2 Day Computer Pricing
With the arrival of Microsoft Project Server and Portfolio Server, many organizations have an opportunity to improve the management of their projects, resources and portfolios. In this course, we will focus on how organizations can improve the quality of their portfolio of projects. The quality of the portfolio will be measured in terms of the level of strategic alignment and accomplishment, the contribution to the bottom line for profit-organizations (or contribution to the society for government and non-profit organizations), the utilization of resources and the overall balance of the portfolio.
This 2-day course prepares portfolio managers and their support staff to manage their project portfolio effectively in a Project Server environment. The course is a workshop in which participants will work in groups with a real database of projects of a virtual organization. Each group will have access to a Project Server database for hands-on exercises. This course is aligned with and based on the Standard for Portfolio Management from PMI published in 2006.
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A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) areas covered:
Integration Management, Scope Management, Time Management, Cost Management, Quality Management, Human Resources Management and Risk Management.
Who should attend?
- People who have Microsoft Project Server installed in their organizations and who use Project Web Access and Microsoft Project. It is recommended that participants know Project Web Access and Microsoft Project
- This course is suited for project schedulers, portfolio analysts, portfolio managers, portfolios directors and project office staff.
What will my seminar experience cover?
- Review of the current portfolio management theory- Portfolio governance
- PMI Process groups and processes
- The resource constraint and the importance of project ranking
- Modeling many projects using Microsoft Project and Project Server
- Finding the right level of detail
- Establishing scheduling guidelines
- Scheduling methods: when to use Critical Path, Critical Chain or Earned Value?
- Creating standards and imposing them
- Overview of portfolio analysis techniques
We will discuss the latest techniques from published research:
- Key performance indicators
- Strategic alignment analysis
- Earned Value of the project portfolio by year
- Theory of constraints (Goldratt)
- Efficient Frontier (Markowitz)
- Key performance indicators
- Schedule, Cost and Quality performance indicators
- How to develop formulas for these indicators in Project Server
- Thresholds, traffic light indicators and screen tips
- Strategic alignment analysis
- Strategies of organizations generally break down into the strategy buckets: improving operational efficiency, increasing revenues for profit-organizations (or contribution to the society for government and non-profit organizations) and transforming the organization
- Identify organization-specific, independent categories of strategies
- Assess the projects on their contribution to accomplishing the strategy
- Earned Value of the project portfolio by year
- Normally, the Earned Value technique is applied on a single project, but here we will apply it to a portfolio of projects
- Theory of constraints (Goldratt):
The critical resource determines the throughput capacity of an organization:
- Determine the most critical resource in the 0-3 month time frame (fixed resource capacity) and explore how to decrease the workload for this resource and/or how to increase the throughput for this resource. Then stagger the projects based on the availability of this critical resource.
- Identify the over-allocated resources in the 3-6 month time frame (flexible resource capacity). Decide if you should hire or train more people in these critical skills, or if you need to trim non-critical resources to balance the organization.
- Efficient Frontier (Markowitz)
This technique can be applied with the new Microsoft application Project Portfolio Server.
- The Efficient Frontier depicts the optimum combinations of investment level and level of strategy accomplishment.
- Given an investment level, the percentage of strategy accomplishment can be optimized, or vice versa.
- The technique allows you to identify mandatory projects and incorporate limited budget and resource availabilities.
- Checking if the project portfolio is in balance on, among others:
- Strategy buckets: improvement of operational efficiency versus increasing revenues versus organizational transformation
- Short term versus long term
- Buy side versus Inside or Sell side of the organization
- Utilization of the different resource skills of the organization
- Portfolio graphical representations:
- Traffic-light report: cost, time, quality and risk performance indicators and thresholds
- Tracking Gantt chart: out-of-date projects, latest forecasts of the finish dates relative to the baseline finish dates
- Bubble charts:
- risk-reward-cost
- strategic alignment- reward-cost
- Pivot-table: resource utilization by skill, department or region
- Line charts:
- Cost Performance Index and Schedule Performance Index over time
- Milestone accomplishment versus milestone baseline
Please bring your own sketches of reports you would like to check if Project and Portfolio Server can produce them
How will I benefit?
Develop and enhance the contributions you make to your organization by learning:
- Some of the latest portfolio analysis techniques
- The strengths and weaknesses of the different current portfolio analysis techniques
- To apply these techniques using Microsoft Project Server and Portfolio Server
- To create portfolio representations that are meaningful to executives using the Portfolio Analyzer
- To assess the balance of a project portfolio
What instructional materials will be used?
Lectures, case studies, group discussions and exercises.
