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 Situation
Solution
Benefits
SituationProject portfolio management (PPM) has become increasingly important as companies initiate and manage more projects. Unless companies have an effective process for monitoring the entire project portfolio, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to separate underperforming projects from high-reward investments. Existing and potential project roadblocks may be harder to detect. Spending may fall out of line with strategic business objectives. And overall productivity may be compromised.
SolutionThe goal of a project portfolio management solution is to offer an efficient approach to analyzing and managing a portfolio of complex, global, and time-constrained projects. With the 2007 Microsoft Office System, users can: Effectively prioritize and evaluate competing investments: | • | Use best practice techniques to automatically derive prioritization scores—such as strategic value, financial value, and risk. | | • | Develop investment maps to effectively evaluate the competing investments from multiple dimensions. |
Optimize budget and align selected investments with business strategy:
Employ sophisticated optimization algorithms and run what-if scenarios to identify tradeoffs and select the optimal portfolio under varying budgetary and business constraints that best aligns with your organization's business strategy.
Capture all investments within a central repository: | • | Consolidate business and IT investments within an enterprise repository to improve visibility, insight, and control. | | • | With flexible configuration forms administrators can quickly build and publish templates, standardizing and streamlining the collection of data for all portfolios. |
Measure and track portfolio performance: | • | Monitor the performance of each investment to help ensure you realize the forecasted benefits. | | • | Re-optimize the portfolio in accordance with your governance process to help maintain continuous alignment with your organization's business strategy. |
Automate and enforce governance processes:
Define multiple workflows to subject each project to the appropriate governance controls throughout its life cycle—from proposal to post-implementation.
Employ best practice methods:
Use templates such as a business driver library or risk assessments and embedded best practice methodologies to more effectively manage project, program, and application portfolios across the organization.
BenefitsBy adopting a Project Portfolio Management solution based on the Microsoft Office System, companies could realize the following benefits: | • | Resource Management: Right skills, right time; matching, optimizing, and balancing resources | | • | Financial Management: Estimating, cost resources, formal budget creation, budget versus actual costs, and integration to project accounting financial modules | | • | Time Capture: Report time against projects, capture detailed or high-level time, assign expenses to projects, automatically populate project accounting systems |
Case StudiesSee how other companies are using the Microsoft Office System for their project and portfolio management solutions: | • | Korean Airlines: "Our 2007 Microsoft Office system EPM deployment will give our executives easy access to the clear and concise information they need to manage our complete portfolio of projects." - Seong Yeon Park, Deputy Manager of Corporate Strategic Division, Korean Airlines. | | • | AXA Tech: "Project management is hugely important when you have 2,200 employees in 5 countries. The Microsoft Office EPM Solution will be a strategic tool for us in coordinating our global efforts." - Leon Billis, CEO, AXA Tech. |
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