Project portfolio management with Quam® and SharePoint

Project Portfolio Management is the continuous process of identifying, collecting, prioritizing, selecting, approving, controlling and monitoring all projects of a definable organization in order to initiate, maintain and complete at any time the mix of programs or projects that most effectively supports the organization's overall strategic goals, taking into account available resources.

As priorities, objectives and available resources change over time, portfolio management does not end, but is a permanent, cyclical and overarching management task.

Projektportfoliomanagement im neuen Quam Modul

Portfolio management therefore has the task of defining projects or assessing proposed projects to what extent they serve the overriding objectives of your organisation. In order to evaluate project proposals with the aim of finding and selecting the right projects, project portfolio management requires a set of essential characteristics that can be used as criteria for evaluating individual project proposals. On the basis of such an evaluation along various criteria, projects can be approved, postponed or rejected.

Which criteria these are can hardly be generalized permanently for each organization and all projects. There are many different approaches here; economic criteria can be evaluated (such as contributions to sales, EBIT, cash flow, etc.), strategic benefits (such as new or improved products, new markets or customer groups) or operational goals (more efficient processes, lower risks, lower error rates, etc.). We recommend a pragmatic approach that uses as few criteria as possible to achieve a clear demarcation between projects rather than a multitude of criteria that ensure that - depending on who evaluates the criteria - almost every project could "somehow" fit into a portfolio.

Identification, collection, prioritization, selection and release of projects

First of all, a tool that supports the process is helpful:

Collect project proposals
Evaluate, compare and prioritise project proposals according to various criteria
Select and approve project proposals

Benutzeroberflaeche um Projekte zu verwalten

Quam®'s multi-project management environment supports the lifecycle from idea through application to management of the individual project. Quam® provides a workflow that initially supports the formulation of project proposals and a portfolio overview that provides an overview of submitted project proposals. Before a project space can be created at all, these project proposals must be evaluated and approved.

The flexibility of the underlying SharePoint now makes it easy to add a wide range of other parameters, especially your own, to the data structure of project proposals as criteria in addition to the available parameters, and to create a wide variety of views of proposals taking these parameters into account. In this way, any parameters can be used for evaluation - in particular, these parameters can change over time. Criteria, which are decisive for the evaluation in this year, could be replaced in the following year by another set of criteria!

Flexibility thanks to familiar office environment

For ad-hoc evaluations, the Excel export via the portfolio overview can also be used to generate further evaluations, e.g. in the form of graphically prepared diagrams or pivot tables for decision support. Since a SharePoint list and the Excel file used can also be dynamically linked to each other on a permanent basis, such a preparation in Excel only has to be set up once. The Excel file can be reused whenever changes are made to the project list database by simply updating the source data. This combines the advantages of central data storage with the flexibility of Excel!

Projektcockpit mit Projekten unterschiedlicher Laufzeiten

Experience shows that the parameters that are useful for the evaluation of project proposals vary greatly from individual to individual. Here, the necessary budgets for each period can be a criterion or the resource consumption in terms of personnel capacities in a period or the sheer number of projects starting in a time slice, e.g. a quarter, the contribution to a certain company goal in the current period or even more complex point schemes or the like.

Here it is very helpful that SharePoint lists can be expanded to store this information without much effort in order to include these individual parameters, whether qualitative or quantitative. All that is required is basic knowledge of how lists work and how views are structured in SharePoint and how to manipulate the corresponding rights, lists and views.

Depending on the SharePoint edition used, the Excel evaluations mentioned above can even be directly and dynamically integrated into the pages as a web part (Excel Web Access Web Part), thus integrating practically any individual evaluation and decision-making aid as a dashboard, which a standard software naturally can hardly achieve.

Planning beyond the start of the project

The portfolio overview is continuously updated from the individual project areas even after the start of the approved projects and offers an overview of the essential parameters of current projects (budget, duration, quality, costs, resource consumption). Cross-project scheduling provides a consolidated overview of the entire portfolio over time. The portfolio managers who have approved the projects are also actively informed about the changes to key parameters (e.g. an approved end date for an entire project) and can actively control portfolio shifts - up to and including the suspension or stoppage of entire projects.

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