Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 September 2006
Table of Contents Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 Overview ...............1 Gain Visibility and Control .......................................................... 2 Objectively Prioritize and Evaluate Competing Investments ............ 2 Optimize Budget and Align Investments with Business Strategy...... 3 Tightly Integrate with Office Project Server 2007 .......................... 3 Gain Visibility and Control ..............................................................
Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 Overview Microsoft® Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 is a top-down portfolio management solution that helps organizations to realize their potential by identifying, selecting, managing, and delivering portfolios that best align with their business strategy.
Figure 1: Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 Positioning & Messaging Statements Gain Visibility and Control Quickly gain visibility and control across your project, program, and application portfolios by automating governance processes, standardizing, and streamlining the collection of data, and tracking portfolio performance to maximize return on investment (ROI) and improve operational efficiencies.
scores to evaluate the project, program, and application portfolios from multiple dimensions. Define and prioritize business strategy and drive consensus among executives using the pair-wise comparison matrix. Derive prioritization scores such as strategic value, financial value, risk, architectural fit, and operational performance to objectively assess projects, programs, and applications. Generate charts to effectively evaluate potential investments within the portfolios.
Help ensure that customers and partners can quickly deploy world-class portfolio analytical techniques and tools within the EPM Solution. Maintain data integrity between the two environments through regular synchronization events. Enable portfolio analysts to link federated computers running Office Project Server 2007 to Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 and consolidate projects into an enterprise repository.
Gain Visibility and Control Gain visibility into your project, program, and application portfolios by using Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 to standardize and streamline the collection of data within one enterprise system of record. Automate the governance processes across the organization to subject each project to the appropriate governance controls throughout its entire life cycle.
Figure 2: Example of a configurable workflow in Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 Centralize and Streamline Portfolio Data Collection Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 enables you to quickly capture all project, program, and application investments in an enterprise repository, with easy-to-use customizable templates and flexible forms to help ensure you standardize and streamline the collection of essential data.
Project Request Form: Complete a project request form to capture the high-level information for each new request, such as business description, start and end dates, and sponsors. Business Case Templates (see Figure 3): Develop a detailed business case for each project request in accordance with the governance workflow including: General Project Information: Capture general project information. Cost Estimate: Capture detailed cost estimates.
Figure 3: Example of a detailed Business Case template in Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 Application Inventory Templates (see Figure 4): Define templates to capture the essential metrics necessary to gain visibility into your application portfolio. For example: General Application Information: Capture general attributes about the application. www.microsoft.
Cost Estimates: Capture application costs, and calculate annual cost of ownership (ACO) and total cost of ownership (TCO). Strategic Impact: Assess how each application supports your organization’s business strategy. Architectural Fit: Assess how each application supports your organization’s enterprise architecture standards and strategy. Business Process: Evaluate and keep a record of the business processes that each application supports.
Figure 4: Example of an application record in Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 www.microsoft.
Measure and Track Portfolio Performance With the Portfolio Dashboard module of Office Project Portfolio Server 2007, you can measure and track projects, programs, and applications throughout their life cycle, giving you the visibility to proactively identify potential issues, make decisions, and help ensure that your portfolios deliver maximum business value.
Status Reports: The snapshot reporting mechanism enables project, program, and application managers to generate periodic status reports to measure the overall health of each investment throughout their life cycle. Cost Management: Maintain financial controls by assessing budget versus actual for project cost. Resource Management: Evaluate staffing and resource utilization.
Application Portfolio Management (APM) Scenario: Sidney Higa, CIO of Wide World Importers, desperately needed to get more visibility into her application portfolio. More than 70 percent of the annual IT budget went to supporting existing applications across the organization, and Sidney needed a better understanding of how this expense contributed to the business.
Objectively Prioritize and Evaluate Competing Investments Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 includes proven techniques to help objectively prioritize your organization’s business strategy for the upcoming planning horizon, drive consensus between the key stakeholders, and evaluate and prioritize competing investments from multiple dimensions.
markets and segments‖ is moderately more important when compared to ―Improve Customer Satisfaction‖? Figure 6: Business driver pair-wise comparison matrix in Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 In Figure 7, we see the resulting consensus on relative business priorities for an organization. It is very important to note that these derived driver priorities are relative scorings and not simply ranked from number 1 to number 7. www.microsoft.
Figure 7: Derived relative priority of business drivers in Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 Prioritize Competing Investments from Multiple Dimensions With potentially hundreds of projects, programs, and applications competing for the same limited budget and resources, formulating common scoring criteria is essential to effectively prioritize and evaluate the competing investment proposals.
Project and Programs—Best practice prioritization scores include: Financial Value: Calculate a project’s financial value (ROI, net present value (NPV), internal rate of return (IRR)) based on the cost and benefit estimates captured in each business case. Strategic Value: Objectively derive a strategic value score for each project in Portfolio Optimizer based on the project’s impact on the business strategy (see Figures 8 and 9).
Server 2007 impact matrix shown in Figure 8, each project is evaluated against each business driver and rated on a 5-point scale (for example, ―no impact,‖ ―low impact,‖ ―moderate impact,‖ ―strong impact,‖ and ―extreme impact‖) depending on the project’s contribution to quantitative key performance indicators (KPIs) defined for each driver. This process derives a strategic value score for each project shown in Figure 9.
Business Importance: Objectively derive a business importance score for each application. Architectural Fit: Map each application against the organization’s architectural strategy and standards, and calculate an architectural fit score. Risk Assessment: Calculate an application’s risk using the Portfolio Builder risk questionnaire. Operational Performance: Automatically derive an operational performance score for each application based on a performance questionnaire in Portfolio Builder.
Figure 10: Example of an application to business process impact assessment in Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 Generate Charts to Map Potential Portfolio Investments Create charts and investment maps to visually evaluate the competing investments from multiple dimensions using the derived prioritization scores (for example, strategic, financial, risk, architectural fit, and performance).
Figure 11: An example of a bubble chart in Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 Prioritize and Evaluate Competing Investments—Scenarios Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Scenario: The CIO of Woodgrove Bank, Jay Jamison, receives an e-mail notification from Dana Birkby, the PMO director at Woodgrove, indicating that business cases for two more major projects have just been submitted: one for an online customer mortgage system, and another to roll out a wireless CRM solution to the sales field.
Jay arranges a Business Driver Prioritization workshop with the executive team and uses the pair-wise comparison matrix in Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 to objectively prioritize the business drivers and drive consensus between the CEO and other executive stakeholders. The driver for ―grow market share‖ is calculated to be 5.5 times more important than ―diversify product offering,‖ which likely favors the funding of the sales field CRM system over the new online customer mortgage system.
The charts vividly illustrate potential outliers, including identifying one specific ―thick client‖ ERP application having both high business importance and high risk. Interestingly, another ERP system used in their shipping operations business unit has a Web-based ―thin client‖ and is considered high in business importance and low in risk, and it ranks well in operational performance. The two applications have very high functional overlap as they support the same business processes.
Optimize Budget and Align Investments with Business Strategy Select the Portfolio Best Aligned with Strategic and Financial Goals When you are selecting your project or program portfolio for the upcoming planning horizon, Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 helps optimize budgets and recommend portfolios that best align with your organization’s business strategy.
Force in Compliance or Pet Projects: Portfolio Optimizer enables analysts to force in mandatory projects, or even ―pet‖ projects, overriding the optimization algorithm to ensure these projects are included in the resulting portfolio. This analysis technique enables you to rapidly assess the impact on the portfolio’s business value and effectively communicate the tradeoffs of including these mandated projects within the portfolio.
Use Advanced Analysis to Improve Portfolio Selection Use advanced portfolio analytical techniques to assess the portfolio’s alignment with the organization’s business strategy and identify and break the constraints prohibiting the portfolio from reaching the Efficient Frontier.
Figure 13: A chart indicating the original portfolio has fallen short of the Efficient Frontier in Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 Model Different Strategic Scenarios The Portfolio Optimizer enables executives to model changes to the organization’s business strategy and dynamically assess the impact on the existing project or program portfolios.
This technique helps you quickly see if you are over or under investing in each of the prioritized business drivers. For example, Figure 14 shows the results of the Business Alignment Assessment generated before optimizing the portfolio. Executives can quickly see that this organization is under investing in the higher-priority drivers and over investing in the lower-priority drivers, suggesting the portfolio spending is not aligned with the organization’s business strategy.
Figure 15: Business Alignment Analysis (after optimization): Relative driver priority versus proposed investment Finalize Portfolio Selection Using the Decision Dashboard The Portfolio Optimizer Decision Dashboard (see Figure 16) enables portfolio analysts to publish key metrics and recommended portfolios (such as optimization results) into an intuitive view, to provide executives with the data to support project and program funding decisions (such as Approve, Suspend, Cancel).
Figure 16: The Decision Dashboard in Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 www.microsoft.
Optimization and Alignment Scenario Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Scenario: Wendy Wheeler, vice president of business planning at Contoso Pharmaceuticals, is informed by the CFO that the board approved a $25 million budget for her group. Though an increase over last year’s budget, it is not enough to undertake every project request submitted. Using Office Project Portfolio Server 2007, Wendy opens a project portfolio and loads the Portfolio Optimizer.
Using the Portfolio Optimizer advanced portfolio analytics techniques, Wendy plots her portfolio of projects against the Efficient Frontier curve, which shows the best plan under varying cost thresholds. Wendy quickly determines that the forced-in projects were significantly affecting the portfolio’s overall strategic value, and revises her model.
Tightly Integrate with Office Project Server 2007 Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 integrates with Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 to provide organizations with an end-to-end project portfolio management solution. Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 is a key component of the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution, helping to ensure that executives gain visibility, insight, and control across their project, program, and application portfolios.
Figure 17: Microsoft EPM Solution architecture and example governance process Integration with Office Project Server 2007 Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 includes the Project Server Gateway, a bidirectional link with Office Project Server 2007. The gateway enables administrators to import, export, and synchronize phases and milestones, resource requirement data (such as budget, actual and forecast), resource availability data, and enterprise fields between the two environments.
manager). Named resource data is captured in Office Project Server 2007 and mapped to a primary resource type in Office Project Portfolio Server 2007. Schedule Data: Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 captures phase and milestone data. The data from the detailed tasks in Office Project Server 2007 is automatically aggregated to the appropriate phases in Office Project Portfolio Server 2007. Enterprise Fields: The administrator can map enterprise fields (attributes) between the two environments.
Exchange Data with Line-of-Business Applications Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 includes a flexible import module that enables analysts to manage the data exchange between general ledger systems and Office Project Portfolio Server 2007. Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 includes a read-only application programming interface (API) to help ensure that organizations and partners can develop connectors to third-party enterprise systems to improve interoperability. www.microsoft.
Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 Benefits The following describe the top 10 benefits of using Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 in your organization. #1 Automate and enforce governance processes. Define multiple workflows to subject each project to the appropriate governance controls throughout its life cycle—from proposal to post-implementation. #2 Employ best practice methods.
#6 Optimize budget and align selected investments with business strategy. Run optimization what-if scenarios to identify tradeoffs and select the optimal portfolio under varying budgetary and business constraints that best aligns with your organization’s business strategy. #7 Reach the Efficient Frontier. Take advantage of advanced portfolio analytical techniques—for example, insight analysis—to identify and break the constraints that can prohibit the portfolio from reaching the Efficient Frontier.
System Requirements Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 processor, RAM, and hard disk requirements are highly dependent on the number of services installed on the computer and the load on the server. Minimum requirements assume one server where all Office Project Portfolio Server components and supporting technologies (for example, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Windows Server System™) are installed.
Component Requirement Office Project Server 2007 is required to use the Project Server Gateway (the bi-directional link between Project Portfolio Server 2007 and Project Server 2007) Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (included in Microsoft Windows Server 2003) is required for Document Management Office Project Portfolio Web Access Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Web Access is a Web portal used to access the information stored in Microsoft Office Project Server 2007.
Additional Resources To learn more about Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 and the Microsoft EPM Solution, please refer to the following list of related links for additional resources and information. Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 Site http://www.microsoft.com/office/portfolioserver/ Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 Site http://www.microsoft.com/office/projectserver/ Business Value from the Microsoft EPM Solution http://www.microsoft.com/business/epm.
