We’ve talked a lot about the dangers of an underperforming PMO and then covered in more detail the characteristics of a strong PMO. But to make this happen, you not only need great information, such as best practices, but also technology – most commonly a PPM tool that is designed to create business value.

Preferably, you want a solution that encapsulates project management, program management and portfolio management to ensure you have an end to end solution.

Equally important is to use a system that enables both a top down strategic led approach and bottom-up execution led approach. A far better concept than buying individual solutions for each discipline.

Or so you may think!  As we discussed in our earlier post on the challenges and barriers to PPM adoption this should be the long term objective.  It will be a mammoth task to establish a standardized system for project, program and portfolio management all in one “big bang” deployment.  In fact, many of the failed implementations of competitive solutions which have adopted this approach, have resulted in customer success stories for KeyedIn Projects. 

So why do we advocate a top down strategy led approach?

After decades of working with organizations to help them achieve their desired outcomes, we believe we’ve made an important discovery.  By providing the PMO and executive team with a pragmatic, information focused solution that manages resources, costs, delivery and benefits; we are able to step into the chaos and quickly start to deliver clarity and visibility.  By focusing only on what the team needs to know to make decisions, we are able to implement and start to add value in a very short timeframe.

Planning is based around breaking down the project into elements – defining deliverables and ensuring all planning, measurement and control is focused on delivering results and not merely effort.  Effort doesn’t count – results do!

Of course we still have the tools, time and expense systems, project planning tools and resource allocation available – but we encourage our clients to use these as and when they need them, rather than making them the central point around which everything else revolves.

We believe that this approach guarantees successful deployment of a PPM solution in such a way that users are more likely to adopt the tools, and therefore drive additional value, without the “stick” associated with some competitive offerings.

As I mentioned before – KeyedIn Projects focuses on driving business results. That means that our system provides an executive view (or oversight) into the organization’s project or program portfolio – tying projects and programs to overall corporate objectives and strategies, but also giving leaders a way to monitor and measure accountabilities.

And while many competitive offerings have adjusted their existing applications for the web, we re-wrote our project management solutions for SaaS deployment. They are true, native and multi-tenant SaaS-based applications.  We took our decades of project management domain experience and combined it with the unique technical requirements of SaaS to ensure performance, usability and scalability.

We built a product for you that is easy to use and fast to implement – all at a fraction of the cost of on-premise systems.

And we’ve done so for small businesses with a handful of projects to global enterprises with thousands.  More importantly, we have done so by delivering functionality that makes it efficient and fast for everyone.

Back to the PPM Evaluation Process.

Rachel Hentges
PMO Influencer
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Rachel Hentges

Rachel Hentges is challenging PMO leaders to think differently about their role. Rachel is the author of key industry related surveys, reports, blogs and more that challenge the status quo of today’s PMOs.