Portfolio Program Project Management

“We are known for the Project Management Services we provide to our customers. Whether it is a particular Project that requires Project Management expertise, or a Portfolio, Program, or Project Management Office that your organization is considering implementing, we have the professionals to make it successful.”

PPM Savvy’s Project Control Office provides our customers with knowledgeable project management professionals that help organizations:

  • Reduce Risk
  • Control Costs
  • Improve Success Rates

Our seasoned team of experts help our customers to manage complex projects across a wide range of industries in both public and private sectors. We have assembled a variety of accelerators comprised of proven processes and templates that provide for planning and managing programs and projects.

Realistic and Pragmatic Frameworks
PPM Savvy professionals get results using a realistic and pragmatic framework that enables them to tailor a unique approach to each project.

PMBOK, PRINCE2, ITIL and other disciplines

The foundation of sound project management is using and applying best practices that are defined by professional organizations that relate to project management and are widely adopted.  Here is a short list of industry best practices used for research, development and enhancement to existing services:

Why Is Portfolio/Program/Project Management Important?

The purpose of the Portfolio Management Office is to:

  • Provide comprehensive and consistent portfolio, program, and project management practices and reliable, metrics based statuses.
  • Provide an organization with governance and processes that recognizes all stakeholders (Business and Technology) to create involvement, commitment, buy-in, accountability, and ownership
  • Enable data driven decisions for establishing project cadence based on business value
  • Manage projects to ensure success once transitioned to operations, minimizing impact to day to day work upon implementation

With projects becoming more complex financially, technically and logistically, the role of the project manager is pivotal now more than ever to a project’s success. PPM Savvy has established a reputation for providing high quality project management services across both public and private sectors. We ensure that each client’s objectives are clearly defined and make certain the client has full knowledge of the implications of all different options available to them. We place great emphasis on controlling and managing change, and each project is managed proactively to prevent it from developing its own inertia.

Our team can work within the confines of a customer PMO or within PPM Savvy’s own framework to ensure that project deliverables adhere to quality standards.

Business Transformation through Technology

PPM Savvy believes that project governance with dedicated participation from the business and IT stakeholders provides the foundation for project success. PPM Savvy helps to ensure that business leaders play key roles at the project decision making levels. Once established, we bring proven project and application development methodologies that drive project results through data driven decision making. Because of PPM Savvy’s proven project methodologies, clients can trust that we will deliver on time, within scope and budget.

Project Methodologies That Deliver (simplistic example)

We begin the Planning Phase by jointly developing a project charter document, followed by requirements and a high level schedule. Based on the project, we corroboratively select an agile or waterfall development approach. We can also follow client methodologies, and/or a combination as appropriate.

  • Project Charter
  • Requirements
  • High Level Schedule
  • Project Approach - Industry Standard Or Customer In-House

Upon stage exit approval, the team moves into the Design Phase to identify potential solutions that meet the business requirements. Refined requirements and the business process models are documented. Wire frames, or mock-ups, are created to expedite requirements and ensure common understanding.

  • Development
  • User Acceptance & Implementation
  • Design

In the Development or Construction Phase, the coding and initial unit and system testing is conducted. In addition, the test plan and test cases are completed.

  • Coding
  • Initial Unit & System Testing
  • Test Plan
  • Test Cases

The User Acceptance Testing (UAT) environment is the most critical testing step prior to releasing a system to production for general use. During the Implementation Phase, the project team transitions documentation to the help desk for ongoing support. The key to a successful UAT process is a mutual understanding and joint acceptance between the client and PPM Savvy teams on how issues will be captured, documented, and resolved.

  • Business Stakeholders Perform Testing
  • Project Team Transitions Documentation To Help Desk
  • Ongoing Support
  • Zendesk Or Other Management Tool

The Added Benefits

PPM Savvy’s team of professionals can provide your company the extra edge with streamlined process, dependable delivery and subject matter experts to meet your services’ needs, including: solution architecture, business analysis, project management and more. Engagements can be limited to project discovery and scope, or expand as requested, up to full implementation with documentation and training.

PPM Savvy has completed a wide variety of planning projects for our clients. To provide some perspective about our capabilities and diversified interests, the following list describes projects that are representative of our planning capabilities. Projects and services undertaken by PPM Savvy have lasted from a few days to several months. Our clients represent all types of organizations including large corporations, medium size companies, entrepreneurial start-ups, and non-profit organizations.

Established in 2009 and with years of experience, PPM Savvy has taken its unique style of project consultancy into the workplace, enabling corporate clients of all sizes to optimize their planning infrastructure and deliver clear benefits.

From the early stages of project initiation through to the complexities of project planning, execution and finally closure, PPM Savvy prides itself on talking your language guaranteeing smooth project consultancy with the minimum of fuss.

PPM Savvy prides itself of having the solutions for all your planning and business change needs. With years of experience, PPS has helped many corporate clients achieve their business goals, through:

  • Development of planning methodologies and governance processes
  • Training and coaching on planning related disciplines and methodologies, for example, PMI and/or PRINCE2
  • Guidance and assistance with the setting up of Project Management Offices (PMOs)
  • Creation of standard planning templates including centralised resource pools for enhanced resource management
  • Development of programme & portfolio level plans drawn from detailed project and work stream schedules
  • Plan development  – planning workshops to help clients initiate the structure of project, work stream and programme plans
  • Training and coaching on the Microsoft Office Project desktop project management tool including Project Server EPM and Smartsheet
  • Consultancy and implementation of Enterprise Project Management solutions
  • Plan presentation – development of high quality presentational views of planning and roadmap information for stakeholders through automated solutions

Below are some key principles for the planning of any project. This is really about applying a degree of common sense in terms of how much rigour should be applied, depending upon the magnitude and nature of the initiative.

  • Scope – consider what are you trying to achieve – what are the outcomes or products to be delivered? Agreeing on scope is about setting expectations. A “failed” project is more often than not linked to poor scope, scope creep as the scope has changed along the way without going through a formal change management process.
  • Build – using any one of a variety of tools, build a schedule that breaks down the scope into smaller chunks or deliverables that can be managed easily, and yet, when combined, rolls up to the overall product/s to be delivered.
  • Describe each deliverable – formally describe each deliverable so that the specification of what is to be delivered is unambiguous, and everyone understands the level of quality required.
  • Stages and milestones – for longer and larger projects consider breaking the work down into stages and incorporate review, sign-off, “Go-No-go” milestones along the way so as to check quality and compliance at each stage. If a project becomes unviable at a given stage, it can be shut down at that point.
  • Link activities that are dependent on others – ensure the schedule tasks and milestones are linked so that it makes sense as a sequence of work. For example, you cannot commence the ground floor build until the foundations are in place. Linking a schedule in this way also means if something is delayed then the ripple effect can be understood in advance.
  • Who will do the work? Do you have enough resources to carry out the work? Identified roles and required resources are fictional who don’t exist until all work have an identified owner. If you don’t have enough resources, then you may need to phase the work.
  • Share the plan – involve others in the planning, particularly the people who are the experts and have done similar work before, since their knowledge will help you build a more realistic schedule sooner rather than later – collaborate!
  • Agree and “Baseline” the schedule – once the plan is agreed upon by all appropriate stakeholders, and deemed as “realistic” then “baseline” it. Without having this snapshot you will find it difficult to measure whether you are on track or if you have veered off course against time, scope or cost.
  • Track, update and adjust – the schedule needs to be updated weekly or more often for most projects. Keeping the schedule up to date provides the vital information of what has been achieved and how much work is left. With the baseline available to compare actual progress, we can deduce whether the project is over or under performing and likely to come in on time, and within estimated cost, scope and quality.
  • Close the project and actually learn the lessons! – one of the most important but rarely undertaken
    stages in a project is to capture the lessons of what went right and what went wrong, the opportunities for improvements!