Grow Your Own PPM Solution

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As portfolio manager, you’re responsible for supporting the intake of new project requests, providing visibility into the portfolio of in-flight projects, and helping to facilitate the right approval and prioritization decisions.
You need a project portfolio management (PPM) tool that promotes the maintenance and flow of good data to help you succeed in these tasks. However, while throwing expensive technology at bad process rarely works, many organizations take this approach to solve their PPM problems.
Commercial PPM solutions are powerful and compelling, but they are also expensive, complex, and hard to use. When a solution is not properly adopted, the data can be unreliable and inconsistent, defeating the point of purchasing a tool in the first place.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Your choice of PPM solution must be in tune with your organizational PPM maturity to ensure that you are prepared to sustain the tool use without having the corresponding PPM processes collapse under its own weight.
A spreadsheet-based homegrown PPM solution can provide key capabilities of an optimized PPM solution with a high level of sophistication and complexity without the prohibitive capital and labor costs demanded by commercial PPM solution.
Focus on your PPM decision makers that will consume the reports and insights by investigating their specific reporting needs.

Impact and Result

Think outside the commercial box. Develop an affordable, adoptable, and effective PPM solution using widely available tools based on Info-Tech’s ready-to-deploy templates.
Make your solution sustainable. When it comes to portfolio management, high level is better. A tool that is accurate and maintainable will provide more value than one that strives for precise data yet is ultimately unmaintainable.
Report success. A PPM tool needs to foster portfolio visibility in order to engage and inform the executive layer and support effective decision making.

Grow Your Own PPM Solution Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should grow your own PPM solution, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

Grow Your Own PPM Solution – Executive Brief

1. Right-size your PPM solution

Scope an affordable, adoptable, and effective PPM solution with Info-Tech's Portfolio Manager 2017 workbook.

2. Get to know Portfolio Manager 2017

Learn how to use Info-Tech's Portfolio Manager 2017 workbook and create powerful reports.

3. Implement your homegrown PPM solution

Plan and implement an affordable, adoptable, and effective PPM solution with Info-Tech's Portfolio Manager 2017 workbook.

4. Outgrow your own PPM solution

Develop an exit strategy from your home-grown solution to a commercial PPM toolset. In this video, we show a rapid transition from the Excel dataset shown on this page to a commercial solution from Meisterplan. Christoph Hirnle of Meisterplan is interviewed starting at 9 minutes.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Table of Contents

Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst

Get the help you need in this 3-phase advisory process. You'll receive 9 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.

Guided Implementation 1: Right-size your PPM solution

Call 1: Scope the discussion with your existing PPM strategy.
Call 2: Confirm your organization’s readiness for a homegrown solution.
Call 3: Conduct a cost-benefit analysis and right-size your homegrown PPM solution.

Guided Implementation 2: Get to know Portfolio Manager 2017

Call 1: Enter project portfolio data.
Call 2: Right-size reports for your project portfolio stakeholders.
Call 3: Discuss how to customize portfolio data structure, reports, and other tool functionalities.

Guided Implementation 3: Implement your PPM solution

Call 1: Identify opportunities for injecting the new tool into the PPM processes.
Call 2: Design a pilot run for using your new PPM solution.
Call 3: Create a communication plan for leadership and project managers.