Focusing on PPM

An Ask the Expert feature with Stephen Sharp of PowerSteering Software

Project portfolio management promises to help customers juggle competing investment priorities, reduce IT failures and improve alignment between technology and their business.

“The most common mistake we see is organizations trying to roll out PPM starting with project and time tracking.”
-Stephen Sharp, Chairman and CEO of PowerSteering Software

PPM improves alignment by providing a means for prioritizing potential investments, to ensure the organization is working on the highest value activities that reflect corporate strategy. This proactively helps reduce failures, by weeding out unfeasible and non-strategic efforts before they consume resources. Quality of execution is greatly enhanced by resource and project management, which matches work with the people best suited to the task, and gives them the tools to be both efficient and effective. Underlying all of the above is the dimension of reporting and analytics, to measure progress, track financial benefits realization and take corrective action when required. Taken together and done well, PPM empowers organizations with governance, end-to-end visibility and control over the entire portfolio management process to more effectively implement strategy and accelerate business results.

Achieving desired outcomes

We believe a 'top-down' approach - initially focused on rationalizing the processes for investment prioritization and selection - delivers the biggest and quickest results. It also builds organizational momentum because of that success. The most common mistake we see is organizations trying to roll out PPM starting with project and time tracking. That is not only harder to do well, because it requires managing the work of lots of people at a very granular level, but is also more tactical than strategic in nature. Ensuring you are focused on the right things to begin with is of far more value than the wrong projects executed to perfection.

Challenges

A key challenge for all PPM software vendors is managing the balance between capability, complexity and cost. An end-to-end PPM system has to provide a lot of functionality, which puts it as risk of being a) expensive, b) difficult to deploy and support, and c) cumbersome for end users. We address this by delivering an on-demand, enterprise-capable product that is also highly configurable so it provides a customer with just the capabilities they need now, yet can easily adapt as requirements change. And as a SaaS application, it deploys quickly and requires lower upfront and ongoing costs than installed solutions.

Future adoption

We see an increased adoption of PPM as a business discipline across the entire enterprise. While PPM 'grew up' in specialized functional pockets like IT, it has expanded into areas like innovation, merger integration, business improvement, cost reduction and many other project-intensive initiatives that benefit from investment rationalization and improved execution. This has become even more important in the current economic downturn. This relates to the second direction we've witnessed: the increased adoption of SaaS PPM applications by organizations of all sizes. SaaS is at the point where it's a proven model embraced by large organizations. Compared to installed software, SaaS PPM solutions are typically lower cost and offer faster speed to value, at lower risk. That really resonates in this economic climate, and it should increase PPM adoption by organizations previously disenchanted by the cost and complexity of traditional PPM systems.

Stephen Sharp is Chairman and CEO of PowerSteering Software, a leading provider of on-demand enterprise project and portfolio management (PPM) solutions.

Case study
Boots, the largest drug store chain in the UK, had outsourced the bulk of its IT operations to three different vendors. While meant to free internal staff for more strategic work, they quickly realized it was a major challenge to keep track of what the outsourcers were working on. With PowerSteering, Boots can readily tell how the outsourcers are performing against SLAs and ultimately what business value those outsourcing relationships are delivering. The system was deployed in less than six weeks and has since scaled to over 800 users. Interestingly, Boots had initially selected an installed PPM solution, but turned to PowerSteering after it became obvious how complicated the roll-out of the other product would be.