By Jason Ames, PMP

Concluding our discussion from the prior blog articles, we now address success factors 4 and 5.

Finding the Bottlenecks

One of the significant advantages of having an Enterprise Project Portfolio Management system is the ability to see how each project affects the rest of the projects. Project managers have been trained to look at the critical path of their tasks but do they know if other tasks are impacting their performance?

Ask yourself these questions:

• Do team members work on multiple projects?
• Does your project share a facility with other projects?
• Is your project dependent on another project’s output?

If the answer is yes, then looking at your project schedule is not enough. Your schedule must be linked to the other ongoing projects.

The most common issue is when small teams of critical resources are assigned to numerous projects. For example, imagine a hospital with only one doctor to see every patient: how many patients can s/he see before the backlog shuts down the entire system? This problem exists for many organizations, where the same resources are continually assigned to projects with little regard for their existing workload. The opposite can also hold where some resources are constantly underused. Once the bottlenecks have been discovered, it is essential to ensure that assigned resources have everything they need to complete the most critical projects as soon as possible.

Constant Learning

Your investment in any business system does not stop after you have rolled out the approach to the user community. They need to constantly learn to get the most out of your investment and your people. In fact, in the Project Management Institution (PMI) “Organizational Project Management Maturity Model” (OPM³), the most mature organizations are the ones that stress continual improvement. Therefore, organizations need to commit to education and constant learning. Continuous learning can come in many flavors: from formal training classes and brown bag lunch sessions to regular emails to users containing tips and tricks to best practices.

Conclusion

Don’t trust your enterprise to a bunch of individual spreadsheets; don’t implement an EPPM and perform scheduling with it. Your organization must select, execute, and successfully perform the right projects. It would be best if you terminated projects that don’t support your strategic goals and those that drain resources from critical projects. Maximize your organizational output by implementing EPPM, integrating it with other key business systems, and successfully executing the right projects.