Strategic project portfolio management with Can Do software

Customers' requirements are changing, especially in terms of speed and quality in meeting their needs. This development also applies to the companies themselves. IT departments, for example, are often confronted with an increasing demand for service requirements from the specialist departments and must reconcile these with ongoing activities.

In order to select the strategically relevant projects from the large number of requests, a scoring process is carried out which calculates and depicts the economic significance of the requested projects for the company, followed by realistic resource planning which shows whether or when a sufficient number of employees are available to implement the prioritized projects.

In order to select the strategically relevant projects from the large number of enquiries, a scoring is carried out which calculates and depicts the economic significance of the requested projects for the company, followed by realistic resource planning which shows whether or when a sufficient number of employees is available to implement the prioritized projects.

But not only in the IT sector, but in general, projects are the means of choice in many organizations when it comes to organizing work. Portfolio Management Definition therefore means that several projects are initially launched and worked on simultaneously. This project portfolio has to be managed, i.e. monitored and controlled in terms of time and budget, resources and, of course, quality using project management software.

This project portfolio has to be managed, i.e. monitored and controlled in terms of time and budget, resources and, of course, quality using project management software. A Project Management Office (PMO) is often set up for this purpose. This is because there are mutual dependencies between the individual projects with regard to the resources and budgets available for the completion of tasks. Due to the increasing complexity in this project landscape, companies have started to support their project portfolio management with software tools to identify risks such as budget shortages and capacity bottlenecks at an early stage, prioritize projects accordingly and implement them successfully "in time, budget and quality".

Choose the right projects with the right software

It is challenging to select from a large number of projects and ideas those projects which are in line with the company's strategy and which can be realized both financially and in terms of capacity.

Various project management tools are available for this purpose, including Can Do's portfolio management software, which supports conventional evaluation systems (e.g. balanced scorecards) and allows the user to store any number of values in freely definable fields in order to create his own evaluation scale. The portfolios can be clearly monitored and controlled with the help of bubble charts. All information is processed in real time and taken into account in the display. For example, if the risk in a project changes, the position of the bubble representing this project changes immediately.

Early recognition of resource bottlenecks

Uncoordinated actionizm does not lead anywhere when managing parallel projects. The mutual resentment caused, for example, by overworked IT staff and dissatisfied specialist departments complaining about continual postponements of deadlines is not uncommon. This conflict can be solved with planning in Can Do and the conflict messages based on probability calculation, which identify resource bottlenecks in the course of the feasibility analysis. For if many projects are implemented in parallel, it is of great benefit to know where restrictions are likely to occur as soon as a new project is added. The complete overview of available capacities at the push of a button in Can Do's portfolio management software has changed expectations and has a positive effect on the mutual understanding of the temporal feasibility of projects.

In Can Do we see immediately when we can provide the necessary resources for the implementation and release the projects accordingly in a controlled manner. Josef Marchner, CIO HERMA GmbH

Simulation and detailed planning of projects in the portfolio

With its portfolio management software, Can Do offers the possibility of detailed planning at portfolio level for projects whose realization has not yet been decided. This makes it possible to depict load curves and dynamic developments of simulated projects already in the portfolio. Especially the deployment and workload of project staff varies greatly during the course of a project - these fluctuations can be simulated in Can Do's project portfolio management and thus taken into account in the planning.

• Support of the complete process from the collection of
  project ideas, the prioritization and implementation of projects to
  to evaluate the same bubble chart to monitor the portfolio - probabilities of occurrence for projects - resource and budget control in the project portfolio - software includes all current and planned projects in its calculations - risk management
  at portfolio level
• Live management: all information is available in real time
  and also for the graphical representation (bubble chart)
  considered
• Modern ergonomics
• Create graphical user interface and portfolios at the click of a mouse

Can Do's AI-supported risk management provides recommendations for action such as "intervene immediately" or "ignore" in order to complete the wealth of recurring tasks more quickly and to better assess and manage risks within the portfolio. The freedoms gained enable employees to concentrate on the essentials and open up active creative scope.

Agile project management

While development departments in particular swear by agile methods such as Scrum, these approaches represent a major blind spot in planning for project managers and especially for portfolio managers: The project manager often does not know if and when the agile teams will realize the work (work packages or stories in the Scrum world) for his project. Furthermore, capacity planning in agile methods does not actually occur, which is a problem for the portfolio manager in his company-wide resource management. With its interface to JIRA, probably the most frequently used Scrum tool, Can Do closes this gap for agile project management. Epics with their stories in JIRA are mapped in Can Do, including resource allocation (team and employees) and story/work package status.