For portfolio managers and project office staff that use Microsoft Office Project Professional, Project Web Access, Project Server and Project Portfolio Server

About This Course

This 2-day course prepares project portfolio managers and their support staff for managing their portfolio more effectively with Microsoft enterprise project management tools. With the arrival of Microsoft Project Server and the new Project Portfolio Server, many organizations have a unique opportunity to dramatically improve the quality of their portfolio of projects. Improvements 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 society for non-profit organizations, the utilization versus capacity of resources and the overall balance of the portfolio. The course is a workshop in which participants will work in small groups with a database of real projects of a virtual organization. The course was created and is continuously improved by a review of the latest literature on portfolio management and an exploration on how these techniques can be applied using the Microsoft toolset. This course is based on the 2006 Standard for Portfolio Management from PMI.

Prerequisite: participant must be familiar with the Project Web Access and Microsoft Project application interfaces

Dates: Click here for a listing of course dates.

Learning Objectives

After this course, you will:

• Be aware of some of the latest portfolio analysis techniques
• Know the strengths and weaknesses of the different current portfolio analysis techniques
• Be able to apply these techniques using Microsoft Project Server and Portfolio Server
• Be able to create portfolio representations that are meaningful to executives using the Portfolio Analyzer
• Be able to assess the balance of a project portfolio

Course Topics

Review of the current portfolio management theory

• PMI standard: The Standard for Portfolio Management
• Portfolio governance
• PMI Process groups and processes
• Portfolios have a resource constraint; 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, Resource-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 per year
• Theory of constraints (Goldratt)
• Efficient Frontier (Markowitz)

In more detail:

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 your own organization-specific, independent categories of strategies (strategy buckets)
• 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 look ahead window (with fixed resource capacity). 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 look ahead window (with flexible resource capacity). Decide if you should hire/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 the level of strategy accomplishment.
• Given an investment level, the percentage of strategy accomplishment can be calculated, or vice versa.
• The technique allows you to identify mandatory projects and to incorporate limited money and skill availabilities.

Checking if the project portfolio is in balance across (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 within 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 Server and Project Portfolio Server can produce them