ZDS

Kintana Information

Portfolio management by an IT department begins with the specification of project requirements and resources, projects usually being the most important component of IT spending.

Project management activities feed actual progress and resource usage data into the portfolio model.

The information agreggated in the portfolio data pool can be viewed as a super project management system, but the objectives of portfolio and project management are quite distinct.

The objective of portfolio management is to do the right thing : picking (or killing) projects to achieve a mix that represents the best use of the IT budget.

Project management is concerned with tracking specific investments of human resources : doing things right.

The traditional method of supporting project, and to a degree portfolio, management, is to use MS Project and Excel spreadsheets to periodically capture and aggregate resource and usage information.

Using workflow based systems the information can be captured as part of a continuous process. Collected in a centralized database, this information can be aggregated and viewed in real-time. The time-honored weekly time sheet may actually give way to a daily time sheet.

The information agreggated in the portfolio data pool has different values to the LOB managers, CIO/CTO, and Project managers who provide it with and extract information from it.

From the perspective of the LOB manager, portfolio management provides better insight into the projects that she has contracted out to IT. Implementing rules in the portfolio system to quantify business return provides both a more level playing field in competing for IT resources against more powerful users of IT resources, and better protection for key projects against arbitrary across the board budget cuts.

For CIO and CTO's portfolio management provides a overall view of the IT departments committments, resource allocation, and project status that is more current. The painful process of aligning IT effort with business objectives (selecting or killing projects) is supported by a more rational balancing of project value against resources.

Project managers are primary suppliers to the portfolio management but derive the least direct benefit. Getting them to buy into the system requires careful management. The first and critical thing is that the system should cut the amount of effort placed on them to generate weekly/monthly project status reports. The more helpful the system is in providing project templates and other support for setting up and maintaining project status the better.

Project managers will value the system to the extent that the system provides better feedback on current project state with less effort.

A better view into the state of related projects competing with them for resources will have equivalent value.

For individuals the system should mimimize data entry time by providing time sheets customized for the projects they have subscribed to, possibly with default values from the previous week.

A key point is to honestly capture real effort. Presenting a form that requires hours to total to the mythic 40 hours, when you have actually worked 68, immediately requires the provider to fabricate data, and nonsense aggregated is still nonsense.

Kintana™ and 'HP PPM (Project and Portfolio Management)'™ are trademarks of Hewlett Packard Corporation.