“We chose Daptiv because feature-for-feature it met our requirements better than any other offering. Daptiv has been incredibly reliable for us, and it has to be since it’s the backbone of our PMO.”
— Colin Erven, Manager of Project Governance and Team Support, 
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Without an efficient process to capture, analyze and make decisions on a project portfolio, it’s nearly impossible to run an effective project management office (PMO). The situation can be made worse by uncoordinated spreadsheets and project plans, or an ineffective PPM tool, and lead to common challenges, including:
- Lack of strategic alignment. Without a well-defined project intake process, there is no way for the business to effectively prioritize new investments with business priorities.
- Project overload. If there are too few resources available to meet project demand, an organization will likely be overloaded without a way to make smart tradeoffs.
- Lack of visibility. Disparate project plans, issue lists, risk logs, status updates and project documents make it time consuming and difficult to get visibility into a project portfolio.
- Resource bottlenecks. An immature resource management process can lead to resource contention, underutilized resources and late project delivery.
SOLUTION
Daptiv’s PMO solution enables Project Management Offices to implement a structured approach to managing project portfolios. Pre-built scoring models for analyzing project requests help you control project intake based on business priorities. The PMO solution enables a ‘single source of truth’ for project portfolios and automates the capture of project data to minimize errors.
Daptiv provides powerful Work Intelligence™ functionality, so providing regular dashboards and reporting is easy. In addition, because Daptiv is widely adopted within project teams, the portfolio data is accurate and up-to-date.
We understand that improving organizational PPM maturity is often a multi-year process. Daptiv offers best-practice solution templates to get you started. Over time you can customize and extend Daptiv as your needs evolve. For example, once you’ve mastered the project intake process, your organization can use Daptiv to improve financial management and controls.
CAPABILITIES
Daptiv for the PMO provides the following capabilities:
Demand Management
The first step in managing IT demand is to aggregate and understand all incoming work, including projects, enhancements and non-project work. Daptiv provides a best-practice project scoring model to allow quick evaluation without suffering “paralysis by analysis”. Portfolio optimization tools and scoring bubble charts allow the PMO to prioritize and shape the incoming demand in alignment with corporate goals and objectives.
Capacity Planning
A prioritized list of IT investments needs to be mapped to the available resource capacity to prevent resource contention. Non-project demand for ongoing operations are planned using workspaces for pre-allocation and time tracking, revealing true availability for project work. Capacity planning reports quickly identify capacity overloads, while the capacity planner application provides what-if analysis, allowing PMO’s to answer “when”, and not just “if” a project can start.
Resource Management
Daptiv starts with capacity planning, but then provides allocation tools, including Team Manager and Resource Allocation reports, to help resource managers with allocation decisions. Project managers then assign these resources to individual tasks, and users log their time using Daptiv’s web-based timesheets. Daptiv provides views and reports to roll up allocated, task, and actual time to provide visibility and decision support to all levels of management.
Portfolio Management: Monitoring
Daptiv understands that projects can roll up into multiple portfolios and Daptiv for the PMO has pre-configured attributes for three of the most common: Investment Class, Business Unit, and Strategic Alignment. Dashboards show traditional project portfolio status, as well as reports to show how all work—including ongoing operations—breaks out by Business Unit and Investment Class. The Project Landing Map highlights when projects will roll-out, whether they have one go-live event or multiple.
Portfolio Management: Value Management
What’s the portfolio’s value to the enterprise? Daptiv for the PMO provides executives with insight to this question using several elements. Benefits scoring and tracking shows the value of projects—including non-financial benefits—on an apples-to-apples basis. The Benefits Realization application provides for input of before and after measurements based on criteria you specify. And an innovative dashboard uses the benefits scoring system to reveal benefits being released each quarter as projects go live.
Project and Program Management
Manage project execution for multiple project methodologies, including waterfall, iterative, business process improvement, Agile, Six Sigma and more. Roll all project types up into unified portfolios. Daptiv’s project templates allow customers to provide pre-defined tasks, documents, and artifacts for each methodology—giving the project manager everything they need to get started.
Financials Management
Material expenses and labor costs need to be budgeted, tracked, and adjusted during the life of a project. Daptiv tracks planned and actual expenses or a more sophisticated three-tiered model can be used for tracking capital orders, purchase orders, and invoices. Labor cost estimates and actual costs are calculated using Daptiv’s built-in labor rate functionality and combined with material expenses for a complete picture of project finances.
Download the Essential Buyer’s Guide for PPM to learn:
- How to build a business justification and ROI for a PPM tool
- How to assess your organization’s PPM maturity level
- Industry trends shaping the future of PPM solutions
- How to build a vendor comparison matrix to assess vendors
