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PPM: The Prescription for Successful IT Project Management

June 22, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Portfolio Management

PPM: The Prescription for Successful IT Project Management
By Alexander Hankewicz

Project portfolio management (PPM) is a process to obtain project management information of all resources, time, budget, and labor skills in order to align, manage, and review these elements–and to ensure deliverables are being met in terms of project milestones, in accordance with the work breakdown schedule.

In a time of economic and business uncertainty, PPM may be the prescription to obtain successful IT project management results. However, IT departments in many organizations are viewed by some in senior management circles as a huge money pit, a kind of necessary evil that generates little in terms of ongoing business development or growth.

In view of this type of prevailing logic, it’s no wonder that organizations take the reflex action to rapidly slash IT projects and spending. However without tools such as PPM to fully analyze the return on investments of IT projects, the organization could be faced with even greater financial risk by either cutting badly needed IT infrastructure improvements or by maintaining costly legacy applications that in some cases are expensive to support.

Removing the Guesswork from IT Spending

IT project managers have duties that can range in diverse areas from increasing storage capacity to rolling out a complex business application such as a new ERP system. The financial implications of these tasks require that the IT managers be aware what resources are available to complete a task at any given time. As business looks for ways to reduce operating expenditures during the current economic slowdown, delaying and reducing IT project spending may not be the best long-term approach.

A PPM solution equips an IT manager with the ability to measure an organization’s available resources (primarily, time, labor, and budgets) against pending projects, and align resources with business objectives, in order to fully measure return on investment (ROI) prior to launching a project. In using a PPM tool, an organization has the ability to position IT initiatives into a lexicon that key non-IT-management personnel can understand. Project spending can be viewed as way of analyzing from both the total cost of ownership (TCO) and ROI perspectives and understanding how these projects relate to overall business strategy initiatives.

Additional Benefits

PPM tools have been on the market for at least ten years, and economic slowdowns are not the only criteria to demonstrate PPM’s benefits. For example, the information collected from managing past projects can be used for estimating and planning future projects. If one can reduce subsequent project costs by as little as 5 percent spending on redundant processes and testing, then the cost savings can be significant. In some organizations, IT spending represents as much as 50 percent of the overall capital budget and it is with this mindset that PPM can respond to determining the value on how those investments will generate a return to support business objectives. One of the limiting factors of PPM, however, is that although it has provided business with a view to evaluate the value of IT projects, it can only focus on new project investment. If project spending represents 25 percent of an IT budget then this means 75 percent of an IT organization’s existing infrastructure may not be measured using this tool.

For more information on PPM and vendors that offer PPM solutions, please visit TEC’s Project Portfolio Management Evaluation Center (http://ppm.technologyevaluation.com/). You can also read white papers, vendor comparisons, and articles that discuss documented improvements organizations have made.

Reproduced with the expressed permission of Technology Evaluation Centers Inc. Copyright © 2009 Technology Evaluation Centers Inc.

Alexander Hankewicz is a Senior Business Analyst at Technical Evaluation Centers.
He has over fifteen years of I.T. Management Experience in the area of Supply Chain Management Systems, Business Process Re-Engineering, Vendor Management and Project Management for enterprise wide systems for a variety of Fortune 500 Companies Including H.P. Sony Ericsson, Nortel, and Perkins Elmer He has written numerous articles and can be reached at ahankewicz@tec-centers.com.

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