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Project Portfolio Management

Watch this video below for tips on managing portfolios of projects.  A project portfolio contains one or more projects with similar characteristics.  For instance, you might put all your consulting projects into one portfolio.  Or, you might put marketing or sales together.  Or, there may be completely different lines along which your projects naturally fall.  Those belong in portfolios.

Once you have placed projects into a portfolio, you can do special things with them.  Try running reports for all projects in a portfolio, or comparing one portfolio against another.  You can see project revenue for a single selected portfolio.  Or you could filter the resource allocation chart for a selected portfolio.

Consider how you might group your projects for effective portfolio reporting.

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Project Costing and Billing Rates

Unique costs and billing rates can be set for every project.  Even if you have 500 different projects each can have a different rate.

There are actually five different project costing models in Standard Time®.

  1. User rates
  2. Category rates
  3. Project rates
  4. Role rates
  5. Option Year rates

You can choose any of those these for a given project.  That means each project task and each time log associated with a project can potentially compute client and salary rates differently.  Usually, the same choices are made for all projects, and just the user rates are changed for each one.  But, you could change the model for each project.

 

 

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PTO and Time Off Tracking

Having a solution for PTO and time off requests is just as important as project tracking. Putting the PTO options right in with the project tasks means the users can quickly enter time off requests at the same time they enter project task actuals. This solution lets you do both, and that means you get a nice complete solution.

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Project Portfolios

Group your projects into portfolios and get reports, graphs and metrics.

Grouping projects by portfolio is a simple way to perform operations for like projects.  What does that mean?  It means if you want a report for a certain group of projects, put them in a portfolio and run the report on that portfolio.  Or if you want to see tasks allocated to users on just a certain group of projects, again, put them into a portfolio and view the resource allocation window.  Other such operation might be viewing a project revenue chart, or viewing resource utilization reports for a certain portfolio of projects.

Project portfolio management is built into Standard Time®.  So whenever you need a see a report or chart or graph, look for the option to view only the projects in a chosen portfolio.

Project revenue by portfolio

For instance, project revenue is a great use of portfolios.  Lets say you need to view project revenue estimates for the consulting jobs.  Or a certain manufacturing process.  Or geographical region.  Just put the projects that matter into a portfolio, and your revenue chart shows only them.  Nice!

Project resource allocation by portfolio

Another great application for portfolios is viewing project task allocation by portfolio.  Let’s say you want to see how tasks are assigned to the consulting projects, or by type of project.  Again, portfolios work great.  You see only those tasks assigned to projects in a selected portfolio.  So, group up your projects and give it a try!

 

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Better Than a Spreadsheet

Don’t use a spreadsheet to track your projects. This video will show you a better way.

I guess every hardcore project manager knows that.  But it’s worth a reminder.  Watch the video.

Here’s the first point.  You can’t sync Android and iOS with a spreadsheet.  That means somebody is stuck entering time on a desktop.  What about your employees in the field?  How do they get their hours back to your project?  Why not just use an app that syncs?

Second: In a spreadsheet, your billing rates will get so out of whack you’ll want to off yourself.  There are tools for this sort of thing you know.  Just sayin’  🙂

Third, your spreadsheet is not likely to look for user mistakes.  So you’ll be correcting them every week.  Is that a good use of your time?  And what if you make a mistake.  10% of those mistakes never get found.  Multiply those hours times your billing rate.  That’s how much you lose in human error.  Uggh…

Fourth, sure, you can create some charts to show project status in a spreadsheet.  But are they all encompassing?  Or do you update them every time something changes.

Fifth: Can you log in with the web.  Sort of… I guess.  But now you have sharing issues.

And lastly, you really don’t get a lot of project management in spreadsheets.  Standard Time has PM aplenty.  Like that word, aplenty.  Me to.  😉  PM aplenty.

 

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What is a project milestone?

Good question!  What is a project milestone?

Think of a project milestone as a marker in time where you stop and evaluate your project.

How is your project going?  Have you completed everything necessary to move on to the next level?  Have you finished everything in this milestone?  And are you ready to move forward to the next one?

The video below shows what milestones look like in a Gantt chart, and how to track time to them.  But normally you don’t actually track time to milestones.  They are just markers in time, not actual tasks.  But you can if you want to.  In fact, you could set up a project with nothing but milestones!  Just track hours to them and compare against your original estimates.  That’s a simple way to track projects.

In the old days, a milestones was a physical stone erected by the road.  There would be one stone every mile.  Just count the stones as you waked along, and you would know how far you had traveled, and how far the next town was.  They were just like our interstate mile markers now.

Project milestones are very similar.  They tell you how far into the project you have traveled.  Got a big project?  Put up a milestone every so often and you’ll know where you are.

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Ten Tools For the PMO Office

Now, this is what the PMO office needs.  Have you seen this?

The video below lists ten cool tools for the project management office.  (Actually the term “PMO Office” is a little redundant.)  But I really liked this set of tools.  You start with a database that displays all your projects as peers — no more discreet files on your hard drive.  Under each project is a list of assigned to employees.  Those employees see only their projects and tasks in the timesheet where they record actual hours.  Go back to the project task view and you can compare estimates with actuals.

Of course, the PMO office wants more than a simple task list.  They want resource allocation, project revenue projects, utilization reports with percentages and effective rates.  And they want some daily scrum status.  To me… it all seems to be here.  Take a look!

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVJ1AYCJ9Rw