Demian Entrekin
- Expertise in SaaS business models and technologies, software design techniques and Portfolio Management techniques
- Founder/CEO/CTO for Innotas, Founder/Chief Architect for Convoy Corp and CTO at Teaching Channel
- All 8 Best Practices
- Pre-Meeting Discovery Process
- One-on-One Call with Expert
- Meeting Summary Report
- Post-Meeting Engagement
Project Portfolio Management
Common Problems
- Time to market: Understanding how to best allocate your resources is a key to bringing the right products to market faster.
Competitive pressure, especially on companies disrupted by technology or using technology in their offerings, means that companies feel the urgent need to get advantage in the market quickly. Time to market is often a make-or-break need. Whether first mover advantage or fast follower – speed is critical.
- Cost controls: Whether it's a normal budget cycle or a situation where cost cutting is needed, your business needs the best tools to control costs.
Whether there's a budget reduction or a need to drive margins, it can be tricky to control spending on projects.
- What projects are active?
- What projects can I cut?
- Do I have redundant projects?
- How are they performing?
These are hard questions to answer well, especially if leadership needs to reduce spending. Where and how do we do that? How do we know we're right?
Project Portfolio Management can help answer those questions. Having the ability to pull up at your fingertips how your project resources are being spent and making the right paring decisions is very important.
- Competitive advantage: Your company can only gain competitive advantage if you are sure you are spending your resources on the right things.
How do you know if the money you are spending on your products and projects are the right investments?
Project Portfolio Management is a tool you can put in place that goes beyond simple chain-of-command management structures and allows a more robust analysis that can help you gain competitive advantage.
Portfolio management pulls all the project teams into one visible bucket so it's a lot easier for managers to make sure that the people employed to build a product are actually working on the right things.
- Managing strategic change: It can be hard for a company to change direction if your resources are spread broadly among many projects.
If you need to change the direction of your company, you will have to shift the allocation of your company's resources.
How do you find out how your resources are actually deployed? Do you have an accurate picture of the active projects and their status.
Without Project Portfolio Management tools, it can be very hard to know exactly who is working on what well enough so you can make a shift in strategic direction. The knowledge of what is actually being worked on gives you the power to say what adjustments need to be made to implement a strategic shift.
- Poor execution: How can you make sure that the work being done is being done well?
Without a means to implement standards and measure performance, it's very hard to improve quality and overall project performance.
- Do we have a methodology?
- Do we have a reputable process?
- Are the teams following it?
- Do all the projects us the same kind of reporting so we can compare results apples-to-apples?
If you don't have these kinds of protections in place, performance is dependent on key individuals rather than on systemic solutions.