporting and means that the PMO can be much more pro-active in taking action when projects are going off track.