Portfolio Management - Okapi Solutions

Portfolio Management Processes

The delivery of the right projects at the right time is critical to an organisation achieving and maintaining its competitive advantage.  However, many organisations struggle with identifying and allocating limited resources and assets.  The Project Portfolio Management (PPM) approach helps you select and manage an optimal portfolio of projects – one that maximises your organisation’s responsiveness, revenues and adaptability, while keeping projects aligned with strategic business goals and objectives.

The high-level process flow shown* identifies the three 'workstreams' that must be managed in parallel to ensure the benefits of a PPM approach can be achieved.  As with all business-led approaches, the starting point is to ensure the organisation's business vision, short and medium to longer-term strategies are identified, documented and communicated.  These are initial activities that any business will have undertaken, but the next steps - breaking the vision down into 'chunks' of work, creating and agreeing the required business cases, structuring the activities and resources into projects, prioritising those projects, removing or minimising resource conflicts, along with other activities - takes a great deal of effort, skilled project planning and experience.

All organisations are focused on their bottom line and employing full-time, in-house portfolio planning resources may not be the most efficient approach to achieving this objective as they are, justifiably, focused on day-to-day operations.  Greater cost and time efficiencies can be acheived by utilising skilled and knowledgeable consultants in specific areas, augmenting internal departmental staff and ensuring the portfolio planning and decision process commences and completes as quickly as possible.  Working together with our clients, we design and structure PPM process and techniques and enable our clients to establish a consistent method to select, prioritise and manage those projects that deliver maximum business value.

If you'd like to learn more, or even discuss how we can assist you with establishing the right procedures or managing the Portfolio Management process, please contact us.

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Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Tools

Also key to the success of Project Portfolio Management is the need to ensure visibility of the portfolio, that is, across all projects, budgets, milestones, resources, departments and stakeholders is maintained.  This may be accomplished via the implementation and use of a, or combination of more than one, PPM tool.  There are several tools in the market and whichever is chosen will depend on the type of organisation and its specific requirements.

The annual Gartner Magic Quadrant evaluates and ranks the major and upcoming vendors but, there are many other tools available which are worthy of investigation, potentially easier to implement and much more suitable to individual companies.

We have experience of multiple products and tools - either located on-premise or provided as a SaaS application - that assist in maintaining project and portfolio visibility.  Further, we can assist organisations with the specification, evaluation, selection and implementation of a PPM tool.

If you'd like to discuss how Okapi Solutions can assist you with your PPM tool project please contact us.