How does your company currently balance operational and strategic project work? In our experience, project-intensive organisations need regular project portfolio analyses to achieve an optimal balance. This is the only way to ensure the best possible use of resources along with a focused target strategy.

Read in this Capture blog post:

• How to strategically manage your project portfolio with PPM.
• What data can be used for a project portfolio analysis
• How to recognise a professional project management organisation

Project Portfolio Management: An Operational and Strategic Responsibility

The professionalisation of project management organisations can be significantly advanced by introducing a project management office or project portfolio management software. Further training in project management methods also increases staff efficiency. In combination with the necessary time resources and structural framework conditions for strategic reflection and control of the project portfolio, you hold all the trump cards!

Project portfolio analysis: Indicator-based decisions instead of gut feeling

With PPM software, you get indicator-based project portfolio analyses at the push of a button. If the data collection in your project work is reasonably defined and all project staff contribute to it, you can effortlessly control your project portfolio strategically. The list of possible key figures is long: financial, process and personnel key figures can be continuously expanded by qualitative surveys such as customer satisfaction. Initially, it makes sense to focus on a few performance indicators in order to keep staff motivation to enter data constantly high. It is supported by visualisations of central key figures that put different projects in relation to each other. Classic management tools such as the balanced scorecard or PMO dashboards are your strategic cockpit that you definitely won't want to do without in your work in the future!

_{Fig: Balanced Scorecard - Project prioritisation}

Prioritise projects correctly: The ranking, scoring and domain method

A project portfolio analysis is not limited to the evaluation of ongoing projects, but enables accurate decisions along the entire project life cycle, starting with idea and project selection. But objectivity is always a matter of perspective, and depending on which decision criteria are used, the result can be different. With PPM solutions, you can perform both simple and complex portfolio analyses:

• With the ranking method, you select a few comparison criteria (return on investment, costs, staffing) and rank the projects like in a sports competition. The resulting project prioritisation then determines the further decision-making steps: for example, which projects are pushed, monitored more closely or sometimes even terminated.
• The scoring method enables a more differentiated picture of the company's projects by using several comparison criteria and weighting them differently depending on the project. The dimensions of risk and compliance may play a special role in one project due to the use of new technologies or strict industry regulations, but hardly at all in a standard or follow-up project. A direct comparison of these variables and projects would therefore make little sense, but it is very useful in combination with other weighted factors. The result of the analysis could also be a project ranking, whereby the results are even more meaningful when broken down into a decision matrix.   
• The domain method supports a decentralised assessment process, which initially makes a standardised comparison of all company projects difficult. However, with a large number of company projects, it can make sense to first prioritise projects within a department in order to compare them with the results of other departments.

A high level of maturity of digitised project organisation can be recognised by the fact that the increase in efficiency and value of operational project work can be measured and tracked. Regular project portfolio analyses create transparency and a solid discussion basis for demanding stakeholders.

Capture Demo Session: Portfolio management instead of pure project lists

Want to gain more insights into modern project portfolio management and see project portfolio analysis live in action? Then register now for the Capture On-Demand webinar with our PPM experts.

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