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PPM without Automation?
October 6, 2007 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Portfolio Management
PPM without Automation?
By Demian Entrekin
With or without automation, there’s plenty of process work that goes into setting up a Project Portfolio Management implementation. There are several key components required:
- End-to-end project life cycle
- Stage-gate project approval process
- Project methodologies
- Resource approval processes
The question then becomes, Can an organization pull off a PPM implementation without PPM software to support it? To provide a full and complete answer to that question, we would have to define what “pull off” implies and that would require more space that I’m prepared to use here. So for the moment, let’s just jump in and explore what I will call the “Manual Approach.”
To be sure, in the Manual Approach you can educate all stakeholders and team members on the bigger picture. You can define the swim-lane process for how projects get initiated, approved, planned, staffed, executed, etc. You can train all the players on how the various processes are supposed to be followed. You can define reporting standards and implement methodologies. And you can schedule the regular meetings that are required to move things along.
This work will help get the ball rolling. But the challenge of keeping the ball rolling in a Manual Approach becomes overwhelming. With a Manual Approach to PPM, key resources will spend hours and hours pulling together status reports. Managing the stage-gate approval process will become so onerous that it will not be followed. Creating a view of resource allocation will not accurately reflect what people are actually doing. All project reporting data is suspect. Earned value calculations, for example, are hard to trust in the Manual Approach.
In short, a Manual Approach to PPM will burden the leaders who are trying to implement the process and it will not scale. Furthermore, a Manual Approach will create so much overhead as to become a formidable barrier-to-success to the leadership team. There’s no doubt that process is critical to success, but to realize the full benefits of Project Portfolio Management, organizations need a single system to maintain standards, establish visibility, produce reports, provide metrics, and enforce process work flows.
Without PPM automation, you may end up feeling like you’re sweeping the ocean floor with a broom.
Demian is the CTO of Innotas. As founder and CEO, Entrekin oversaw marketing, product development, sales and services for the company. Today, he focuses on strategic product direction. Prior to Innotas, Entrekin co-founded Convoy Corporation and was Chief Architect of its initial products. In that role, Entrekin helped the company lead the middleware market with an annual growth rate of 670 percent and played an instrumental role in Convoy’s subsequent acquisition by New Era Networks in 1999. A recognized thought leader in Project Portfolio Management, Entrekin has published numerous papers on PPM and his blog (PPM Today) explores current issues related to successful PPM implementation. During his 18 year career, Demian has assumed leadership roles as a consultant and as an entrepreneur, delivering commercial and corporate database applications. Demian holds a B.A. in English from UCLA and an M.A. in English from San Francisco State University.
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