PPM Deployment Best Practices

Congratulations, your organization has decided to invest in a Project Portfolio Management (PPM) tool to improve planning and execution of projects, programs, and portfolios. If you want to succeed in this endeavor, it is vitally important that you recognize that just deploying a new tool will not “automagically” deliver the results you need. Many organizations do not realize there is a certain level of investment into your internal technology, people, and supporting processes to ensure the success of the solution’s implementation. In our experience working with hundreds of clients over the years, there are a number of important components of this journey that must be addressed to ensure success. These can generally be categorized into several key areas:

• Executive Sponsorship
• Strategic Project Management
• Organizational Change Management
• People/Process/Technology
• Phased Deployment
• Ongoing Administration and Support

Executive Sponsorship

The deployment of a PPM tool is almost certain to fail if you do not have an engaged executive sponsor. This individual must be the driver for this change in the organization. They will champion the tool and ensure adoption by reinforcing the need for it and the benefits of using the system. Without this engagement, usage of the tool will become “optional”, and it will die a slow and painful death, becoming just another “tool that didn’t work out”.

Strategic Project Management

To ensure success, you should treat the deployment of a PPM tool as you would any other strategic project. This means that you should assign a professional project manager to oversee the planning and delivery of the system. You should also allocate a project core team that includes representatives from appropriate parts of the organization. This core team will help ensure the processes and tool configuration support the organization’s needs, and they will act as champions of the tool for your user community.

Budget must be allocated to acquire the necessary software licenses, and to provide for outside services and training from a trusted partner who specializes in PPM tool deployment.

Organizational Change Management

In our experience working with many organizations across industries, organizational change management is often the most neglected component of a PPM tool deployment. Because the tool will impact the way people perform their work, you must address change management. So, how do you do that?

• Organizational awareness:
  making sure everyone is aware of what’s coming and what to expect is key.
• Individual acceptance:
  answering, “what’s in it for me” will help each person understand their role. In other words, how will the tool help them as well as the organization?
• Training and user guides:
  it is critical that the users are given the knowledge to use the tool properly. Beyond the training and user guides, you should also plan for early support of your users to ensure that they have retained the knowledge needed to successfully use the system.

You will receive a lot of questions and thus will need to address numerous issues as you begin rolling out the tool. Throughout this process, your executive sponsor and project team will need to reinforce the importance of using the tool and demonstrate the benefits it delivers to the organization.

People/Process/Technology

Many organizations have an unrealistic expectation that if they just roll out a new tool, everything will be fine. The reality is that the tool is just one component of the people/process/technology triangle. The technology will expose process gaps that must be addressed. Be prepared to invest in defining your processes such as project intake, resource allocation, time tracking, project status reporting, and more if you want to be successful. The people component must also be addressed to ensure that all users have the ability to use the tool as designed. It must be clearly communicated that usage of the tool is not optional, and that the processes exist to provide organizational benefits and must be followed.

Phased Deployment

It is very tempting to want to use all the capabilities of a new tool as soon as it is available to your organization. However, you must consider your users’ capacity to absorb change when you decide which components to roll out. In our experience, successful organizations use a phased approach to feature deployment. In Phase 1, the goal is usually just to load all active projects, programs, and portfolios to provide visibility into the work taking place. Future phases can address other areas, such as resource management, timesheets, integration with other systems, automation of processes, etc. The point is to carefully consider the pace of change that your organization can handle and that your staff can support.

Ongoing Administration and Support

Deployment of a PPM tool will likely require development of new skills in your IT organization to support the underlying systems. For example, Sensei IQ™ is built on the Microsoft Power Platform, which includes Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, and Dataverse, all of which lives inside your Microsoft 365 tenant. Your IT organization must have the necessary skills and knowledge to work with this technology to support your user community. It is also advisable to engage a trusted partner to provide ongoing support to address tool enhancements and cover any internal knowledge gaps that may exist.

Conclusion

In summary, you can see that there are several critical success factors in rolling out a PPM tool. You will ensure a successful deployment while saving time and money, as well as minimizing frustration, if you embark on this journey with your eyes wide open and plan for the necessary investments. Sensei Project Solutions™ looks forward to collaborating with you in your PPM journey.

Contact us: info@senseiprojectsolutions.com .