Portfolio Management

Organisations are increasingly recognising the need to manage their complete project portfolio as an entity, identifying and balancing potential future cost and resource needs. Further, this need extends to portfolios extending years into the future, and embracing projects from their conceptual stage through to the final closure. The need also extends to defining and managing the management level parameters of risk and probability associated with those projects.

• Evaluation and comparison of the project portfolio management tools
• Integrating project portfolio management with longer range budget and resource planning
• PPM and PS integration into asset management
• Tools for Enterprise Asset Lifecycle Management (EAM)
• What are the capabilities of PPM and how does it integrate with other modules?
• Migration from project view to portfolio view – managing a shift in mindset
• How does Investment Management (IM) and PPM integrate?
• PPM 5.0 - what are the latest offerings and solutions?
• cProjects - what is new and emerging?
• Scoring and managing risks, benefits, probabilities, mitigation actions across a project portfolio
• How does the Project Builder fit in with the PPM tool?
• What are the options for integrating third party tools?
• Strategies for managing changes that arise across simultaneous projects

Resource Management

Resources are always a limitation in project execution, and the effective utilisation of their available capacity is vital. This involves the appropriate definition of the resources and their available capacity, and scheduling tools to best match resource requirements with this available capacity.

• Effectively defining and managing resource capacity
• Capacity planning, evaluation, levelling within and across projects
• Graphical scheduling tools like MRS (Multi-Resource Scheduling) and third-party tools
• Integration of resource management with service contracts and service entry sheets
• Third party scheduling tools available to align with requirements - Primavera, MS Projects, MRS etc
• Capacity loading and scheduling – resource capacity management
• Implementing a long term view of resource capacity and planning
• What is the role of PPM for resource management?
• Contractor allocation across multiple projects
• Managing schedule changes within the resource plan
• Importance of identifying and understanding the skill set on each project
• Role and benefits of the Multi-Resource Scheduling (MRS) tool for resource management
• Integrated workforce scheduling with capacity planning with SAP PS, PM and MRS
• Work centre allocation – how does project team interrelate with work centres?
• Effectively forecasting costs and resources for projects and portfolios throughout the entire project life-cycle

Business Intelligence Reporting

The ability to extract, report and analyse PPM data is critical to the success of the PPM system. This seems more so than for any of the other logistics modules due variously to PPM being a continually changing landscape of different projects and their individual budgets, cash-flows, and resources, the often large size of those budgets, and the very strong linkage to financials and contracts.

• Evaluating the project and portfolio reporting tools in SAP – standard PS and PPM, BW/BI/BO capability, portal/dashboards
• Custom reports to close gaps in standard reporting capability
• Summary and exception reporting
• Reporting for cross-module processes
• What are the benefits of building customised project system reports?
• Reporting on capital projects
• Identifying portfolio analysis and risk
• BI/BW functionality
• What is the correct Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) for reporting?
• Estimate vs. actual reporting
• Resource management and capacity reporting
• BI tools available to dive greater visibility of capital investment portfolio
• PPM analytics and dashboards
• Project management reporting vs. financial reporting
• Reporting on timeline management

3rd Party Project Management Tools for Scheduling & Estimating

• Time management during concept development phase
• Capital projects estimation
• PPM solutions for scheduling
• Milestone management
• Primavera integrations – How it interfaces with PS/PPM
• How to make scheduling integration work
• Integration of third party estimating tools – Primavera, MS Project
• SAP Enterprise Project Connector (EPC) tool
• Overcoming the impact of changing business needs on estimating and scheduling
• Speed of delivery
• Mapping out “what if” scenarios during the scheduling and estimating phase
• Estimating hours and deliverables

Financial Forecasting

Effectively forecasting costs and resources for projects and portfolios throughout the entire project life cycle is critical to successful project management.

• Cash flow forecasting and cost control
• Managing budget variation requests - allocating budget distribution
• Expenditure alerts - implement progressive warnings for over expenditure
• Capital project estimation
• Cash flow and liquidity - financial supply chain management (FSCM)
• Consolidation of forecasts across projects and into portfolios
• Project cash management tools - estimating and cost planning tools
• Standard forecast reporting
• Comparison of percentage complete vs. percentage spent
• Cost forecasting and re-planning

Contract Management

Utilisation of external resources is inevitable required on many projects, whether to meet needs for manpower, skills or specialist capability. This makes management of the contracts under which these resources operate, and the need for effective cost and utilisation management via the contracts under which they are engaged, an essential project management capability.

• Contract allocation across multiple projects
• Successful invoice management - managing high volumes and manual processes
• Using CATS for contractors and to interface with service entry sheets
• Contract management in SAP - what are the successful common practices? What does SAP provide in this space?
• Sub-contractor management - how are they managed in SAP?
• Managing variations - contractor billing
• Managing the process of administration
• Tendering and assessment management
• Contract risks and contingency plans for contract management
• Supplier Relationship Management (SRM)
• Creation of contracts - variations, schedules, contractor performance reports
• Managing contract issues and EH&S compliance
• SAP Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) - planning, tendering, vendor assessment, procurement, work execution, date progress tracking
• Performance reporting, variation and extension management, progress payments, invoicing, monthly accruals through to close out

User Training & Change Management

Having processes in place to manage unforseen changes throughout a projects lifecycle is critical for successfully overcoming hurdles along the way. Unsuccessful change management is one of the most common causes of IT system failures, including PPM systems, with the system successfully technically installed to requirements, but the users left behind and refusing to tap its potential. Sometimes, the bond to the previous legacy systems is so strong or valid that its retention and integration should even have been considered during system design, thereby heading off many of the change issues.

• Best balance of systems/processes between retaining legacy and pushing users to SAP
• How to manage avoidance on use of SAP?
• Successful procedures to train users to use SAP for project and portfolio management
• Shifting a cultural mindset - easier said than done?
• Gaining senior management buy-in to implement change management practices to ensure quality as an end result
• Rollout and acceptance of ongoing system changes and improvements
• Implementing training groups, new user training and ultimately breaking bad habits
• Super users - what are their roles? Is this the best practice to implement and manage change?
• Long-term training options post go-live - making users aware of available training options
• What online training systems are available?
• Transactional vs. business process training approach
• Ease of use for training and management

Document Management

Projects can generate a large number of associated documents over their lifecycle, and any comprehensive PPM solution must be able to manage these documents through their life cycle, and associate them with the relevant sections of the project or portfolio.

• Integrating PPM to the document management capability within SAP
• Linking projects to documents - ease of use
• Level of granularity vs. management of data
• Master data management
• Managing large volumes of documents over the project lifecycle
• Purchase orders
• From simple linkage to full Document Lifecycle Management (DMS) tool vs. third party tools
• Integrating PPM to the document management capability within SAP
• Document collaboration and sharing (c-folders)

Implementation Options - Upgrades & Enhancement Packs

• Upgrade experiences - technical, business readiness and change management
• SAPs roadmap for the future of PS
• Where do PPM and c-Projects fit in the roadmap
• Rapid deployment vs. lengthy roll out
• Benefits of implementing EPH5
• Enhancement Packs - What is in there? What do they do?
• Understanding the process and solutions outcomes before implementing the tool
• Implementation according to scope of project e.g large vs. small
• Assessing PS maturity for PPM
• Where are the gaps in the roadmap that require enhancements versus upgrade

Mobility Solutions

Many projects involve field resources, often widely geographically dispersed and away from desktop SAP access. Integration of these resources, and in particular the gathering of data from them, can be greatly expedited by the use of a mobile solution.

• Capability of PS to integrate with a mobile solution
• Different device options available for mobile reporting and project management
• SAP mobile EAM - what are the possibilities?
• How has mobile technologies been successfully used for projects?
• Time reporting through the iPAD - what are the possibilities?
• Monitoring and reporting functionality on mobile devices
• Available technologies from SAP and third parties
• Supported processes - time capture, goods movement, schedule updates, percentage complete

Risk Analysis & Management

• Portfolio risk assessment and analysis – tools available to measure and manage project risks during the cycle
• Identifying various types of risk e.g. business risk, portfolio risk, project risk
• Common practices for carrying out risk assessment during the project lifecycle
• How is risk assessment integrated with SAP PS and PPM?

PPM Common Practices

• Is there a common practice approach for PPM and PS?
• Are there industry specific common practices?
• Cross industry shared practices
• Best approaches across various industries
• Lessons learned and common issues