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Portfolio indicators or Key Performance Indicators are paramount in having a global view of the organization and its project performance. In this article, we review the most important ones.

KPI 1: Internal demand in number of days / workers

When your organization manages internal projects, whether it be change projects or new product development, the client and the project sponsor will from within the company. That is why, when poorly managed, internal project portfolios can become crazy races, causing disputes between the various promoters as they try to get ahead of each other in order to increment the team staff, acquire additional funding or the favour of the board of directors.

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Therefore, it is very important to be clear, at all times, about what the total internal demand of each area of the organization is generating for its different projects. It is true that you can rely on what is the largest project or what are the criteria to incur costs, but while the first is a partial indicator, the second does not allow you to see the development of the planned workload. The internal client demand indicator is the perfect KPI for this purpose. Thanks to this, you will know how many days of work each department or functional area of your company generates in the project teams. This information is not only valuable for the CIO and the CEO, but can also help you establish a maximum demand limit for days worked related to the organization (throughout time).

Of course, if there are transversal projects that involve several departments, it is essential to have a good system of project allocation, so that the information contained in the system is not distorted and the indicator is actually useful.

KPI 2: Employees by professional profile

If your organization relies on consultants for your projects, it is very possible that the available skills vary greatly over time. Today you could have four experts in programming JavaScript and none in four months. Hence, it is important to be clear at all times what the composition of your human resources by professional profiles are. The evolution of this indicator will facilitate the work of your PMO, the planning of resources as well as the identification of gaps or oversupply. In addition, graphics are very useful for the management team, as they easily communicate the structure of the personnel involved in projects.

KPI 3: Estimating effort

The previous indicator would do little to manage the portfolio if we could not anticipate the future needs of certain profiles. For this, it is essential to have a view of the estimated efforts in the coming months. Each project manager takes into account where the greatest effort is concentrated in for the projects for which he is responsible for, but very few have the necessary information to know if the "hot seasons" of each project coincide. From such a chart, portfolio managers would know when there is a greater risk of scarcity of certain skills and can plan accordingly. In the given example, the busiest months are June, September, July and April, respectively.

KPI 4: Budget by objectives

Within the economic indicators, one of the most interesting from the point of view of the portfolio is the one that indicates the aggregate investment that is being allocated to each one of the objectives of the organization. This indicator should serve as confirmation that the management of the project portfolio is following the strategic guidelines established by the highest management bodies. If a goal has the highest priority, it is logical that it is receiving the highest share of investment. Any contrary discrepancy must have sufficiently justified grounds. In the given example, if sales growth were more important to managers than increased operational efficiency, the portfolio should be revised to ensure that total investments in these areas correspond to the priorities. It is possible that the operational improvement currently has a very expensive project of change but of limited duration, after which completion the percentages would be re-adjusted.

KPI 5: Process budgeting

What business processes are absorbing more investment? In conjunction with the domestic demand indicator, this indicator leads to optimization, cost reduction and the elimination of redundancies and inefficiencies. Processes that are considered marginal and low value-added often consume resources for administrative and maintenance reasons that are difficult to reduce. However, it is crucial to know what the natural or average value of this indicator is and to ensure that it never rises above it. In the given image, assume that the average cost of storage for 'GlobalCorp360' is at 8%. If at any time it rises above 12% for no apparent reasons, this becomes alarming and yields more than enough evidence to submit the process to an audit.

KPI 6 and 7: Budget by component and current cost per component

The simplest indicator, which shows the budgets for each of the projects involved, remains the most useful for the portfolio manager. As with the calendar for an event manager, the director of a portfolio should always have before him a written reference of the budget of each project. The person responsible for a portfolio must demand the highest precision of the budgets and the costs incurred by each project. For the same reason, it is essential to have a solution that, like ITM Platform, updates the information immediately each time a new invoice is registered, without having to wait for periodic reports.

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ITM Platform is specifically designed to support multi-project organizations: our client base ranges from small consultants to large corporations, such as Grupo Lala, the first manufacturer of dairy products in Mexico, or Spire Healthcare, the second largest private healthcare provider in the United Kingdom.

Why do they choose us? They say that among all the tools that allow both planning and executing projects and managing portfolios, it is not easy to find solutions that are useful for both project managers and PMO directors at the same time in the same environment.

So when someone asks us if we can help them get their Project Management Office up and running, the answer comes as natural as the smile you give an old friend. In this article we discuss the main reasons why ITM Platform is a great ally to support the activities of a PMO.

1. Capture your organization

Any organization can reflect the structure of their teams in a very short time. Whether it's a functional organizational structure based on departments, a purely project-based structure, or a matrix-type intermediate structure, the first step for your organization to start managing your ITM Platform projects is to map which department, project or area of competence belongs to each member.

In fact, flexibility is achieved by combining two criteria:

Organizational units, comparable to traditional departments
Working groups, which allow cross-grouping. For example, you can create project teams that have a certain permanence character. These groups can also be used to bring experts together by competencies so that project and PMO managers can easily assign them to specialized tasks and groups.

Once you have reflected the departments and functional units, you can continue defining the details that will allow ITM Platform to control the costs and progress of your projects in real time:

Hourly rates: How much do your team members charge per hour? How much do external consultants charge? What is the overhead of a workgroup compared to a technician? By specifying the fees for each type of expert, ITM Platform allows you to reflect the actual costs of your projects with the desired level of detail.

2. Capture your processes

ITM Platform allows you to capture any methodology you are using in your organization for project management. Although the software is intended to capture the components, processes and groups recommended in standards such as PMBOK or Prince2, especially when it comes to project integration management, it is not necessary to strictly follow these manuals to properly manage the projects. The focus of the tool is to provide a flexible technological service that allows the capture of all relevant information and capture the process flows that exist in each organization.

3. Connect to your teams

ITM Platform empowers all project teams, from the highest level director to the young talented new arrivals.

Management: Those who are interested in seeing key metrics such as the degree of progress of the projects by each program, the level of risk exposure of the projects, or the composition of costs per manpower according to the provider can use the customizable scorecards and reports.
PMO portfolio managers, program managers and PMO directors

The people that connect the company's strategy to day-to-day project management are those that most directly benefit from the ITM Platform. Let us see some different aspects:

Shared resources

In situations with cross-cutting projects shared by experts and analysts from different functional areas or departments, it is common practice for one of the PMO director's main attributions to be to avoid conflicts when using shared resources: professionals in high demand due to them being very qualified and are irreplaceable in their specialty. Conflicts for shared resources are the cause of delay in 42% of large cross-sectional projects.To avoid such conflicts, ITM Platform allows you to immediately identify over-allocation of all resources in the organization.

Scenario projections

The ITM Platform methodological tools for defining business objectives and linking them to project execution scenarios are one of the aspects most valued by those who manage project programs.

Portfolio Evaluation

Aggregated project data allows you to carry out a continuous evaluation of your portfolio with the required periodicity. From the moment that your entire project team is using the same tool to plan and execute projects to carry out portfolio tracking, you can say goodbye to tedious periodic portfolio evaluations that stretch over months. It will be sufficient to extract data from ITM Platform to discuss with your team.

Project Managers

The possibility of combining predictive projects with agile methodologies allows different relationships to coexist between customers the development of products and results within a single unified portfolio based on shared financial management and resources.To top it off, project managers benefit from a user experience optimized for the integration of projects from menus that are always visible and easy to navigate.

Analysts and team members

Team members with no planning and control responsibilities should only enter the progress data of their tasks on the ITM Platform. For this, they have different auxiliary interfaces that save time and increase their productivity:

Mobile App on Android and MacOS. Report the time worked on a task. It is a fundamental support tool for those who are out and about or working remotely.
The ITM Platform teambot. The integration of ITM Platform with Slack is designed to aid personal productivity, as it allows each team member to track the tasks in which they are involved and report progress with simple commands such as “/itmplatform list tasks”
In addition, software development teams working with JIRA for issue management can connect these with their ITM Platform projects to manage their portfolio from their preferred environment.

4. Align project management and portfolio planning

Project management software can be divided into three broad sections: task managers and teams; project planners; and portfolio managers. Few tools can find the balance between these three areas. This is where ITM Platform stands out precisely because our obsession is to optimize the return of the projects from the first minute, with little to no barriers of entry.

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Download our comparison of MS Project versus ITM Platform

Industy standards that consolidate at certain historical moments are often more strongly influenced by the human tendency to conservatism than by the value they bring.

It may seem like a bold statement, but there is a plethora of literature on it. It will be clearer with an example: the QWERTY keyboard came from a salesman trick: agents who sold typewriters demonstrated the amazing ease of use by typing the word "typewriter" using only keys in the upper row of the keyboard.

However, many people still believe that the QWERTY keyboard was created after extensive studies on the relationships between English vocabulary letters and, therefore, is optimized for English speakers.

This is the case of MS Project, which appeared in the era of the personal computer and propelled the digital consolidation of project management methodologies in hundreds of thousands of organizations. Just as QWERTY has never been replaced by an alternative keyboard due to the resistance of the typographers (first) and the millions of users (after) who were already accustomed to a certain configuration, the continuity in using MS Project is not due to a rational comparison between alternatives evaluated on an equal footing, but the enormous power of continuity.

What both products have in common is the combinatorial use to generate a superior result to its parts. The integration of characters and components creates a coordinated meaning. In this situation, replacing all functions with different access modes in an alternative generates major issues in the transition.

But there is the difference between the two examples. While QWERTY has captured 100% of users, Microsoft Project only has 67% of the market share in project management, and 15% in portfolio management, according to Statista.

This rate will go down for one simple reason: MS Project is a product anchored in the past. There are many reasons to dismiss it in favor of a solution based on a contemporary digital paradigm, that is: collaborative, distributed and connected.

So, what are the main reasons for leaving behind MS Project?

The question could also be formulated in the opposite direction: What reason is there to continue using MS Project? It is fundamentally a desktop program and is for personal use? Is it that it’s comfortable? Or a false perception of the balance between advantages and disadvantages?

Let's review the motivations for replacing MS Project with a SaaS solution like ITM Platform:

MS Project is single user (ITM Platform is multi-user)

In MS Project, the working model is a project manager who creates the project plan, saves it to a file on a local hard drive ... and makes changes manually.

"In ITM Platform, your team can be an army permanently connected."

Overcoming the native limitations of MS Project as a desktop solution is very costly even for small teams. While ITM Platform is worth $ 1,000 USD per year to support teams of up to 7 people, that same amount can only serve 1.5 people with the most affordable version of MS Project online.

In addition, since MS Project does not have project approval mechanisms and state changes, anyone can make changes to .mpp files on a shared server without prior discussion, without approval flows or notifications to the parties involved.

On the contrary, ITM Platform works from a network model, so users do not work on files, but in environments: shared project ecosystems common to each organization. This model has important implications:

Users have differentiated access profiles, so they make modifications exclusively in their area of responsibility;
No action by other users goes unnoticed: the system generates notifications about changes made to projects and tasks, as well as allowing contextual communications.
In short, thanks to the ability of team members to report hours and progress, the distance between planning and execution is much shorter and more efficient than MS Project.

ITM Platform is designed for strategic planning - MS Project is not

MS Project focuses on improving its timeline; ITM Platform in alignment with business objectives

When considering this aspect, the history of project management as a discipline is of particular importance. With its expansion beyond the fields of engineering to assert itself as an organization management model, the demands on the priority aspects with which software must comply have changed.

MS Project has not responded to those needs, having preferred to concentrate on the complexity of planning aspects.

In contrast, ITM Platform allows you to introduce business objectives, study different scenarios and make decisions based on actual data for which projects to execute.

MS Project requires expensive installations - ITM Platform is cloud based

"ITM Platform is a tool for organizations; MS Project is software for the personal use of project managers."

This distinction has nuances: MS Project Server is the version for organizations that Microsoft offer. However, the process of moving from the personal to the organizational version can cost between $ 10,000 and $ 20,000. In addition, the on premises installation requires MS, SQL and Sharepoint servers as a starting point, as well as advanced technical expertise in those fields.

On the other hand, the deployment of ITM Platform in an organization is much more agile, since it does not require any type of installation (clarification: we offer on-premises installation for the organizations that demand it, but it is a marginal option among our customers). Including all parameterization and initial training, our customers begin to use ITM Platform in terms of between two days and two weeks.

Build a PMO in a week ... or in an eternity

"ITM Platform is an ideal tool to create a project management office."

For adoption facilities and portfolio management capabilities, ITM Platform is an ideal tool for organizations that already manage projects from the initiative of individual project managers and that are about to create a project management office. While MS Project Server requires a remarkable economic and human effort to simply deploy the tool, ITM Platform is a catalyst for centralized management, thanks to the ability to focus on the methodological aspects that really matter.

MS Project does not offer control over basic integration components

The management of basic components of project integration - such as costs and billing of projects - are done outside of MS Project, so anyone who only accesses the .mpp file has no visibility to these modifications.

On the other hand, ITM Platform's solution includes cost management, making it an excellent candidate for integrations with ERP systems. Another example of the holistic ITM Platform approach is risk.

MS Project has a closed philosophy - ITM Platform an open philosophy

In the era of online business productivity, where most players integrate solutions through API to achieve more ambitious automation flows, Microsoft maintains a closed philosophy that only allows to connect their own solutions with each other: Excel, Access, and so on. Even so, the possibilities to connect MS Project are deficient. It is impossible, for example, to receive custom notifications in Outlook when modifications are made to projects.

On the contrary, ITM Platform strives to coexist with the systems of all our clients: we don’t want to bring about traumatic changes.

Not only do we have a complete API for developers from any organization to connect their ERP, accounting or CRM systems; there are also integrations with JIRA and Slack, as well as an upcoming presence in Zapier.

MS Project is rigid - ITM Platform is flexible

According to Mark Corker, president of Seradex Web Services, software complexity and the repercussions of preprogrammed options to readjust dates in dependency tasks have the counterproductive result that 99% of MS Project projects have no reliable dates.

On the contrary, ITM Platform is based on a flexible software model: resilient adaptation goes from the technology to the user, and not the other way around. That's the reason why ITM Platform is enjoyed not just by project managers, but also by CFOs, CEOs, CIOs, IT Analysts, and a long etcetera.

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An area of knowledge is, according to PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge), "an identified area of project management defined by its knowledge requirements and described in terms of its processes, practices, initial data, results, tools and techniques that compose them. " In fact, all project management processes contained in the PMBOK are divided into 10 areas.

Start integrating the components of your projects with ITM Platform and keep control over activities, resources, costs, suppliers, customers, risks and much more.

In addition to the famous 6 phases of project management, the PMBOK contains 10 areas of knowledge:

Project integration
Project scope management
Project time management
Project cost management
Project quality management
Project Human Resource Management
Project Communication Management
Project Risk Management
Project Procurement Management
Project Stakeholder Management

In this article, we review the first area of knowledge: Project integration.

The management of PMBOK project integration brings together the processes and activities necessary for the project to exist beyond its parts. Without integration, the project is nothing more than a value proposition with a goal; Once the components are identified and defined to integrate them around the scope to be produced, the project is sufficiently defined to be accepted.

Integration, however, should not be confused with initiation: in fact, it is a beginner's mistake to integrate the components only when defining the project: integration must be maintained throughout the project life cycle, along with the six management processes in this area of knowledge.

The 4 keys to improvement in this area of knowledge are:

Gain acceptance

Create an attack plan

Be willing to make concessions and rectifications

Learn from mistakes and successes in project closure

Obtain acceptance

Integration management will be effective if we gain the support of all team members and, above all, stakeholders. Getting acceptance from the start of the project ensures that we have the support and funding to succeed. To do this, we start by creating a Project Plan and a Preliminary Reach Statement.

The Project Plan marks the beginning of the project and includes the necessary approvals and corrections. In addition, it authorizes the project manager to direct and organize the resources, which will be reflected in this letter, being well defined in their roles and responsibilities.

In the Preliminary Scope Statement we indicate the scope of the project, we define the reasons for undertaking this initiative, the objectives, the possible limitations, the possible solutions and identify the important stakeholders affected by this project. This document defines the project itself, as well as the strategy that must be followed for the change control process.

With these two documents we will be able to guarantee that the resources are coordinated and programmed in the form and time that are needed.

Create an attack plan

We begin by identifying the activities that will be necessary to effectively execute, manage and monitor the project. It will be necessary to have a project management software that allows for planning and supervision of the project at any time and from anywhere.

With a Gantt, we can visualize the project tasks and the assigned resources. In addition, we will get daily status updates, necessary to effectively manage the project.

As the project progresses, so that reporting and monitoring among all team members is more accurate and timely, we should emphasize that everyone updates the completion status of their tasks. Otherwise, its use is very easy and intuitive.

Be willing to make concessions

One of the biggest challenges that we will face in implementing the project is the management of people. The interests and opinions may be overlapping between managers of different departments and on multiple occasions they may ask to make changes in the planning of our project.

For us to be effective we must be willing to make concessions, although we may not always be able to give them what they ask of us. Above all is the project, which must meet the objectives and requirements set out in the Project Plan.

We must ensure that the team is doing its part of the project correctly and make sure that the work is completed according to the requirements in the Preliminary Reach Statement. We must monitor and control project work by measuring and balancing project progress; and carrying out corrective or preventative actions, to ensure compliance with all objectives.

It is important that we follow the established process for change control as defined in the Preliminary Reach Statement, and when a change request is made, make sure it goes through the appropriate channels before it becomes part of the plan.

Each change request must be evaluated individually and we would only implement validated and approved changes that will help us to achieve the project objectives.

Learning from mistakes and also successes

At the beginning of the project we clearly defined all the activities, and at the end of the project all we have to do is verify that the activities are all completed and that the final product or service meets the expectations of the client and the interested parties. It is desirable that we obtain written approval of the completion of the project.

Once the project is finished, it is about learning from any mistakes and successes. We organize a formal meeting with the team members and have a brainstorming session, listing one by one all the errors observed during the project. We also make a list of things that went well.

The weaknesses that we have encountered, the threats of the environment suffered, the strengths that we have detected as a team and the opportunities that we have known or did not take advantage of, everything learned in this experience, will serve us for the next project in which we will be more effective.

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One of the greatest challenges of a PMO is to ensure that the experiences generated within a project are extended to the rest of the organization and not lost when the project team dissolves. Even within each project, reaching a knowledge baseline explicitly shared by all key team members can be tricky.

This process of knowledge transfer is specific to project-based organizations and encounters different obstacles to those that characterize the transfer and application of knowledge in the field of R & D, for example.

Unfortunately, Project Management Offices can either leave the functions of knowledge transfer in the background or, when they recognize their importance, often do not take an in depth approa Preview ch. To address the problem in its complexity, we recommend starting from the recognition of the main obstacles that prevent the linear flow of knowledge.

According to B. H. Reich, there are 9 obstacles to knowledge transfer between projects:

1. Lessons Not Learned

The difficulties organizations have in managing their day-to-day projects, starts and ends with this issue. It is true that beyond the records of previous experiences and the guidelines for the project in question, a new and unrepeatable path is undertaken that is not possible to predict, but the lessons learned allow the team to compare and analyze the possible scenarios, as well as Learn from previous situations that made it difficult to achieve the desired results.

Unfortunately, the unrepeatable characteristic of the projects complicates the application of these lessons, which are often transferred through the personal experience of a team member. In order to scale the learning beyond the personal components, it is advisable to:

- work on document repositories that allow for identification of previous similarities

- share the most relevant lessons of projects with characteristics that are going to be repeated, either because they belong to the same line of business, have the same client, or develop in similar markets.

2. Selecting defective equipment

Even if you have a project team with all the necessary competences to deliver a result of sufficient quality, it is possible that there are competencies that are difficult to identify, especially with regards to the accumulated experience, the Know-how of the company and, in the case of projects abroad, the multicultural dimension. Added to this is the fact that whoever carries out the planning will never be an expert in all the technical aspects that must be covered, which may fail to match the requirements with the technical capacity of the team. In this case, even transfer of knowledge internally to the project can seriously fail.

3. Volatile team governance

On this occasion, this is a problem related to project governance. The loss of a member of the governance structure that has a direct bearing on resource orientation and corporate strategies (eg, executive sponsorship or project management) seriously compromises levels of knowledge and stability within company departments based on projects.

4. Lack of function recognition

Project governance is sustained both by management and project sponsors, who must receive the appropriate training to monitor with more discretion. The difficulty is to incorporate top management into the management of knowledge without taking away the authority and the urgency we perceive it in the danger of taking wrong directions because the sponsors may have some inaccuracy or wrong distinction in relation to the project.

5. Inadequate knowledge integration

Large-scale projects require the intertwining of expertise in a number of areas to solve complex problems, to innovate or to transform that knowledge into something greater, thanks to its correct coupling. As we commonly see, there is not a person with the exact key to fit that diverse knowledge appropriately, so there is a risk that the pieces of the puzzle will come together incorrectly, interfering with the result. Given this scenario, project management requires that the directors ensure that effective communication with and among their work teams is maintained, to achieve a successful integration of multifunctional knowledge.

6. Incomplete transfer of knowledge

Often, for the development of a complex and innovative project, that requires the implementation of resources or specialized technical support, project members must go to the suppliers of the organization or interact with a consultant. In such interactions, knowledge transfer should strive to be as transparent as possible, but fears and conflicts of interest between the project team and their knowledge provider often interfere with the process.

Most of the failures that undermine the completion of a project occur because of incomplete knowledge transfer between the team and external consultants or suppliers during design.

This is because the people from the consultancy have the aspiration to receive higher profits, for their intellectual property and recognition of value, so in the first instance they will refuse to sell their knowledge.

Consequently, during the transfer of knowledge, information that is often crucial for the success of the project is omitted and this is not usually discovered until it has failed, which encourages us to go back and evaluate the failure. It is therefore of paramount importance to ascertain the quality of the documentation received by the knowledge provider and to evaluate its quality so that the project manager can make the most appropriate decisions.

7. Loss of Team Members

The fact that a member of the team may leave due to planned or unforeseen circumstances is an intellectual leak of great value for the project, since the time that person has dedicated to the planning and / or design process involves the accumulation of knowledge and skills related to the project and that are irreplaceable. This knowledge disappears once the person leaves.

In order to protect ourselves from the knowledge gaps created by possible losses of team members who are key players for the project, preventive measures should be taken to document knowledge, in order to continue the project with new members. Of course, there will always be some knowledge that stays with the person, which will be irreplaceable.

8. Lack of a Role Awareness Map

As part of the project management, we highlight the creation of a knowledge map, grouped by role, to serve as a tool so that all members of the team (including the senior positions) can identify who knows what and what skills the team has for the project.

The knowledge map allows us to facilitate the efficient and effective approach to complex problems. Not having one translates into greater difficulties in finding the solution to a given conflict, since it involves the risk of assigning decision making to people whose knowledge is not the most suitable for the type of problem.

Theorists on the subject, such as Crowston and Kammerer, and Faraj and Sproull, have concluded that project teams with a knowledge map can be more effective, focusing mainly on the integration of knowledge.

9. Loss between phases

During the operational processes of the project, the structure and integration of the equipment varies with the passage from one phase to another, so we run the risk of losing valuable knowledge in those changes in composition or transmitting knowledge inadequately. For these cases, traditionally, one uses the techniques of written or graphic documentation, to record the knowledge of a previous phase, useful for the operations of the next phase.

However, in the written record, we often overlook data of great relevance for the optimal development of the new operational phase, such as the rationale of the design or its options. In turn, the interpretations that each team gives to documentation may be altered by the subjective criteria of its members, which leads to errors or delays, while trying to understand why certain decisions were made in the previous phase.

Therefore, as a method of knowledge management within the project management, we recommend integrating multimedia records in the documentation that complementcrucial aspects of the decision making of a phase, as well as manage mining data and networks of experts, so that it is as specific and clear as possible.