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What are some common ways to align portfolio management with strategy?

portfolioIn most organizations, the successful implementation of initiatives that are strategic in nature is very crucial. But a number of them neglects the importance of aligning portfolio management with strategy. According to a recent survey only 10 percent pay heed to aligning portfolio management with strategy.

Leadership, direction and guidance. Monitoring and reporting of key performance. ALIGNMNET TO STRATEGY and empowering teams to make day to day decisions is very crucial.

The most talked about and critical factors to align portfolio management with strategy are as follows.

3 C’s:

The important three c’s mainly culture, change management and communication. These three c’s are very crucial to company’s success. The triple threat of portfolio management is having these components work in harmony with the company’s strategy.

Culture can be understood as the habits which are embodied by an organization. It may also refer to personality. Culture can be described as something that may refer to something unseen that can be felt when walking around in an organization. According a survey, it has been cited that approx. 95% of the employs never pay attention to what’s the strategy, they just focus on the tasks individually, not the strategy or planning or the overall growth.

Although culture may be difficult to describe, it can be understood as instead of just letting our cultures evolve randomly we should focus on making and building cultures inside our organizations. And that can happen by socializing that culture through communication and change movement.

Governance:

When you want to practice good portfolio management with remarkably aligned strategy these core governance functions should always be kept in mind.

  1. Oversight
  2. Control
  3. Decision making
  4. Integrating
  5. Value
  6. Risk management
  7. PPPM maturity.
  8. Organizational structure.

 

 

Agility:

A broader umbrella for organizations culture and processes that are quick and adaptable.Quick here suggests how nimble they are in terms of speed of reacting. Whereas adaptable refers to being flexible or versatile. To take best advantages of internal of external changes one should it’s crucial to make a versatile and flexible organizations. The cause of strategical change is portfolio management.

How you align portfolio management with strategy?

This question is a challenge for project managers now a days. While building an organization to enable strategic initiative an organization should be defined by verticals of end to end processes.

Portfolio management is all aboutmaking decisions and then carrying out appropriate actions for its cause. Portfolio managers need to develop their business skills, most importantly the understanding the mechanisms and processes associated with governance and strategy planning.

Some of the key features are

Exploring the factors that influence strategy, mainly the culture of organization, capability of the organization and what does stakeholders expect from the firm.

Secondly, the strategic management or planning of the organization. Their choices at corporate level, decisions and how the actions are carried out to formulate those decisions into successful happenings

In the end, the process of portfolio execution is presented.

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Enterprise Function Support

valueIf you are new to project management, you surely need to know and understand this phenomena,the first thing is understanding enterprise function model. The enterprise functional model is generic one that can be applied to numerous organizations, in any industry. It can be of two ways, product driven and service driven. It represents the highest level functions in an enterprise.

Now a days with the changing needs, everyone is in need of enterprise function support, it is more demanded as hybrid project delivery approaches. The quantitative analysis as show that the hybrid project delivery is becoming rather common these days.

In order to add more value to one’s business the things like aligning business activities is coming into considerations by project management leads. The activities which are made top of the list are project delivery activities.

The considerations may include activities like speed at which project iterations are produced using agile method, complexities of business and technology, and the increasing expectations of customers. Though these considerations are not limited to the ones discussed in the article, there can be many others as well.

All of these enhances the importance of enterprise functions and their support such as portfolio management, release management and resource management etc. these and other enterprise delivery disciplines have been identified by a framework known as scale agile framework. This has been identified as the key to success in agile project delivery methods.

Coming back to enterprise function model and its key features, the material used in enterprise function model gives details about

  • Overview of functions used.
  • Functional responsibilities
  • Terminology

This model is generic and can be implemented to a wide range of industries and enterprises.

The approach used can be product driven or service driven.

A function can be understood as a group of knowledge related (subject area activities).

These activities need to have a purpose.

The framework used for enterprise function model has an impression of creating a sense of getting a long lost thing back specially when considering the innovations, but that’s not the case.

Rather this framework has helped in identifying the critical need to have these functions in place and engaging all types of deliveries in an enterprise.

Whether there are project managers or agile leads, both can increase the percentage of their project’s success by getting closely related and integrated with enterprise functions. Lacking of this will create troubles for enterprise and organizations will have a hard time in processes like schedule, resource, dependency, testing and implementation. Without having any robust enterprise function model in place, the enterprise may lead to lesser number of successful projects ultimately reducing the business value and profit share of organizations, which is indeed closely related to how organizations design their work infrastructure.

Talking about function and their model, it varies with the scope of the industry, whereas the thing that has been seen is all enterprises do have research and development function.

Consistency while following the right model and delivery is very important for businesses.

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When the Benefits of Your Recent Project Fades Away

benifitsThis is a thing which is not being paid due attention, for instance, let’s understand it with an example the project you were working on is complete you are busy taking your time out, enjoy success, celebrating with your stakeholders and other teammates. You are not following your recently completed project but somebody else surely is.

You even engage in some new assignment. But then the unexpected happen. Ad what it is?

The project you completed is not delivering results. At some point like the first six months or so of your project, you might even overhear what your project has been creating, a mess for others or let’s just say , not adding the right kind of value or expected value to the business of your customer or the organization you are working for. But once you find out the results are not as expected, next thing on your mind is how you need to carry out the amendments but firstly you get to know, what went wrong?

You start looking for clues and let us see, what can be the answers,

Your findings reveal that the related processes which are supporting your product are not aligned thus in return producing the loss. Which results in erosion of benefits or you can say with this the benefits of the product fade away.

Some of the factors are discussed below, which can be of great help for project managers, these factors will help you fill the loopholes when you work on your next project, so here you go.

  • Overtime
  • Regulatory fines
  • Overlooked tax deductions union disputes.

Discussing these in detail is important.

But first, understand is what your next step would be, focus on the assignment you are currently working on and ignore what’s been lacking behind or work on the solution involving your stakeholders, other project managers, and team in the process. The answer may differ according to the situation you are in, but one thing you need know, updating the project with lessons learned is important. And crucial to your success as a project manager, whether you are in the leadership role or not.

Regulatory fine:

The project processes do not provide the project report on time, regulatory reports to be precise. There is a lack of compliance, data requested by federal or local authorities is missing. This results in creating a lot of mess.

Overtime:

Lack of clarity about changes brought by your project and the changed processes caused the operational areas to work as usual. Producing the undesired results and the operational areas worked as usual, and the work had to be done again.

Union disputes:

The implementation of the new processes and project caused a change in union worker’s duties, which were caused due to not thinking about the minor aspects at hand, in the current contract, the new contract if done, would be on a larger scale with contemplating, each and every aspect.

Benefits Gain Profit Earning Income Hands Volunteer Concept
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Hi friends, have problem listing open end activities in primavera P6?

import-projectIf you want to list up open end activities in primavera v6 and you can’t find any option in p6. A simple way is exporting activity relation detail to excel and separate predecessor with only SS successor. But that is a too lengthy process because at times you don’t know what formulas to apply in excel for fast working.  In excel one predecessor can have more than one successor. So you have to select predecessors with fully SS relation successors only.  Download are free to use schedule viewer. We have a project health check section which provides various checks including ‘ACTIVITIES WITHOUT SUCCESSORS’

There is a checkbox under this section where you can include or exclude activities with SS successors only. You can then export the activities to excel.  Hope this would be of great help for you on your project. You can still contact our experts if you face any ambiguity on provided email addresses globally or contact the vendor who provided you with the software.

Here are some problems that you might face and we are giving a solution to it in advance so that our blogs could be of great help for you. If you use the above-mentioned schedule viewer, and if it proves to be good there might a problem arise that it shows activities without predecessors or successors. It might not show open end activities. Only showing milestone activities with no successors and predecessors, this might create a lot of confusion or ambiguity. The problem can be, your, not tagging the checkbox. Consider, start to logic as missing.

Done. The other problem can be how to export that list to excel. When you try to export the whole project is exporting. Well, that is a big issue but you need not worry. When all the project activities are exporting including those without successors but you just want to export the list , not the Gantt then what you need to do is after clicking export and the options box comes up , you ought to select ‘expand to level  1’ and uncheck or deselect the ‘ draw Gantt  option’.

Another problem that can arise is , what can be the formula or any other method for extracting  SS relation activities in excel. The solution is using the formula countif(). You could sum up the total number of successors for each activity ID and the subtract the number of SS successors.

Another problem can be with the registration code being invalid there can be multiple reasons for it but one that has been commonly witnessed is moving or copying the existing file if you have copied or moved the file, the new file would need it’s own registration key. For the key that has been generated to you , you must use it for the existing file and not for any of new, moved or copied a file.

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Cost Controls Redefined

Balancing the AccountsManage all types of projects with detailed cost control using separate cost control processes to track every dimension of project financials. View graphical cash flows.The Cost Sheet Dashboard provides rolled-up information from all project financials with drill-down into details.View and manage multi-year forecasts at the CSI division level or any other multi-level cost structure.Manage all contracts and change orders in detail. Ensure payment integrity.Leverage Transaction Visual Analysis to see all related cost transactions at a glance.Manage Project Schedule and Resources effectively and efficiently.

Advanced project cost management in primavera P6

Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management is the most powerful, robust and easy-to-use solution for globally prioritizing, planning, managing and executing projects, programs, and portfolios. Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management is an integrated project portfolio management (PPM) solution comprising role-specific functionality to satisfy each team member’s needs, responsibilities, and skills. It provides a single solution for managing projects of any size and adapts to various levels of complexity within a project. In addition, it intelligently scales to meet the needs of various roles, functions or skill levels in an organization and on a project team. This course builds on the student’s current knowledge, skills and application of project cost management using Primavera P6.

Learning Outcomes

  •     Ability to implement global change – modify projects using advanced functionality.
  •     Manage project cost effectively
  •     Apply advanced scheduling techniques.
  •     Implement earned value analysis.
  •     Use top-down budgeting.
  •     Assign codes.

Benefits

Assist project managers, cost control managers and cot controllers to use Primavera for integrating the cost with the project schedule.

  •     Apply the cost control techniques using Primavera including EVM.
  •     Calculate percent complete. Importing and exporting project data.
  •     Understand effective top-down/bottoms-up budgeting calculations.

Topics

Import and export data.

  •     Update baselines.
  •     Use Claim Digger.
  •     Apply duration types.
  •     Calculate percent complete.
  •     Use earned value analysis.
  •     Use top-down budgeting.
  •     Apply tracking layouts.

Auto computes layouts.

  •     Use top-down estimating.
  •     View reflection projects.
  •     Manage issues and risks.
  •     Create a project with Project Architect.
  •     Assign codes.
  •     Use global change.

Advanced scheduling.

Prerequisites

Participants should be working in a project management environment and understand how projects are planned and controlled, including knowledge of the following subjects:

P102 Project Management in Primavera using P6 V8.3.

Project management processes.

Experience in the use of PCs and an understanding of the operating system.

Audience

This course is targeted at those who are seeking to develop their skills and knowledge in the project budget and cost management.

  •     Project manager (generic)
  •     Project manager (industry specific)
  •     Cost Control Managers
  •     Project planners and schedulers
  •     Project control managers
  •     Project control engineers
  •     Project team members
  •     Project team leaders
  •     Cost Control Engineers
  •     Project coordinators
  •     Planning and scheduling engineers
  •     Quantity surveyors

Format

  • Face-to-face delivery of theory.
  • Facilitated discussions.
  • Facilitator demonstrates the functions of the software using different mediums, such as PowerPoint slides, live software module-by-module view on a screen.
  • Individual activities.
  • Structured Workshops

Our program design and delivery is based on adult learning principles and experiential learning techniques:

  • Individual and group activities
  • Short lecture sessions
  • Using templates
  • Practical and experiential
  • Written activities
  • Presentations
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Standardization and How it Effects a Project Manager’s Business?

project-managementThis article is written for the better understanding of how the standardizing of project management adds value to once business, in any industry, the growth is driven by standardizing project management across the organization.

Some key capabilities for standardization:

An enterprise must invest in standardizing, codifying and documentation of project management practices. It doesn’t mean one way of managing projects but a portfolio of consistent projects the enterprise.

Different business units and verticals may follow different methods or templates for following project management. Many variations are carried out in order to meet the needs of customers and specific markets.

For instance just think if standardizing is not done, it can reduce management’s ability to track and control price change requests and manage scope stuff, which may result in lower margins and increased project risks. Formalizing projects help scale your business. Fostering standardization of processed such as change management, scheduling, costing and project reporting is also very important.

Another major step in standardizing is consolidating and integrating project data. Project teams can also improve productivity and effectiveness.

Benefits of standardization are vast and far reaching, those organization that combined standardized project management processes with the right kind of technology get a significantly good result and successful projects. The outcomes include improved project team productivity, fewer project losses, the higher instance of projects that get completed on time, and are under their financial reachability.

Standardizing project management across an enterprise often encounters resistance. Because teams usually working as how they might be feeling but often you have to encounter adjustments one way or another. There is a positive side of creating consistent project management experience.

Standardization can have the following positive impact on a project manager’s life.

If you are a project manager, you can experience that your life may go from slow and steady to chaotic in a matter of seconds. , it is witnessed it would be helpful both for the leader and the teammates to work efficiently if you share a common way of working such as a framework or interface etc.

Considering an example, if the schedule of your project is built on the same tool as your teammate, it would be easier for you to grab what’s next on the to do list.

When hiring a new project manager, standardized project management, which is already implemented in the enterprise may help the new hiring in the understanding of how the work is done in that organization. Thus, drastically reducing the learning curve.

The cooperative continuous improvement is a very important thing and I have always been in the favor of improving. And the best way of doing this working along the other project managers, peers or pioneers both. This will help you in carrying out your tasks in more effective and standardized way. Thus making standardizing your tasks easier. Having someone to share your ideas and looking up to someone for some good experience is indeed a good strategy

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How Outsourcing Adds Value to Your Business?

outsourcingBefore pursuing to the understanding of adding value to your business, first, we need to understand what is outsourcing.  According to our very own Wikipedia, this term refers to a practice used by different companies in which they transfer a portion of their work to different external companies, this is a cost effective way but the condition is, it should be used properly. The external sources or service providers ought to be Specialists in their related fields.

Leaders choose out-sourcing to enhance business value propositions to stake-holders.

The question arises how and why the need arises, some of the processes are temporary and the company does not intend to hire a professional for doing that task.

However, before that, it is necessary that you should think and study about all the advantages and disadvantages of giving the resources and time of your business to a third party vendor, which is indeed very critical for your business.

As every other strategy related to business, there are many pros and cons to outsourcing as well. If not done right, it can bring down your business and create a lot of unrest.

Famous outsourcing business streams may include,

Pros of outsourcing

  • Swiftness and expertise
  • Concentrating on core process
  • Risk sharing
  • Reduced operational costs
  • Reduced recruitment costs

Cons of outsourcing:

The disadvantages include:

  • Risk of exposure of confidential data
  • Hidden costs
  • Lack of customer focus

How it adds value to your business:

When outsourcing, making a strategy which is effective in lowering the cost is very important.

Project managers can help make one.  Considering this three part structure,

  1. Assess the current state
  2. Consider the “to be” state
  3. Consider the governance require to sustain the future state

Project managers can avoid some common pitfalls in their outsourcing projects:

  1. Add a legal team, consisting of procurement and legal outsourcing experts which will help you in making the agreements.
  2. If you have any senior leaders around you, invite them to your project, in this way you can steer the initiative this will also help align it to the business mission.
  3. Gather some leadership support from your seniors; they might help you abstain from committing some serious blunders.

The things that count should be on finger tips of a project manager while handling a process with outsourcing aspects. Leaders can capitalize business value by keeping the right things in mind and if the outsourcing is done with a defined end.

Just to get an idea, consider that Assessments can be made on few things, such as

  1. Associate labor costs
  2. Labor expertise
  3. Value and non value support services
  4. Baseline of operational measures and service levels.

Project managers can help in many ways make an outsourcing strategies that trigger capitalization.

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Resources Allocation

iStock_000006849315XSmallTop ways that a project manager is likely to allocate resources for their projects, As discussed in earlier articles, the project managers need to be multi-tasking super heroes.

So what’s the best way of allocating your resources in best possible way?

It’s crucial and critical to stay on top of resource allocation. Ideally resource allocation should be inclined by these three principles,

  • Creating value for clients
  • Creating value for your agency
  • Creating value for employees

Now the most important question that arises, how does creating value relates to resources,

Motivated teams are a result of efficient resource practicing. Happy and motivated employees are vested in their work. That includes positivity towards their organization as well as clients.

First we should understand, what a resource is,

A resource can be identified as an economic factor or a productive factor, required to accomplish an activity.

Or as means to undertake an enterprise and achieve desired out comes.

Resources have several types.

They can be energy, entrepreneurship, information, expertise, management and time to name a few.

In project management, it includes executing project, managing people, technology, time, space, tools, equipment etc.

It also includes basic allocation decision, contingency mechanisms.

A very important and crucial technique used in resource allocation is resource leveling.

Which can be understood as a project management technique, use to examine unbalanced use of resources. Which mostly includes people and equipment.Another use is resolving over allocations and conflicts.

Resource training is also very major part, for many in the corporate world September is the start of the final push whether you are looking forward to finish the year or your project on a strong note or you ought to get new skills acquire for major roles, you need training resources.

Statistics show that you and your organization is spending significant time and money on training each year. This article will guide you in five different training resources, they might range from free to thousands of dollars.

The web today is filled with thousands of resources, a distinct problem is information overload, and you can start with these projects to stay informed on project management practices. It might help you in learning other skills.

Note:

If you are a self-employedproject management professional, copy blogger is a must read. It helps you build your internet presence.

Now we come to understanding resource allocation in a broader perspective;

Plans change all the time, one minute you are working on one project, next minute on another. The next thing you know your team has been switched to something else or the client might drastically adjusts the scope. In such an hour of panic or utter bewilderment. Rapid adjustments and re allocation of resources can be very time consuming and a big headache. Make your life easier and be at ease with your work by using latest tools e.g. “resource Guru” to streamline your re allocation process. Many companies still use legacy project management tools, that hasn’t kept up well with the time.

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Does Internet of Things(IoT) changing project management?

Internet of things refers to ever growing network of physical objects that contains an IP address that features for internet connectivity. The communication that occurs between these devices and systems is what enables.

IOT-project-managementThe way IOT is changing project management is not just because everything these days is internet enabled but because the software for project management we use will be more inter connected. And hiring project managers will help us in handling the projects whether it is research or development in a better way. And even if your projects are not IOT related today, they will be in the near future.

There are a number of people that think IOT is not related to construction or medicine. For example if you are digging the road or working on some product of home appliance or working in the clothing industry, how does the internet of things effects project management there.

You don’t think it is vital to all the industries, it is, for now IOT is in its infancy. It is a broad term but we can narrow it down to enhance our understanding they say basically it’s a networking thing that have something embedded. Which allows to gather and share data. Which is indeed the very point of progress these days. Let us take an example here. A retailer has a dress, he thinks of doing something new, different and innovative with this dress. Starting from health care or may be it can even alert to health care. All of this just based on one dress. Another point is that this dress can even alert the person from some dangers. Like they are not aware of a car coming up from behind them and they might get hit form that car.  It doesn’t basically includes wires hanging all around or big things coming out of the dress just some technical things embedded as a thread or whatever stuff the dress is made up of.

A number of people believes the internet to be old and soon to be replaced by something else. But internet of things is the next big thing because innovation and communication would always be the need of the hour. A need for progress, development, innovation and handling the projects with the most refine and adequate knowledge of things.

As mentioned in our previous articles, IOT will change the way we drive our business models, it might change the way we do business, automating things that are done manually today or in the near past. Same things will be revolutionized by the use of IOT. It will have positive effects enhancing professional efficiencies and operational efficiencies.

Let us take here an example of a 3D printer for a better understanding of IOT and how it relates to project managers, a project manager will go to the R&D folks. Bringing the system where it needed to be whether the system needs to communicate? The project manager will go back to the R&D asking them, have you think of this or have you think of that.

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What should be known while scheduling?

During project management a very important and basic step is program or task scheduling. Project managers give a very significant importance to this. This article proves to be of great help for project managers who focus on the importance of scheduling.

While scheduling there are a number of terms that should be known.

Few of them are listed below.

ACTIVITY:

While working towards a larger goal, a task or process to be accomplished in a set period of time is called activity.

Actual cost:

The actual or real amount paid for labors or materials.

Activity relationship:

An ordered link between two activities representing the order of execution.

Approved change request:

A prove that can be a document which approves changes made to the contract.

Approved and reviewed by all stakeholders

Backward pass (backward plan):

Also known as critical path calculation, calculates earliest dates for activities on the network. It works backwards to find the finish dates and latest starts.

Bar chart:

A chart on which bars are used to represent activities. Lined up on an X axis time scale, length of the bar represents time duration.

Base line:

A set of dates and cost frozen at the start of the project and is used in evaluating the performance.

Change estimate:

An estimate of a potential change that can be made to a project, which helps in determining the overall cost of the project. Main focus is in cost, resources and scheduling.

Change impact:

The effect of a change on the whole project

Committed cost

A payment that is not yet made but is committed by the stakeholders, it can b in the form of a purchase order or a contract which is not recoverable.

Cost break down structure:

Breaking down in to cost elements for cost control planning.

Critical activity

An activity being carried out on the critical path of the project

Critical path:

A sequence of network activities, which adds up to the longest over all duration. Which determines the shortest time to complete the project

Critical path analysis:

Analysis using the longest path of a project. This aims to identify whether the project can be completed on time and tasks are a barrier between the project and its timely completion. The mile stones are identified and eliminated.

Date constraint:

Mainly used in scheduling software tell us the starting and ending date of tasks and sub tasks in a project. Often used to delay activities or imposed date deadlines in a schedule.

Direct labor:

A labor which can be directly allocated to the output of a productive account. It can either be allocated to a cost Centre. Usually not directly related to output.

Double resource estimated duration:

If the assigned levels of resources have doubled, it successfully measures the length of the activity duration

These all tasks are a very important and essential part of scheduling. These primary key factors helps the project managers in scheduling the tasks for getting maximum progressive output from the project.

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