PPM for Internal Departments Features and Functions
A business practice that assists organizations to align their portfolio of projects with their business strategy. Typically IT departments employ an IT governance framework to ensure that their PPM strategy is put into action. With the increasing demand of IT departments to justify their project investments, PPM software has risen in popularity as the tool of choice. It allows both executives and IT decision makers to gain insight into their IT portfolios. PPM software allows IT managers to prioritize projects, allocate resources where needed, and gain financial insight into their portfolio investments.
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Resource Planning and Scheduling
Resource planning and scheduling is the efficient and effective deployment of an organization's resources when they are needed. Such resources may include financial resources, inventory, human skills, production resources, or information technology.
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Product Technology
This group of criteria defines the technical architecture of the product as well as the technological environment in which the product can run successfully. Criteria include product and application architecture, software usability and administration, platform and database support, application standards support, communications and protocol support and integration capabilities. Relative to the other evaluation criteria, best practice selections place a lower relative importance on the product technology criterion. This apparently lower importance is deceptive because the product technology usually houses the majority of the selecting organization's mandatory criteria, which generally include server, client, protocol and database support, application scalability, and other architectural capabilities. The definition of mandatory criteria within this set often allows the client to quickly narrow the long list of potential vendors to a short list of applicable solutions that pass muster relative to the most basic mandatory selection criteria.
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Customer Support and Contact Management
Opportunity management systems (OMS) store sales opportunities and related information. Each sales lead can be tracked with information such as source, type, worth, status, likelihood of closure, etc. An OMS can also perform other related tasks, such as prioritizing sales calls and generating analyses that assist the fine-tuning of marketing strategies. Contract management systems provides tools to create and edit contracts, as well as to monitor and mange the provision of service in line with the agreed-upon terms and conditions. Contact management systems enable organizations to easily store and find contact information, such as names, addresses, and telephone numbers. Sophisticated contact managers provide reporting functions and allow several people in a workgroup to access the same database of contacts. Some also provide calendar functions, which blurs the line between contact managers and personal information managers (PIM).
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Time and Expense Management
Time management refers to the development of processes and tools that increase efficiency and productivity. Time management tools include electronic timesheets that capture both work and non-work related activities, thus allowing organizations to capture and track data for payroll and project-related activities. Expense management refers to tools that streamline and automate the submission and approval of multiple expenses and expense types, such as travel, lodging, car rentals, meals, etc. In accounting, an expense is a general term for an outgoing payment made by a business or individual.
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Financial Management, Budgeting, and Costing
Financial management systems in a professional services automation (PSA) solution automate the tracking and submission of project budgets, costs, and assets. In addition, it provides the capability to track multiple billable details and generate customized invoices.
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Knowledge Management, Collaboration, and Analysis
The major focus of knowledge management is to identify and gather content from documents, reports and other sources and to be able to search that content for meaningful relationships. In PPM, knowledge management also includes robust business intelligence capabilities from the extracted repository of information in the system.
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Third Party Integration
Numerous best-of-breed professional services automation (PSA)and project portfolio management (PPM) vendors' solutions integrate with third party project management systems, customer relationship management (CRM), and back-office systems to provide their clients with complete PSA functionality for organizations.
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Portfolio and Project Management
Project portfolio management organizes a series of projects into a single portfolio consisting of reports that capture project objectives, costs, timelines, accomplishments, resources, risks, and other critical factors. Executives can regularly review entire portfolios, spread resources appropriately, and adjust projects to produce the highest departmental returns. As its name implies, project portfolio management groups projects so that they can be managed, the same way an investor would manage stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.
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Project and Process Management Features and Functions
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