How Enterprise PPM Drives Performance Across Your Company

The Challenge: While nearly every organization has a strategy, very few have enterprise systems to execute that strategy and ensure their critical initiatives consistently deliver value.

For most organizations, strategy execution is driven by a loosely connected set of vision and mission statements, annual and capital budgets, and key performance indicators that may be scattered across the organization in spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations or the heads of key employees. Since successful execution depends on the talents of individual managers, executives have little ability to see the specific relationships between these individual efforts and the actual results they deliver to the enterprise.

The Answer: Project and portfolio management (PPM) is the execution engine that focuses organizations on the most important priorities, drives investment decisions, improves business results and implements strategy.

We have identified these four best practice areas that leading organizations are adopting to realize the full ROI potential of PPM and make it a core competency that drives performance enterprise-wide:

1. Avoiding PPM Failure with a "Just Right" Approach: The highway to PPM excellence is littered with efforts that went wrong because of lengthy implementations, functionality overkill, over-customization, insufficient support and disgruntled users.

2. Utilizing SaaS and On-Demand Tools for PPM Agility: News flash: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) isn't just for small companies. It's mature, enterprise-ready and the best way to provide teams with the flexibility and agility they need without having to reinvent the way they work.

3. Embracing a Top-Down PPM to Maximize Returns: Forget about trying to mature every aspect of your execution capabilities in the rigid, sequential, "bottom-up" manner that traditionalists may recommend. Instead, go where the money and value are: portfolio governance, initiative rationalization and leadership visibility.

4. Driving PPM Enterprise-Wide: Implementing strategy and impacting business results isn't limited to any one business unit or function. It transcends the organization and it's everybody's job, so why should PPM be relegated to just one area? PPM is moving out of IT and traveling across the company.