How a PPM Tool Can Streamline Your Operations

Even project-driven companies often struggle to align projects with their overarching business goals. Although executive leaders and business managers often strive to implement projects that maximize capital and enhance ROI, evaluating and prioritizing these projects can be difficult if you don’t have the right Project Portfolio Management (PPM) software or tools.

Having the right PPM tools can be a step ahead towards organizing your company processes and strategies, and most importantly, help your company efficiently manage their entire value stream. So, how exactly can a PPM be of benefit to your business? Read on to learn how a PPM software solution, like Clarity by Broadcom Software, can help accelerate your business success.

What is a Project Portfolio Management Tool?

To start with, let’s first discuss what a project portfolio management (PPM) tool actually is. Simply put, a PPM software solution or tool helps companies of all shapes and sizes realize which projects are most critical, attainable, and beneficial. Selecting, executing, and implementing projects that are most in line with a company’s workforce capacity and financial resources will ultimately help companies execute and reach their goals faster.  Essentially, a project portfolio management software solution can provide your organization with the necessary data to put all the pieces of multiple projects together as well as provide insight and clarity to assess how certain projects will impact the business and evaluate their long-term benefits.

PPM tools are not only essential in strengthening overall project management and company processes, they are also vital for a company’s strategic planning and decision-making process, helping companies to determine which portfolio of investments are worth undertaking and which are not driving a company’s objectives as intended.  

Why is a PPM Tool Important?

Reduces Overspending

Overspending on projects can be a key hindrance to project success. Many organizations are unable to have effective budgeting for projects. Different factors contributing to overspending on projects include faulty resource allocation, zero visibility into project data, poor project estimates, and improper scheduling. Leveraging a PPM software solution, such as Clarity by Broadcom, is key to cutting down such mistakes. With Clarity, you can create financial plans, view plans by cost type,  sort plans by roles, compare cost plans to actuals,  and more to ensure your investments stay on track.

Better Decision Making

A key element of using technology in business is the ability to use solid data in decision making. PPM tools facilitate smart business decisions through accurate data and visibility, which provides a strong foundation for strategic and tactical planning.

A PPM tool gives project management visibility ahead of the project, making it easier to anticipate outcomes and make appropriate decisions for each step forward. 

Boosts Collaboration

Many organizations still can not execute multiple projects simultaneously due to their continued use of traditional methods (i.e. excel sheets) and manual approaches to project planning and reporting. In such cases, such organizations use emails and other data transfer modes that cannot facilitate timely information sharing, time tracking, or the ability to view investments across a portfolio of initiatives from one single point.

On the contrary, software such as Clarity by Broadcom, increases a team’s collaboration and effeciency by facilitating real-time data transfer and reporting, enabling complete project visibility from a centralized dashboard as well as giving teams the ability to assign tasks with just one click and automate simple tasks when needed.

By leveraging this tool, many members of your project team can access and work on multiple projects, each with its individual pieces, and still coordinate all projects within a single interface. This not only enhances teamwork but also helps the team to hit the ground running and ensure projects stay on target.

Facilitate Successful Project Delivery

Most organizational project failure results from ineffective delivery. Ineffective delivery may involve unresolved project issues and costs running over budget. Project portfolio management software help companies reduce such problems. They allow you to plan projects based on available resources, objectives, workforce, and timeline as well as anticipate future needs.

Enhance Efficient Resource Allocation

Resource allocation is a key factor in managing a complex portfolio of initiatives. Unfortunately, traditional planning and resource allocation methods can cause the misutilization of essential resources due to limited portfolio visibility and not factoring in key elements, such as ROI. Such errors delay the achievement of an organization’s key objectives. 

However, PPM tools give you visibility into a project’s entire resource requirements, available resources, and the time needed to complete each project. This allows project managers to allocate more resources to projects of high value to the organization. 

Faster Project Turnaround

PPM tools streamline workflow in a project portfolio. The ability to automate repeatable processes allows teams to focus on other, more time-consuming and complex tasks. Automating these processes keeps the project running on track with minimal monitoring while increasing productivity. Shorter turnarounds are also key competitive advantages over your competitors. 

How Do I Choose a PPM Tool?

Selecting the best PPM tool for your organization can be tricky, but aligning your project to overall business goals is essential. Therefore, choosing a PPM tool aligned with the general functionality you need for your business is vital. Consider the following features when selecting an effective PPM tool.

Scalability

It’s obvious that you may not require every feature each software can offer — you only utilize the features which align with your business objectives. However, you can’t limit yourself from foreseeable future opportunities. So, you need to select a tool to facilitate organizational growth without causing maintenance overhead.

But, creating a balance between scalability and simplicity can be daunting. On the one hand, you don’t need an oversized tool that may be difficult to integrate into your project portfolio. On the other hand, you want to have your future business needs covered. To balance these elements, you will need to plan for the foreseeable future for your company. Planning for features that you foresee your organization will need in the next three years can help you select a PPM tool with the necessary features to meets the demands on your expanding company.

Multiple Deployment Options

An essential factor to the success of your project portfolio is integrating the selected project portfolio management tool into your existing technology stack. A PPM tool needs to seamlessly integrate with your organization’s applications and architecture and be easy to implement and deploy. Clarity, for instance, is available on-prem or in the cloud and can connect to a variety of BI software.

Project Blueprint

An effective PPM tool act as a blueprint for the project portfolio. Why overwhelm project teams with irrelevant information about the tasks they are working on? Too much unessential data can cloud visibility and inhibit efficient problem-solving. In addition, some tools may contain too many features that may not be necessary to your current projects. While such features can be used in future projects, it’s important to prioritize a tool that maximizes the execution and implementation of the current projects.  

The clarity PPM blueprinting feature provides project teams with specific information arranged in fields that each user needs to use. Here, members can easily drag and drop their documents and make changes to the data, which are automatically reflected on other members’ screens. 

User-Friendliness

The last thing you want for your company is a technology tool that can bring added complexities to users. Most PPM tools can meet many topics mentioned above, but when it comes to usability, not all tools have the ease of use many users can handle. As a project leader, you want to ensure your business objectives are attained and minimize the complexities a PPM tool can add to users’ efficiency. 

If the proposed project focuses on replacing the existing PPM tools, added complexities to the new tools may face resistance from project managers and team members. People like a tool they can work with better than the current one. However, if the proposed project involves replacing existing tools with others that enhance users’ efficiency, it can have a positive response, hence increased productivity. 

Choosing the Best PPM Tool to Accelerate Your Business Success

A&I Solutions can help you realize the maximum benefits of your project portfolio through the use of Clarity.  As a leading information technology, software, and IT service provider focused on the Broadcom portfolio of products, our goal is to enable our customers to leverage the benefits of technology to simplify their IT processes and enhance their success.

Contact A&I Solutions for all of your project portfolio management software needs and more!