Microsoft Project Portfolio Management

In today’s competitive and changing markets, organizations are looking to maximize return on investment (ROI) and drive efficiencies to sustain the business and support future growth. Resources are arguably an organization’s most valuable asset and potentially its biggest expense. Proper management and optimal use of resources is key for an organization to realize its business strategy.

With intelligent resource management, an organization can develop and retain a world-class workforce. Microsoft Project Server provides a variety of tools to achieve this;

Resource Centre view provides a flexible interface for searching the enterprise resource pool to find the right people with availability to work on each project. Manage inventory of resources, working time & nonworking time.

Capacity planning capability compares resource demand to capacity.

Tools such as Resource plans, Project Plans, Levelling and Substitution help capture early requirements in the project life cycle, service skill demands and resolve resource over-allocations.

Team Planner tool in Project Professional helps project managers visually manage project-level resource assignments. Quickly identify and resolve over allocation, and easily substitute resources to overcome conflicts.

Access Tasks through Microsoft Outlook/Exchange Integration.

Today more than ever, organizations need accurate, up-to-date information to make informed business decisions. Many organizations use time reporting systems to capture work and nonworking time for payroll, invoicing, and other business purposes. Similarly, project managers need to efficiently capture and communicate status on project work to help gauge progress and to anticipate the effect on planned effort, cost, and timeframes. Organizations need a centralized and common approach to time reporting and task management.

Project Server provides the following capabilities;

An easy-to-use interface.

Single-source, to report working and nonworking time.

Able to capture all time; projects, operations, and administrative time.

Supports high use in short, recurring time reporting periods.

Offers flexible choices for how you and your organization work.

Integrates with other LOB systems.

The Microsoft PPM Solution provides a comprehensive resource management system to help organizations better manage their most important asset.

With an immense amount of data located in a variety of systems, one of the great challenges organizations face is how to collect, categorize, understand, and make decisions about project data.

Microsoft Project Server with SharePoint Business Intelligence (BI) takes that concept of reporting to the next level by providing visibility and helping organizations with decision support for proactive work management.

Helps Standardize data collection and performance metrics across the enterprise and streamlines status reporting through easy-to-use Web-based tools. Automating and standardizing data collection ensures the availability of up-to-date and accurate information to drive enterprise reporting and controls.

PMOs can define consistent KPIs using custom enterprise fields to measure the overall health of initiatives. Performance indicators can be displayed in the project schedule or in the configurable scorecard views for stakeholders.

Automates methods of time, task, and status reporting so team members can provide project managers with real-time progress data.

Powerful BI and Reporting Services to help organizations gain insight. Provides non-technical and technical resources with familiar tools to intuitively create reports and easily configure powerful dashboards.

Microsoft Project Server offers a unified view of all work in a central location. Its purpose is to quickly help organizations gain visibility into projects and operational activities; standardize and streamline data collection; enhance decision making; and subject initiatives to the appropriate governance controls throughout their life cycles.

Effectively communicate and realize business strategy.

Subject varying initiatives and work to the right level of controls.

Drive accountability and traceability.

Better identify and comply with regulatory requirements.

Unify disparate lines of business by using enterprise processes.

Drive governance acceptance and adoption through education and communication.

Refine governance processes to improve business results.

Project Server governance capabilities help PMOs quickly define and automate multiple workflows to manage different types of projects—for example, business projects, as opposed to IT projects— throughout project life cycles, and create event-driven workflows to control other activities: issue and risk management, change management, document approval, and so on.

In uncertain economic times, many executives are being asked to do more with less. Pressure to reduce or maintain budgets is driving sharper scrutiny of discretionary spending, and increases the importance of effectively identifying, selecting, and delivering project portfolios that best align with an organization’s business strategy and that maximize ROI.

Best-practice portfolio selection techniques provide a handshake between value optimization — that is, alignment with business priorities and maximizing return on investment (ROI) — and resource utilization. Together, they help recommend not only which projects to undertake, but to forecast when projects can be delivered.

Objectively define, communicate, and prioritize business strategy.

Score and assess competing requests from multiple dimensions.

Run what-if analysis optimization scenarios under various budgetary constraints.

Compare and contrast portfolios and gain insight through advanced analysis such as Efficient Frontier modeling.

Assess capacity and adjust project schedules to maximize resource utilization across the planning horizon.

Run and model headcount scenarios.