One of the key reasons that PPM tools are implemented is to allow management the ability to perform portfolio reviews anytime and from anywhere. Portfolio reviews allow organisations to ensure there is a balanced selection of opportunities in the portfolio, hold project offices accountable for delivery, provide support to project teams and deliver credible project portfolio reporting to the organisation.

Although the benefits of portfolio reviews are clear and widely accepted, the reality is that most organisations only start using their new PPM tool for portfolio reviews months or even years after it was implemented!

At Project Portfolio Office (PPO), we believe the best time to start using your PPM tool for portfolio reviews is 30 days after subscription. If your tool can’t allow for this, then you might have already made your first mistake.

But first, let’s discuss why it’s important…

Benefit 1: Visibility of what’s missing

One of the greatest advantages of implementing a PPM tool is the visibility it creates of the entire project portfolio. This allows organisations to see where their resources are being utilised, where their money is being spent, which projects are progressing, and which are lagging behind.

At PPO, we’ve seen it all – from projects in execution without schedules, active projects without benefits, approved projects with no budgets or without sponsors, and projects in execution with no scope of work document. Does any of this sound familiar?

It’s clear that missing data is one of the major reasons that portfolio reviews are delayed post PPM tool implementation. This is frequently a sign of a lack of governance and centralised project and portfolio reporting, issues that must be addressed in order to allow organisations to better govern and approve their projects, thus ensuring greater project success.

Unfortunately, project managers and project offices want to get all their data organised on the PPM tool before presenting it to management and fear that problems around a lack of data would be considered as a weakness or failure. This means that the challenge, more often than not, is that the data is not merely missing from the PPM tool, but missing altogether.

The visibility of the absent information is one of the first benefits you will receive from the implementation of your PPM tool.

Benefit 2: Visibility of poor / non-existent processes, standards or guidelines

Based on nearly 200 first portfolio reviews we’ve done for new clients, the PPO team has discovered that early portfolio reviews uncover many underlying business issues. These challenges need to be delved into, unravelled, defined and decisions need to be made on the way forward for each one.

Smoothing out these problems at a portfolio level at the outset of using a new tool will ensure a better understanding of processes, as well as the standardisation of terminology and acceptance of these standards. This in turn will lead to improved collaboration between departments, higher quality of data and better decision making abilities.

Examples of poor, non-existent processes, standards and guidelines include:

• differing opinions on what can be considered a project;
• a lack of definition of project types and / or classifications;
• no understanding of the project owner / project sponsor roles;
• an absence of benefit alignment to strategic objectives; and
• a shortage of standardisation of measurement of project costs.

Benefit 3: You have to know where you’ve been to know where you’re going

Few things are as demotivating when implementing a PPM tool as not seeing any improvement in the number of successfully completed projects.

The reality is that it takes time for the benefits of successfully completed projects to be seen. To gain traction, excitement and benefit during portfolio reviews, we make use of two key measures. The first is data completeness, which is a measure of whether all the necessary information required for the project, based on its type, stage and status, has been recorded. The second measure is data quality, which is to check the calibre of the recorded information for management to support their reviews.

By implementing an early portfolio review, organisations can quickly baseline the starting point of completeness and quality (as percentages) in order to track improvement over time. This can be done by uUsing the PPM tool will provide to get a clear indication of whether the issues discovered are being addressed. An improvement in the data quality and completeness will highlight improvements and will, over time, lead to greater project success.

We know it may be extremely daunting (or even painful) to dive straight into a portfolio review 30 days after implementing a PPM tool, but if the issues mentioned above are not exposed, they cannot be addressed and you may never have a portfolio review from your PPM tool. This means that you will miss the opportunity to ensure there is a balanced selection of opportunities in the portfolio, hold project offices accountable for delivery, support project teams and provide credible project portfolio reporting to the organisation.

So, are you still waiting for your first portfolio review? Would you like a PPM tool that will allow to have your first portfolio review in the next 30 days? If so, try a free 30-day trial of Project Portfolio Office (PPO) today at www.go2ppo.com/try.php.

PPO is an award winning online project portfolio management and collaboration application. PPO is simple, immediate, secure and affordable. PPO is flexible and can be configured to support any methodology.