The result is always the same: inconsistent schedules, cost surprises, limited visibility, and avoidable risk.

Whether you run a PMO, lead a programme, manage cost and risk, or oversee planning and controls, this guide explores how construction organisations can strengthen both project management and construction management by adopting a modern Microsoft-based approach supported by TPG ProjectPowerPack.

Microsoft Power Platform – Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and TPG’s advanced scheduling technology – this approach brings cost, schedule, governance, and reporting into a single enterprise solution.

TPG offers the ability to integrate multiple line of business systems, which is beneficial for managing complex construction projects.

This article explores the following topics:

• Why construction projects need digital project management
• Core challenges in construction project delivery
• How Microsoft tools support construction project management
• Microsoft Project vs. construction-specific software
• Integration with ERP and financial systems
• Best practices for enterprise construction PMOs
• When to adopt a Microsoft-based project management framework
• FAQs

Key Takeaways

• Construction organisations benefit from a single integrated Microsoft framework for project, portfolio, schedule, and cost management.
• TPG ProjectPowerPack adds enterprise scheduling, cost planning, governance workflows, risk and change management, and over 40 Power BI reports to Microsoft 365.
• A Microsoft-based approach improves schedule control, document governance, subcontractor coordination, cost visibility, and change management.
• Optional out-of-the-box integrations with line of business systems including SAP, Oracle, and Dynamics 365 streamline financial controls and portfolio reporting.
• Build a roadmap for adopting Microsoft tools across complex project management and construction management programmes.

Why Construction Projects Need Digital Project Management

Construction delivery operates within rising complexity, regulatory pressure, and stakeholder expectations. A key part of this shift is the move toward a Microsoft-based delivery environment.

TPG builds on Microsoft’s project management tools as the core platform, adding proven methods, governance, templates, and integration capabilities to deliver an enterprise-grade PPM solution. This helps enable a shift from fragmented processes to a consistent, scalable project delivery model.

Growing Complexity and Regulatory Requirements

Today, construction faces a web of regulatory obligations: CDM, BIM mandates, environmental compliance, labour requirements, planning controls, change-order governance, and extensive client reporting. Traditional manual methods cannot keep pace with:

• Multi-discipline coordination.
• Thousands of scheduled activities.
• Supply chain variability.
• Real-time commercial change.
• Safety and regulatory documentation.
• BIM model updates and versioning.

A modern digital system gives construction teams a consistent way to capture, track, and report the data needed for safe, compliant, and predictable delivery.

Why Traditional Spreadsheets and Standalone Tools Fail

Construction teams often use a combination of Excel, PDF, email, file servers, and discipline-specific products. These tools are helpful in isolation but problematic when used together:

• Schedules become misaligned between planners, QS teams, and delivery managers.
• Data is duplicated across systems.
• Cost forecasts do not match programme baselines.
• Subcontractor changes sit in email threads rather than structured workflows.
• Document versions drift, creating compliance risk.
• Reporting takes days rather than minutes.

Benefits of Adopting a Microsoft-Based Framework

A Microsoft-aligned construction delivery environment centralises schedule, cost, risk, change, and reporting. Benefits include:

• One version of the truth for all project and portfolio data.
• Standardised governance using Power Automate workflows (for changes, approvals, and project requests).
• Power BI reporting packs that give executives real-time visibility.
• Integration with the wider Microsoft ecosystem, such as Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, and Dynamics.

Low-code adaptability, enabling PMOs to shape governance without bespoke development.

Our tip: Many contractors find value in using Microsoft Teams as the single entry point for project delivery, to simplify communication and document management.

Core Challenges in Construction Project Delivery

Major construction programmes face recurring delivery barriers that erode predictability and margin. These challenges are often made worse by disconnected tools and isolated systems. Many organisations run multiple planning, cost, resource, and reporting tools that do not communicate with one another, making it difficult to maintain data quality and visibility.

This fragmentation is one of the biggest barriers to construction performance and a strong reason to adopt a unified Microsoft-based project environment.

Let’s unpack the most common issues:

Cost and Schedule Overruns

Mega-projects and infrastructure programmes often suffer from:

• Late design information.
• Contractor delays.
• Materials price escalation.
• Resource shortages.
• Uncontrolled change.
• Misalignment between cost forecast and schedule progress.

Without centralised planning and cost visibility, overruns become difficult to predict or correct.

Managing Change Orders and Subcontractor Dependencies

TPG ProjectPowerPack provides built-in change request logging, evaluation, approval workflows, and portfolio-level analysis, meaning commercial teams can quantify the cumulative impact of changes.

This supports:

• Faster subcontractor change assessments.
• Transparent approvals.
• Stronger claims preparation.
• Better forecasting accuracy.

Built on the Microsoft Power Platform and tightly integrated with Microsoft 365, TPG ProjectPowerPack gives teams a modern, centralised PPM environment that is simple to roll out and easy for users to adopt.

Document Control, Compliance (CDM, BIM), and Versioning Issues

Construction documentation is extensive: method statements, RAMS, BIM models, drawings, permits, design packages, quality forms, inspection records, and safety files. Without structured governance:

• Teams work from outdated documents.
• BIM federation becomes inconsistent.
• CDM documentation is difficult to track.
• Audits become reactive rather than proactive.

Using SharePoint and Teams, integrated directly with TPG ProjectPowerPack, centralises document libraries, tracks version history, and links documentation to schedule tasks, risks, and changes.

Lack of Integration between PM, Finance, and Field Data

Commercial teams, planners, and site managers often operate with different tools, making alignment challenging.

With TPG PSLink, organisations can synchronise SAP, Oracle, and Dynamics 365 data (alongside other systems) with project schedules, cost plans, and forecasts. This provides real-time visibility of cost performance across programmes.

How Microsoft Tools Support Construction Project Management

The Microsoft ecosystem offers comprehensive coverage of all major PPM areas, including scheduling, resource planning, cost control, portfolio management, workflows, and reporting.

Dataverse provides centralised data storage, while Teams, Scheduler, and Project deliver a modern interface, enabling organisations to access a flexible platform that is powerful and easy for teams to adopt. TPG builds on this foundation with industry-specific methods, templates, and governance models tailored for construction environments.

Microsoft 365 provides a powerful foundation for modern construction delivery. TPG ProjectPowerPack, the company’s PPM Project Tool for Microsoft 365, expands native Microsoft capabilities with governance, scheduling, cost planning, and reporting designed for enterprise construction teams.

The following sections outline how each component contributes to the overall system.

Our tip: TPG also supports fast rollouts through its QuickStart packages and multi-project visibility through TPG ProjectLink.

TPG Scheduler and Primavera: Portfolio Visibility and Scheduling

Construction teams can choose between:

• TPG Scheduler, a premium enterprise scheduling engine with critical path, extensive task links, baselines, resource utilisation, constraints, and inter-project links. The powerful TPG Scheduler tool allows for more streamlined projects, providing detailed project and task planning within a unified project management ecosystem.
• If you use Primavera P6 or other scheduling tools, PSLink can be used to integrate these tools into TPG ProjectPowerPack.
• This approach allows organisations to scale over time, beginning with core scheduling and gradually adding resource planning, multi-project coordination, risk and change management, or financial controls as maturity increases.

Planning can take place in the table, board, or Gantt view, directly within TPG ProjectPowerPack.

This flexibility supports:

• Workface planning.
• 4D sequencing.
• Multi-discipline coordination.
• Portfolio-level critical path visibility.
• Scenario analysis with project variants (optional).

Power BI: Cost, Earned Value, and KPI Dashboards

TPG’s integrated reporting pack contains more than 40 Power BI reports, covering:

• Portfolio and programme status.
• Cost and forecast performance.
• Risks and issues.
• Change impact.
• Resource demand and capacity.
• Drivers and priority scoring.

Because all your project, cost, and resource data live in Dataverse, Power BI operates from a single source of truth. This eliminates the inconsistencies that arise from spreadsheet-based reporting and provides the real-time visibility that construction PMOs require for portfolio-level decision-making.

For a deeper look at the types of dashboards construction organisations rely on, see TPG’s overview of the Key PPM Reports used across complex portfolios.

Power Platform: Automate Site Workflows and Approvals

Low-code flexibility helps construction businesses adapt governance without heavy IT involvement. Using Power Apps and Power Automate, PMOs can digitalise:

• Project intake and approvals.
• Permit workflows.
• Design package submissions.
• Change requests.
• Variation approvals.
• HSE checklists.
• Commercial sign-off steps.
• Risk and issue escalations.

SharePoint and Teams: Document Control and Collaboration Hub

• Microsoft Teams provides the entry point for projects.
• SharePoint stores your documents and other project artefacts.
• Power BI offers reporting in the same interface.
• TPG ProjectPowerPack connects the formal PPM data model.

This creates a unified workspace for project managers, planners, QS teams, and subcontractors.

Microsoft Project vs. Construction-Specific Software

Choosing the right project management technology depends on the needs of your portfolio, governance model, and tool ecosystem. Legacy solutions, such as Project Online and SharePoint workflows, are nearing end-of-support, making the move to a Power Platform-based PPM environment an important next step for many construction firms.

The following sections compare Microsoft Project with specialist tools like Primavera P6 and Procore. We outline when Microsoft is the stronger choice for enterprise-level delivery and highlight the governance and flexibility advantages of the Microsoft environment enhanced with TPG ProjectPowerPack.

How Microsoft with TPG ProjectPowerPack Compares to Primavera and Procore

• Primavera P6 is a specialist scheduling tool, widely used in civil and infrastructure projects.
• Procore provides strong field management, quality, and document control.

Microsoft, combined with TPG ProjectPowerPack, offers a broader enterprise ecosystem:

Our tip: If your organisation is already Microsoft 365-first, Microsoft-based PPM accelerates adoption and reduces change cost.

When to Choose Microsoft Solutions for Enterprise-Level Delivery

Microsoft plus TPG is a strong choice when:

• You need tight integration with Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Power BI.
• You want to manage portfolios, programmes, and governance in one place.
• You need flexibility, rather than a rigid construction point solution.
• Field teams already use Microsoft apps.
• You want a scalable PPM solution, without heavy custom development.

For organisations already working within Microsoft 365, the Microsoft approach reduces friction and drives adoption because teams remain in familiar tools, such as Teams and Project. This usability factor is key to achieving widespread adoption, especially in construction environments with diverse digital skill levels.

Flexibility and Governance Benefits of the Microsoft Ecosystem

TPG ProjectPowerPack supports:

• Project lifecycle governance.
• Stage gates.
• Portfolio prioritisation.
• Risk and change management.
• Action tracking.
• Stakeholder management.
• Time capturing.

These capabilities allow PMOs to shape governance around NEC, FIDIC, EPC, or bespoke organisational frameworks.

Integration with ERP and Financial Systems

Financial accuracy is crucial to construction performance, and integrating project and ERP systems is often the missing link.

The Microsoft approach integrates with ERP, CRM, Jira, DevOps, and more through standard connectors or ProjectPowerPack middleware, such as TPG PSLink, allowing the entire project environment to operate as a connected system.

Connecting Project and ERP Data (SAP, Dynamics)

Construction cost control relies on accurate, timely financial information. By connecting enterprise schedules with SAP or Dynamics, organisations gain:

• Budget visibility.
• Approved changes.
• Actual cost updates.
• Forecast alignment.
• Commitments and accruals.

Synchronising Cost and Schedule Data with TPG PSLink

TPG PSLink provides:

• Automated data exchange.
• Mapping of cost codes and WBS structures.
• Bi-directional synchronisation.
• Robust performance for large data volumes.

This removes manual reconciliation and improves cost predictability.

Benefits of Automated Data Exchange and Unified Reporting

With unified cost and schedule data:

• QS teams work with real-time figures.
• Forecasts are more accurate.
• PMOs gain consistent data across all programmes.
• Reports refresh automatically in Power BI.
• Executive dashboards show true performance, not manually compiled snapshots.

Best Practices for Enterprise Construction PMOs

High-performing construction PMOs rely on consistent structures, reliable data, and predictable governance. Because TPG ProjectPowerPack works directly inside Microsoft Teams, adoption is high, users work in tools they already know.

Don’t ignore these best practices:

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and Critical Path Method (CPM) Optimisation

WBS and CPM remain essential for controlling large construction schedules.

TPG Scheduler provides:

• Extensive task links.
• Critical path visibility.
• Constraints and calendars.
• Resource utilisation views.
• Baselines and Gantt comparisons.

Using Risk Registers and Governance Workflows

Project management and construction management organisations benefit from a unified approach to:

• Risk capture.
• Probability and impact scoring.
• Assigning mitigation actions.
• Overseeing risk escalation.
• Integrating risk into status reports.

Governance workflows using Power Automate standardise reviews and approvals.

BIM Integration via SharePoint for Document Versioning

Although TPG ProjectPowerPack is not a BIM tool, it complements BIM processes by:

• Hosting controlled document libraries.
• Managing version history.
• Linking documents to project tasks, risks, and changes.
• Providing clear audit trails.

This supports ISO 19650-aligned information management.

Reporting and Executive Dashboards in Power BI and Viva

Reports can surface in Power BI, Teams, SharePoint, and Viva, meeting stakeholders where they work. Executives can access KPIs such as:

• Earned value.
• CPI and SPI.
• Cost and schedule variance.
• Risk exposure.
• Change impacts.
• Resource capacity.

Portfolio performance.

Reading tip: Capacity Planning in Project Management – 4 Success Factors

When to Adopt a Microsoft-Based Project Management Framework

Adopting a Microsoft project management environment becomes a strategic advantage when legacy tools begin to limit performance.

Here’s how project management and construction management planners can identify the signs that their toolset is reaching its limits and outline a practical roadmap for Microsoft-first adoption. You can also share example success metrics from TPG clients who have already made the transition.

Signs Your Current Toolset Has Reached Its Limits

Your organisation is ready for modernisation if you experience:

• Repeated schedule slippage.
• Data discrepancies between cost, schedule, and procurement.
• Inconsistent reporting across divisions or regions.
• Heavy reliance on spreadsheets.
• Difficulty coordinating subcontractors.
• Lack of portfolio visibility.
• Inefficient document control or compliance gaps.
• Growing pressure to standardise governance.

The Microsoft Power Platform supports a staged adoption path. Organisations can start with essential functionality and then expand as their PPM maturity grows, adding features such as resource planning, multi-project dependencies, ERP integration, or advanced reporting. This flexibility enables teams to adopt the platform more easily without feeling overwhelmed.

Roadmap for Adoption: Pilot, Rollout, Integration

A typical adoption roadmap includes:

1. Discovery and PMO assessment: Understanding current tools, reporting needs, governance maturity, and ERP integration requirements.
2. Pilot project: Implement TPG ProjectPowerPack for one programme or functional area.
3. Scheduling integration: Decide whether to use TPG Scheduler or Primavera.
4. Portfolio and reporting setup: Deploy Power BI reporting packs linked to governance processes.
5. ERP and finance integration: Use TPG PSLink to synchronise cost data.
6. Organisation rollout: Train project managers, planners, QS teams, and field supervisors.
7. Optimisation and continuous improvement: Expand governance models, automation, and reporting

Example Success Metrics from TPG Clients

Although client names are confidential, typical outcomes include:

• 50–70% reduction in manual reporting effort.
• Faster change request turnaround.
• Improved forecasting accuracy.
• Higher PMO stakeholder satisfaction.
• Better resource planning visibility.
• Centralised document and compliance management.

Consistent portfolio-level decision-making.

FAQs

What’s the difference between project management and construction management?

Project management focuses on planning, scheduling, cost control, and governance across the lifecycle of a project. Construction management concentrates on site delivery, subcontractor coordination, safety, and quality control. Together, they form two sides of the same delivery framework.

What are the main advantages of project management in construction?

Key advantages of project management include better schedule predictability, improved cost control, structured change governance, stronger risk management, and more consistent reporting. A modern system like TPG ProjectPowerPack strengthens all these areas.

Can Microsoft Project integrate with my ERP system?

Yes. Using TPG PSLink, Microsoft Project, and TPG ProjectPowerPack, you can integrate with SAP, Oracle, Dynamics 365, and other ERP systems to synchronise costs, budgets, actuals, and commitments.

Does Power BI support construction KPIs and earned value reporting?

Yes. Power BI provides dashboards for earned value (CPI, SPI), cost variance, schedule variance, risk exposure, resource utilisation, and portfolio performance. TPG’s reporting pack includes over 40 predefined construction-relevant reports.

Can Primavera P6 integrate with My ERP System, like SAP?

Yes. Primavera P6 can integrate with ERP systems, which often requires specialist middleware or custom development. By comparison, Microsoft plus TPG PSLink offers out-of-the-box ERP connectivity for many organisations.

Our final tips

Get to know the individually adaptable “PPM Paradise” – the optimal environment for your enterprise-wide project, program, portfolio and resource management. Download the eBook now (just click, no form).

And sign up for our bi-weekly blog newsletter to make sure you receive all our updates.

Is there anything you would like to add regarding construction and project management with Microsoft tools? We’ll be happy to respond to your comment below.

Achim Schmidt-Sibeth
Senior Marketing Manager

After earning his engineering degree in environmental technology, he gained many years of experience in project management through his work at an engineering office, an equipment manufacturer, and a multimedia agency. Achim Schmidt-Sibeth and his team have been responsible for marketing and communication at TPG The Project Group for many years now.

Read more about Achim Schmidt-Sibeth on LinkedIn.

Der Beitrag Project Management in the Construction Industry: Enterprise Delivery Guide erschien zuerst auf Blog Project Management for Companies.

How do you establish capacity planning in project management and master its challenges? In this article, you will learn how to succeed in capacity planning in the project environment with practical tips. Here is an overview of the topics:

• Capacity planning definition
• Benefits and risks of capacity planning in project management
• 4 steps to successful capacity planning in project management
  • Step 1: Necessary processes with the right staff
  • Step 2: Complete and up-to-date project data
  • Step 3: Identify the actually available capacities
  • Step 4: Consolidate capacities and requirements
• Findings of the PMO Survey 2020 regarding capacity planning
• Conclusion and checklist: Capacity planning in project management

Let us begin!

Capacity Planning Definition

Strategic capacity planning is concerned with the predictive provision of appropriate resources in the form of employees with the necessary skills. It must ensure that appropriate employees can implement strategically relevant projects at the right time.

Note: The terms “(strategic) capacity planning” and “strategic resource planning” are synonymous.

The tasks of capacity planning in project management are usually taken on by portfolio managers or the Project Management Office (PMO) in coordination with:

1. Project managers (requirements regarding skills)
2. Team leaders (overview of available resources)

The figure below illustrates the responsibilities of the roles in the project environment of a company.

Benefits and Risks of Capacity Planning in Project Management

You can gain numerous benefits from employee capacity planning. With capacity planning, you:

• Make sure you reserve the most resources for the most important projects – rather than staffing unimportant ones
• Obtain a complete overview of all resources and their assignments to projects and basic load; this will keep you informed about the overall resource utilization at all times
• Know which additional projects you can start and carry out
• Identify resource bottlenecks in good time and can react to them according to corporate strategy
• Avoid resource conflicts, as they do not even arise

With inadequate or without capacity planning, you run various risks:

• Due to inadequate resource allocation, projects are not finished on time
• Project costs may rise, as there are too few appropriate resources
• Some business opportunities you cannot exploit, as the required skills are not available in good time
• You have significantly increased coordination efforts to resolve resource conflicts

All of this can result in dissatisfied customers, hence the importance of capacity planning!

4 Steps to Successful Capacity Planning in Project Management

This is how you reach your goal of successful capacity planning in four practical steps:

Step 1: Necessary Processes with the Right Staff

The strategic planning of capacities depends on:

• Dynamics at your company
• Your industry
• Number of projects
• Number of resources
• Duration of projects

Different companies tend to undergo the strategic process of capacity planning at different intervals:

• One to four times a year for companies developing and making products
• Possibly monthly for companies offering services
• Only on occasion for companies planning few major projects

Those involved in the strategic capacity planning process are:

• Management with strategic targets
• Team leaders and heads of department who must provide resource information
• Project managers who must update ongoing projects by the due date
• PMO preparing new projects properly and controlling the overall process of capacity planning

Make sure all data is complete and up to date by the due date. For this, all involved must pull together in unison.

To achieve this, you need a PMO that has the relevant competencies.

The PMO:

• Defines processes
• Trains the people involved
• Motivates them to perform their tasks in good time

The PMO may also support the project managers and team leaders in executing their tasks. This depends on the type of PMO you have.

Our tip: For successful strategic capacity planning, it is vital to have the support of a strong PMO with backing from top management.

Read this to find out more: PMO Setup in 4 Simple Steps

Promote the benefits of cyclical coordination (at set intervals) to all participants. This will motivate them to get involved. It is crucial to fix the intervals for coordination individually. They depend on your company’s possibilities and necessities.

Moreover, you must be minute in defining how to prepare as well as conduct planning and decision meetings.

You must manage to make all relevant decisions in a matter of hours. At the same time, the decisions on project start and resource availability need to be well founded. This will only work out if you have a clear agenda and stringent moderation in the context of a regular project portfolio meeting.

Our tip: See to the publication of the results of the project portfolio meetings. Employees tend to expect a lot from the PMO’s work and its controlling influence in the interest of better resource management. This is where there is a lot of potential for good news. If you sell it well.

Step 2: Complete and Up-to-Date Project Data

First, you register all projects with the essential information in a central database. This requires details such as:

• Name
• Project manager
• Sponsor
• Start
• Finish
• Traffic light indicators for status and resource requirements

For ongoing projects, the realistic remaining effort is most relevant – based on the current situation.

For new projects, it is necessary to meet the minimum requirement for resource planning. This means you must plan all required skills – not necessarily people – per month or quarter.

It is definitely not enough to look only at the total work without the distribution over time.

This is exactly where it starts to get complex.

Find out your optimum specificity by beginning with the roughest possible but still complete planning.

Our tip: Everyone asks for detailed planning, as it appears to be the better basis. But consider that this requires a higher planning effort. This effort will have to be made again and again in the future. So find out your optimum specificity. What is important above all is complete planning.

Prioritization of Projects

If there are more project proposals than the company can carry out, you need to prioritize them. This allows you to decide which new projects you can start.

There are various methods of prioritizing. They can be suitable to a greater or lesser extent – depending on the number of projects and decision-makers.

You might also like our Project Portfolio Management 7-Step Guide.

Eisenhower’s rating according to importance and urgency is one way. It will help you to get good results quickly.

But the easiest way is to make the decision-makers prioritize the list of new projects.

Our tip: Turn to the relevant decision-makers when determining weight and urgency of the projects.

If there are many decision-makers as well as many projects, you might have to consider a different course. You might need to establish strategic drivers. These must be prioritized and weighted and assigned to the projects accordingly. This will allow the system to calculate a prioritization.

Check on all accounts if the most effort is going towards the most important projects.

Here is how you do it: you match the importance of the drivers to the corresponding efforts of the assigned projects.

Identify unimportant projects which it might be best to discontinue. This can free up resources for more important new projects.

Observe the dependencies among the projects, too. Some development projects can only start once the results of basic projects are available. Maybe you have also planned several alternative scenarios. Naturally, only one of these needs to be implemented.

Simple Excel lists soon prove to be inadequate when it comes to prioritization and dependencies. Professional capacity planning tools provide excellent support for these challenges.

Our tip: When implementing new kinds of projects, e.g. in the R&D area, you often face unknowns or various approaches to a solution. Resource requirements tend to be relatively uncertain or rather different from case to case. We recommend you divide such projects into research and implementation. This allows you to limit the uncertainty in the research part via a time budget. Based on the results of the research you will be able to plan the implementation part anew and in a more precise way.

Further reading: PMO Tools for Successful Multi-Project Management

Step 3: Identify the Actually Available Capacities

It does not make sense to analyze each person individually. While this would be desirable, it would be too much effort. It would be confusing, too.

Displaying the total capacity of all employees in one chart is not wise either. Employees have different skills which you must deploy as required.

A clear and sensible level of detail can be obtained by consolidation at skill level. Some companies also form teams according to skills. In some circumstances, this permits planning at the level of these teams. In most cases, this is easy to implement.

Read this article to find out about using skills management in resource planning.

The level of detail regarding the skills should bear relation to the effort. The capacity plan must remain easy to understand at all times. The above principle also applies here: as rough as possible, as detailed as necessary.

Moreover, you must use the actual availability for projects in your calculations. There are two options to achieve this:

1. You deduct basic load or absences and operations from the total resource capacity
2. You compare the basic load and the projects with the full capacity

This is ultimately a matter of tools and the decision-makers’ preferences.

How the basic load or operations are dealt with is an important factor for planning precision. To keep it simple, you can use a flat estimate across the entire year.

But it is preferable to retrieve the team leaders’ planning on a monthly basis.

Our tip: Be sure to involve the team leaders in your project capacity planning. Provide them with a suitable tool for tactical resource planning. The tool should be capable of transferring the team leaders’ data to the project and portfolio management system. Team leaders have an interest in planning all activities outside of projects anyway. It can be simple to transfer their data from Excel into a professional tool.

Reading tip: 6 Steps to Resource Planning Implementation

Step 4: Consolidate Capacities and Requirements

At this point, you have the capacities for each skill and the requirements from the projects at hand. Now, you must examine how these fit together.

Find out about 7 success factors for multi-project management here.

In order to control them, all skills and their utilization must be viewable on one page in an appropriate way. After all, a project usually involves various skills.

With every change you make, the effect on all skills should be visible at once. This requires appropriate resource diagrams showing multiple skills on one screen.

When you add new projects to the portfolio, this must be in line with their priority and remaining availability.

Your approach must be similar to filling a glass with stones and sand. You add the large stones first, then the pebbles and at last the sand. Shaking and rattling helps the sand to fill all the gaps.

You may have excess capacity for some skills. In this case, identify tasks for the sales department or product management. Or you might identify potential for retraining. In times of ever-changing environments, this is a valuable insight – if it comes at the right time.

Learn more about Resource Management – Basics and Methods here.

A more common problem will be resource or skill overload. There are some simple and logical ways of resolving these:

• Compensate for the missing capacities with the aid of internal or even external resources
• Change the priority of the projects or drop some projects altogether
• Postpone the projects far enough into the future that they fit into the given resource situation

For all three options, you will need an optimum database at any rate.

But be aware that the database is based on personal estimates. And that it is exposed to political currents.

There is one difficulty you will face time and again when communicating about the workload of the teams. You must make it clear to all involved that the glass is full and nothing new can be taken on.

One trick: Ask this simple question whenever too much is expected to go into the portfolio: what can we remove to make room for the new? This will create the necessary awareness among all stakeholders.

You could also ask what part of “no” they did not understand.

Enjoying a drink together can help as well. This will relieve pressure and improve the atmosphere. After all, there is always room for this in a glass filled with stones, pebbles and sand!

Reliable Data Is the Basis of Successful Capacity Management

No matter whether they are about bringing in external resources or postponing projects: the decisions remain human decisions. But you should always make these decisions based on the best possible data.

To obtain this data, you need suitable software tools for capacity planning. Without the appropriate portfolio management software support, which also helps with strategic resource planning, you will find the tasks involved hard to master.

Are you working with tables in Excel or something similar? Are you dealing with a certain degree of complexity and amount of data? In this case, you will only achieve the best outcome in capacity planning and decision-making with a lot of effort – or not at all.

Our tip: Define your precise objectives and requirements before investing in a tool. Plan a phased introduction of the tool to avoid overwhelming those involved. Only then does the purchase make sense. And you are on the right path to higher resource efficiency.

Reading tip: Requirements for resource planning software for the roles involved

Findings of the PMO Survey 2020 regarding Capacity Planning

In the context of a comprehensive TPG Survey on the state of the PMO in 2020, we derived an interesting result from the responses of 330 companies with a PMO.

Learn more about the challenges of resource management – capacity planning as well as tactical and operational resource planning.

Companies that can be classed as high and top performers have implemented strategic capacity planning much better than low performers.

In the case of the low performers, strategic capacity planning almost does not feature among the responsibilities of the PMO.

In addition, top-performing companies were half as likely to name lack of resources as a reason for unsuccessful projects.

The top performers did not name insufficient staff qualification as a reason for unsuccessful projects either. This was because they were clearly better positioned in terms of skills management than the other performance levels.

What we can take away from this: strategic capacity planning and good skills management clearly pay off in the pursuit of project success.

Conclusion and Checklist: Capacity Planning in Project Management

This article has introduced four important steps to successful strategic capacity planning:

• Step 1: Establish all necessary processes with the appropriate staff – from top management and the PMO to team leaders, department heads and project managers.
• Step 2: Provide for complete and up-to-date project data and prioritize your projects.
• Step 3: Identify the capacities that are actually available at skills level. To do this, define the basic load and confer with the team leaders at regular intervals.
• Step 4: Consolidate the requirements (step 2) and the capacities (step 3). Identify underload as well as overload and try to balance them.

In addition, you have learned about two further important parameters. These can make for successful resource capacity planning in project management:

• An efficient PMO with backing from top management
• A suitable software tool to provide a solid database

Find the most important points summed up in the following checklist:

Checklist Capacity Planning in Project Management

• Appoint a PMO with the appropriate competencies
• Identify the roles and individuals involved
• Promote the benefits of strategic resource / capacity management
• Warn stakeholders of the risks of going without capacity management
• Ensure a coordination process with meetings at set intervals
• Keep all ongoing and new projects up to date
• Control the priorities of the projects
• Consider the dependencies between the projects
• See to complete resource planning by the team leaders, i.e., team capacity planning
• Be exact in preparing and conducting planning sessions
• Create a clear overview by means of a dynamic chart with project lines and resource diagrams
• Introduce the topic step by step to avoid overwhelming those involved
• Provide each role with the appropriate IT tool

Our final tips

Get to know the individually adaptable “PPM Paradise” – the optimal environment for your enterprise-wide project, program, portfolio and resource management. Download the eBook now (just click, no form).

And sign up for our bi-weekly blog newsletter to make sure you receive all our updates.

Is there anything you would like to add regarding project capacity planning? What gives you a headache? We’ll be happy to respond to your comment below.

Der Beitrag Capacity Planning in Project Management – 4 Important Success Factors (with Checklist) erschien zuerst auf Blog Project Management for Companies.

In this article, which includes many practical tips, you will learn about the fastest way to achieve functional and accepted project portfolio management in your company using our 7-step guide. A strong PMO plays an important role in this.

The following topics will be discussed:

• Project portfolio management definition
• Why implement project portfolio management? Important arguments
• The 7-step guide to optimizing your project portfolio management
  • Step 1: Define criteria for projects
  • Step 2: Define a process for project initiation
  • Step 3: Define a method for prioritization
  • Step 4: Start with a complete overview of running projects
  • Step 5: Compare the planned new projects with the remaining capacity and budget
  • Step 6: Keep a constant eye on project handling
  • Step 7: Close projects with a regulated project closure process
• Conclusion: Project portfolio management 7-step guide

Let us start with the definition of project portfolio management:

Project Portfolio Management Definition

Project portfolio management (PPM) ensures that you work on the right projects as a company – i.e., you have the optimal mix of projects to achieve the company’s goals. The project portfolio management process encompasses:

• Assessing the project pipeline
• Selecting projects based on their urgency / importance
• Allocating resources
• Monitoring the progress and goal achievement of all projects.

Portfolio management is a regular task that is usually supported by a PMO.

Why Implement Project Portfolio Management? Important Arguments

The five most important reasons to implement project portfolio management are:

• Focusing on “feasible” and “economically viable” projects
• Having a complete overview of your portfolio
• Benefitting from a clear preparation for selecting the projects
• Making your decisions based on priorities in accordance with corporate strategy
• Planning your capacities ahead of time

To be able to quantify the benefits of a new PPM tool, try ROI calculation.

Often, another question comes up:

What Is the Difference between Project Portfolio Management and Multi-Project Management?

In our view, project portfolio management addresses the strategic aspects of the enterprise-wide project portfolio. The motto for this is: “Do the right projects.”

Multi-project management, on the other hand, encompasses only a subset of all enterprise-wide projects, e.g., those included in the project list of one organizational unit and not assigned to a program (cf. program management). The corresponding motto for each individual project is: “Do the projects right.”

There is no one universally applicable definition of both terms, however.

The 7-Step Guide to Optimizing Your Project Portfolio Management

To be able to assess a portfolio of projects, you must first have information on every individual project. Based on these factors, you subsequently rate your projects.

For each project, ask the following questions to begin with:

• What is the strategic relevance of the project?
• What is the cost?
• What are the resource requirements?
• What deadlines must be met?

The challenge of project portfolio management is to determine the optimal combination of your projects in the portfolio, usually using strategic criteria (business drivers). Thus, you decide:

• Which projects to implement next
• Which ones are less important and will have to wait

In the subsequent 7 steps, you will learn in detail how to implement the project portfolio management process to set up a successful portfolio environment.

Step 1: Define Criteria for Projects

Not all initiatives are projects. Much can be handled as part of operations. With a project-worthiness analysis, you can determine the threshold at which an initiative should be treated as a project at your company.

You can differentiate projects based on the project type (minor / normal / major project). This will allow you to define the methods to be used.

The project-worthiness analysis determines when an initiative should be treated as a project

Simply use this approach to determine when an initiative should be considered a project. Only then is it to be added to the project portfolio selection process.

Design your individual project-worthiness analysis according to your requirements. Possible criteria for this could be:

• Number of departments involved
• Size of the project team
• Staff costs
• Amount of investment
• Duration
• Inherent complexity
• Novelty for the project team
• Quality risk
• External effect

Our tip: Download the free Excel template for your project-worthiness analysis. You can easily adapt the template to your needs.

Step 2: Define a Process for Project Initiation

At any rate, you should ensure one thing when selecting the portfolio: incorporate all projects requested internally or externally. Therefore, define a standardized process for initiating projects.

It is best to use central idea management software for the standardized recording of tasks, ideas, and project requests. Specify a methodical approach including:

• Workflows
• Permissions
• Criteria for the steps of approval

Reading tip: How to implement idea management – benefits and success factors.

And see to the appropriate quality of planning for new projects.

Find answers to the following questions in your project portfolio process:

• How do we collect project proposals or ideas?
• In what way do we assess potential projects?
• How do we approve them? And who is involved in this?
• Which PPM tools do we employ?
• How do we ensure that all involved know about the process and actually live it?
• How do we guarantee the quality of the new projects’ rough planning?

Our tip: Make sure the project portfolio process you design is as simple as possible. This will ensure acceptance and is especially important if you are performing project portfolio management as PMO members. Additional change management will further increase acceptance.

Read article on the importance of Change Management in Project Management.

Step 3: Define a Method for Prioritization

The next project portfolio management task is the prioritization of projects. Prioritization is not a one-off activity. Whenever the circumstances change, you must adapt your priorities. You can determine the strategic relevance of the projects by assigning business drivers proportionally.

These drivers must be clearly separated and distinct in meaning. Possible drivers can be:

• Increasing product quality
• Achieving a higher customer satisfaction
• Increasing staff satisfaction
• Achieving higher cost efficiency
• Expanding into new markets

What is more, the drivers need to be complete from a strategic perspective. In this case, complete means that the drivers should be as few as possible but as many as necessary.

Subsequently, you define the drivers’ importance among themselves.

Our tip: Choose at least 3 strategic drivers but fewer than 10. This will ensure good handling and a meaningful overview on a sensible basis.

Step 4: Start with a Complete Overview of Running Projects

First, you record all running projects with their essential information. To do this, use a central, database-assisted list in your project management software. The required project information should include at least:

• Start
• Finish
• Effort
• Cost
• Sponsor
• Project manager

Assign the relevant strategic business drivers to each of the existing projects.

Proceed by checking whether the most effort actually goes towards the most important projects. To this end, compare the importance of the drivers with the corresponding efforts of the assigned projects.

Identify unimportant projects it might be best to stop. This can free up resources for more important new projects.

Our tip: It is hard to present the financial value of a project that does not produce direct revenue. So it is best to put the initial focus on the importance resulting from the strategic drivers. You can always add a financial evaluation later. You can also divide the project portfolio into projects with revenue and those without.

Reading tip: Microsoft Project Management Tool Overview

Step 5: Compare the Planned New Projects with the Remaining Capacity and Budget Available

In the next step, you add your new list of desired additional projects to the portfolio of running projects. Appropriate portfolio management software provides optimal support for this task through a transparent overview of projects and resource utilization over the relevant period.

Compare the new projects’ effort and cost planning with the remaining capacity and budgets available. This is about finding out which project could start when.

It will be necessary to plan all new projects roughly. Thus, the resource requirements along the timeline become apparent. Planning should not be down to the level of individual people but to skills. This will keep the effort lower for you.

Learn why to use skills management in this article.

Of course, you will have to assign the new projects to the strategic drivers. Otherwise, it will be difficult to prioritize the new projects with the highest strategic contribution.

Only include small projects with low strategic contribution at the end, to fill in the gaps.

Our tip: Make your plans as rough as possible but as detailed as necessary. This step requires very little. The following principle applies: it is better to make a complete and rough plan than an incomplete and overly detailed one. In other words, it is preferable to have ALL projects show up in the overview, at least roughly. Leaving the list incomplete is not advisable. In that case, an overall statement on feasibility would become impossible, as the data would be incomplete.

Step 6: Keep a Constant Eye on Project Handling

The penultimate project portfolio management task is constant control. You should ensure at all costs that the data for all projects is:

• Regularly updated.
• Reported back to the central PPM solution.

The current data is the basis you need, if you ever want to determine:

• Whether new projects can be started in the future.
• When these projects should be started.
• What kind of projects these could be.

You should monitor the portfolio continuously. Also, keep checking the priorities of running projects.

Whenever strategic guidelines change and ongoing projects are not in line with the new strategic direction, you should not rule out a project termination.

Our tip: Arrange for a monthly project portfolio meeting. The latter has to be prepared well by the PMO. As for projects that need to be stopped: rather a calamitous end than an endless calamity.

Step 7: Close Projects with a Regulated Project Closure Process

You should have every project undergo a closure process. The latter includes a final project review with a target-actual comparison of costs and results.

In addition, you should:

• Communicate the Lessons Learned
• Archive the project properly
• Officially discharge the project manager responsible (relieve him or her of the responsibility for the finished project)

After that, everyone is aware that a project has been declared closed. And that the staff can now be assigned to other projects.

Our tip: In the interest of good company culture and communication, consider this: successfully completed projects could be a reason to celebrate. Alongside the results and successes, you would be able to present Lessons Learned. This occasion would give you an opportunity to increase the responsible project managers’ motivation for future projects.

PPRM Tools for Modern Portfolio Management

There are several powerful products for advanced (multi-) project, portfolio and resource management (PPRM) – in the cloud or on premises. These will make your work in a multi-project and portfolio environment much easier.

Our recommendation: take a look at TPG ProjectPowerPack, our tool based on Microsoft 365 and Power Platform. This modern environment provides you with:

• Different portfolios with any number of projects and key performance indicators
• A customizable overview of projects with predefined views for your own, ongoing, completed and all projects; a bar chart for each project’s duration; you can also create and save your own views
• Priorities for portfolio compilation calculated from driver values that can be individually defined; priority dashboard for projects and drivers; the option to sort project and project proposal lists by priority, even in portfolios and programs

Der Beitrag Project Portfolio Management: 7-Step Guide + Download erschien zuerst auf Blog Project Management for Companies.

What you will learn here:

• How to identify, assess and actively manage risks at an early stage instead of merely reacting
• Risk management is a continuous process – not a one-off event.
• An open risk culture within a company increases the success rate of projects.

Look forward to the following chapters with important practical tips:

• Risk management definition
• What are examples of risks in projects?
• Risk management example
• What are risk attitudes for projects?
• Risk management example, risk analysis and key tasks
• Risk measures for risk response in projects
• Conclusion – Risk management in project management

First, we will start with the definition of risk management and the assessment of what makes risk management in project management important.

Enjoy reading.

Risk Management Definition

Risk management is a management task in which the risks of an organization are identified, analyzed and later evaluated. To this end, the organization’s higher-level objectives, strategies and policies for risk management must be defined. In detail, this concerns the definition of criteria according to which the risks are classified and evaluated, the methods of risk identification, the responsibilities for risk decisions, the provision of resources for risk defense, internal and external communication about the identified risks, and the qualification of staff for risk management. (Source: German-language Wikipedia)

The worldwide professional association Project Management Institute (PMI) defines “risk” as events with uncertain occurrence. Hence, besides threats the term also includes chances.

Risk management in project management is meant to increase the chances of achieving the project goals. At the same time, the aim is to minimize the risk of project failure. Professional risk management is an iterative process. It requires the constant review of realities, the reassessment and adjustment of measures and plans.

What Are Examples of Risks in Projects

For instance, the following risks might have to be managed in the project environment:

• Economic losses
• Damage to company reputation
• Dangers for health and life of product users
• Schedule delays
• Technical problems
• Definition of project scope
• Resource scarcity
• Quality problems, etc.

Yet, in everyday project management the opposite effect can occur only too quickly: possible high-impact risks go undetected, are forgotten or ignored. Better not to think about what could happen.

Does that sound familiar?

Practical experience has shown that overlooking risks in the project environment is dangerous. This applies even if risk management is not mandatory in your organization. It can get dangerous if health and life, monetary factors or the company reputation are at stake in a project.

The well-conceived establishment of risk management helps lead projects to success.

Good project managers try to identify risks and plan how to handle them.

To what extent project managers actually implement measures and which measures they decide to use depends on the industry and the individual company culture.

By the way: the uncertainty inherent in a project can be a risk factor in itself.

Risk management in projects should take place during the kick-off workshop.

Risk Management Example

Often, undesirable long-term effects are lurking in the shadows, even in cases with seemingly manageable project risks. Here are two short risk management examples:

• Example 1: Essentially, the project for the new development of customer satisfaction surveys was not a big thing. However, later, it became apparent that important questions had been forgotten and now data for evaluation is missing…
• Example 2: The online form generates errors and brings more frustration than satisfaction to customers. This results in more and more of them turning elsewhere…

With risk management and a more mindful approach beforehand, the project participants might have avoided these kinds of risks after all.

For this reason, there are means and methods of effective risk management. In some cases, their use can make or break the success of a project.

Learn what makes projects successful in our article about project success.

What Are Risk Attitudes for Projects?

You can ask yourself this: as a project manager, am I rather:

• Risk-averse (unwilling to take risks)?
• Risk-tolerant (not likely to dwell on risks)?
• Risk-oriented (taking risks consciously)?

Studies have shown that many project managers as a rule are rather risk-averse – except when they have to navigate their project through an acute crisis. Pressure to succeed and be on schedule often do the rest.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with acting cautiously. However, it is important not to miss out on big opportunities for this reason.

The better approach is to analyze risks closely before taking a decision on how to deal with them.

Example: “Is our only reason not to roll out the new software throughout the company that we are unsure about the effects? Or have we assessed the risks carefully and drawn up an appropriate schedule – in other words, do we know what we are doing?”

Our tip: Be aware of both your company’s and your own risk attitude. This should be clear before you plan your risk management in project management. And make sure you communicate any deviations from the standard process actively and with a sound justification for the respective project situation.

Risk Management in Different Industries

Naturally, your industry also plays a vital role in risk management. Highly regulated and often risky environments, such as the finance sector, will always tend to be more cautious. They also have to demand a certain approach from their project managers.

There are industries in which the lives of the users could be at risk in projects and with products, for instance the aeronautical, automotive, or in some cases the construction, industry. They tend to involve calculated risk management for this reason alone. In their case, the responsibility is very high.

Likewise, project managers tend to implement projects carrying a high risk of damage to reputation for the company with more caution than those in which the good reputation is not particularly at risk.

Risk Management Example, Risk Analysis and Key Tasks

Project managers looking to handle risks in a professional way must first ensure they have a full toolbox. Below, you will get to know a few of these techniques.

Task 1: Risk Identification

To identify risks, you need techniques that trigger creative thought processes. You can:

• Check project documents
• Call meetings with stakeholders and experts
• Organize brainstorming sessions
• Create checklists

If that is not enough and there is reason to suspect that several important risks might yet be unidentified, the Delphi method can help.

With the Delphi Method, the project manager surveys a group of experts individually and anonymously. Should there be a stark difference between the responses, you communicate them to all involved. The purpose of this is to spur discussion. You repeat the procedure until the statements no longer diverge as much.

The benefit of the Delphi Method is that it helps you ensure that:

• Everyone speaks their mind openly
• No one is swayed too much
• No one takes a backseat either, e.g. because others may appear to be dominant

Nominal Group Technique: The Nominal Group Technique is used for similar reasons: it works in the same way as brainstorming. However, rather than everyone calling out their idea, they take it down on a piece of paper. Afterwards, you collect these notes. This helps you ensure that quieter voices on your team will also be heard.

SWOT Analysis: If you are working in a project with high uncertainties and are breaking new ground as a team, you might find an analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT analysis) helpful. With the aid of the four dimensions, you consider in which areas you as a company or a project team are good and where you still see potential for improvement. From this, you derive risks for your project.

Pre-Mortem Approach: Another interesting practice has been tried and tested in agile projects: in the pre-mortem, teams imagine their project as failed already and ask themselves what might have happened and why.

As opposed to the post-mortem approach, i.e., the project autopsy after the failure, this event takes place at the beginning of the project. From this, they derive recommendations for action. The intention is to prevent the failure of the project, if at all possible.

Agile, traditional or hybrid? Which method to use for what project. Read now.

Brain scientists were able to prove that the change in perspective (we imagine we were already in the future looking back) leads to participants engaging in scenarios much more closely and creatively than mere predictive brainstorming.

Our tip: Whichever method you end up picking in each particular case: at the end, you should come out with a risk register, i.e., a list of identified risks in your project.

However, be aware that at this stage you may still have unidentified risks. You will not be able to predict all. Use the risk register document e.g. for the communication with stakeholders. Or use it to diminish the risk of losing sight of project risks.

Do not forget to keep checking and updating the risk document at regular intervals. You should also write down strategies for handling each of the risks in the document.

Our tip: To avoid planning redundant measures in risk management, it is worth analyzing the root causes. You may find a common cause for several risks. You could try to fix this and thus master several risks at once.

Task 2: Risk Analysis in Projects and Its Visualization

Your next step in risk management is a qualitative risk analysis in project management.

When Do You Perform a Risk Analysis in Project Management?

Risk analysis identifies risks and opportunities within a project and evaluates and prioritizes them. Analysis takes places after risk identification and is an iterative process which is repeated throughout the course of the project. An effective risk analysis presents all risks threatening the success of a project in a way that is transparent for all project participants. This makes it easier to steer a project in a lower-risk direction.

Thus, risk analysis in projects is a way of evaluating and weighing the identified risks. Thus, you determine their urgency, possible effects and priority.

You can further analyze those risks which you deem to be most dangerous for your project.

For this purpose, there are several detailed diagram techniques, such as:

• The tornado diagram for visualizing the estimated effects
• The Monte Carlo simulation for acting out scenarios with a random generator
• Decision trees for narrowing down possible measures

• With a risk matrix, you visualize active risks in a colored matrix of impact over probability. The risk table makes communication within the project team easier for you. This tool can help you present the risk situation clearly to project sponsors or the steering committee. The graphical visualization in the risk matrix supports project managers in setting priorities and developing response strategies for the risks as will be described further below.

Learn more about reporting and the risk matrix in our project status report article.

Monetary Risk Analysis for Creation of Reserves

When it comes to risks, it is particularly important to keep an eye on possible financial losses and cushion them if necessary. In general, you have the option to calculate the expected value of risks using the formula below. This is the purpose of the monetary risk analysis in project management:

Expected monetary value = probability of a risk (%) * expected financial impact

From this, you can derive possible risk surcharges, i.e. reserves created for identified and analyzed risks.

Top management, on the other hand, maintains more general reserves for anything that might occur without being previously identified.

Our tip: The sooner you address a risk in a project with risk analysis as part of risk management, the more budget-friendly and effective the solution will be. Thus, address risk issues at the very beginning, if a project is of high importance to your company.

Task 3: Planning Risk Measures in the Case of Risk Acceptance

The creation of risk surcharges and reserves is a form of active risk acceptance. You put up with the occurrence of a risk, but not without making provisions.

If the risk does not materialize, the reserves will be released.

Risk Measures for Risk Response in Projects

The following is true of risk management in project management: what type of measure is suited to which project risk will result from the analysis and the actual options in any situation.

Frequent types of risk measures are:

• Avoidance / Prevention (eliminating or evading the danger)
• Mitigation (reducing the probability of occurrence or the extent of the damage)
• Transfer (transferring responsibility to a third party, such as an insurance company)
• Active acceptance (arranging for risk surcharges and reserves)
• Passive acceptance (doing nothing)
• Escalation (asking management for help)

Passive acceptance (outright acceptance without taking action) can be an adequate reaction to some risks for you. Other risks may require the provision of reserves, the purchase of insurance, the involvement of top management or further measures from you.

It is important to make the decisions on the treatment of risks on a carefully considered basis. To this end, you must identify, analyze and judge risks in advance – i.e., live risk management.

Equally important, if not more, is the understanding that it is not enough to look at risks only once at the beginning of the project. Professional risk management is an iterative process requiring constant assessment of realities, reevaluation and adaptation of measures and plans.

Our tip: Give thought to possible risks in your projects on a regular basis. It is not enough to do this only at the beginning! For risks with high impact and high probability of occurrence, you should always have specific measures planned and communicate these openly. And check periodically if these measures are still adequate.

Conclusion – Risk Management in Project Management

This article has outlined why active risk management is useful in projects and which threats it can help avoid. It can get dangerous if health and life, monetary factors or the company reputation are at stake in a project.

In addition, you have become acquainted with several methods for risk identification and assessment, including agile techniques.

Professional risk management in project management is feasible if you know a few tricks and tweaks. And it is worthwhile: if you actively identify, analyze and communicate your risks, irrespective of industry and risk-taking propensity, you will be able to look back on more project success.

Have the courage to approach this topic! It will certainly pay off for you straight away once a theoretical risk becomes reality.

Our final tips

Get to know the individually adaptable “PPM Paradise” – the optimal environment for your enterprise-wide project, program, portfolio and resource management. Download the eBook now (just click, no form).

And sign up for our bi-weekly blog newsletter to make sure you receive all our updates.

Is there anything you want to add on the topic of risk management? What gives you a headache? We’ll be happy to respond to your comment below!

About the author:Antje Lehmann-Benz, PMP, PMI-ACP, PSM expert is a trainer for project management with a particular focus on agile practices and Scrum seminars. Furthermore, she has experience as a software trainer (JIRA, Confluence) and consultant. In addition to teaching frameworks and theory, she is experienced in the use of agile games and practical exercises to reinforce the knowledge gained.

Read more about Antje Lehmann-Benz on Linkedin.

Der Beitrag Risk Management in Project Management – Practical Tips and How to Do It Right erschien zuerst auf Blog Project Management for Companies.

• PMO setup – Just think of it as a normal project
• PMO setup – Step 1: Current status – analysis & general concept
• PMO setup – Step 2: Preparation and specification
• PMO setup – Step 3: Implementation of the plans
• PMO setup – Step 4: Make the PMO an integral part of normal operations
• Change management – A key success factor right from the start
• Conclusion – PMO setup

After discussing the recommended four steps, the article concludes by describing which PMO success factors will help you obtain buy-in from the affected stakeholders.

But let us get started now.

PMO Setup – Just Think of It as a Normal Project

Deciding to create a project management office means launching a new project. The methods used are the same as for any other project:

• You start by analyzing the current situation.
• Next, you develop a specific plan.
• Then, you implement this plan and integrate it into the normal operations.

Throughout the phases, your smart change management strategy is used to help bring the stakeholders on board. This promotes the project’s acceptance and helps ensure its success.

Please note, however: You will need to adapt your strategy for PMO setup to the current situation and your company’s level of experience in project management. This is a challenge for every organization, as you will soon discover, because there is no one-size-fits-all approach to either the PMO or the process itself.

So, you may find it helpful to use a generic, incremental approach to PMO setup, as it will serve as a point of orientation. The following graphic provides an example.

In this generic framework, PMO setup involves these four steps:

1. Current status – analysis & general concept
2. Preparation and specification
3. PMO implementation
4. PMO normal operations

In addition to these four steps, it helps to have a good change management program for interacting with the people affected. This is because most people, at least initially, are skeptical about any proposed changes. So, be prepared to face resistance to your project again and again. You will need to convince these people / stakeholders.

Reading tip: Why Have a Project Management Office (PMO)?

Visible support from top management is essential, so make sure you have it. It often helps convince the other stakeholders.

One more tip: Right from the start, begin collecting proof that establishing a PMO is having a positive effect on the projects. This evidence will help you counter any possible criticism.

Now let us take a look at the individual steps involved.

Step 1 for PMO Setup: Current Status – Analysis & General Concept

The first step in PMO setup is to analyze the current situation. Take a look at the PM methods, processes, and tools used so far. Scrutinize the most important current projects for weaknesses.

In our experience, it is important to check for these key items in this phase. If you determine that any of these are (still) missing, you can make introducing these the first objective of your newly established PMO.

1. Project-Worthiness Analysis – What Do You Consider a “Project”?

Start by defining what exactly should be handled as a formal project. Only things clearly defined as a project fall under the jurisdiction of the PMO.

Ask yourself: what activities are better handled as part of the normal operations and are therefore under the jurisdiction of the individual departments?

A project-worthiness analysis tailored to your company will help you make this decision.

Free download: Project-worthiness analysis template (MS Excel). You can easily adapt the template to your needs.

2. Prioritized Project Lists – Which Projects Are Currently Being Pursued?

One of the key objectives is to obtain a complete list of all the projects. It must be up to date, detailed, and ideally also prioritized. Without a complete list, you will have no idea what people in the company are really working on.

Let us be honest: are you sure that your list is complete? 

Our experience has shown that few companies actually have a complete list at this stage. Even if it takes a few weeks to prepare the list, it will be well worth the effort and a great help to everyone involved.

The graphic above shows the TPG PPM Paradise. Individual projects are automatically added to the project list. This list provides the up-to-date and accurate information needed for the portfolio reports on which management bases its decisions.

Users of agile methods, please note: PMO setup is essential if you have multiple projects running concurrently, even in an agile environment. Having a complete, accurate list of all the projects is essential for every decision-maker.

Things to keep in mind for the project list and / or tool used to prepare the list:

• It must accept any number of user-defined fields.
• It must have a function for sorting, filtering, and grouping the entries by field.
• It must provide different views based on user permissions.
• Ideally, it offers workflows for adding new projects.
• It must allow you to configure the links to detailed information.
• The list must be pre-filled with key historical data.
• This historical data must be sufficient to detect future trends.
• This history also serves as evidence of the PMO’s contributions.

Our tip: Make sure that every single project is included on your project list. Avoid having any stealth projects that secretly steal your resources. Your primary responsibility as project management officer is to ensure that the list is always complete and up to date!

3. Control Environment – Can We Make Valid Decisions?

Another thing to consider is the control environment. It should include key elements such as:

• Project order (project objective, budget, time frame, etc. with signature)
• Project status report (detailed with traffic light status indicators)
• Final project report (project’s overall result)
• Lessons Learned (What went well and what did not?)

Our tip: In this first phase of establishing a PMO implementation, you need to ask many questions: How helpful have previous project status reports been? What was their intended purpose for each of the stakeholders? What things could be optimized?

4. Processes – Are They Effective and Efficient?

Remember to take a close look at your company’s existing project management processes. It is vital that you check the effectiveness and efficiency of the tools and methods being used.

One important factor is your company’s organizational structure (line / matrix). Take a close look at the training opportunities and career paths available to those involved in project management.

Your findings will help you determine the level of project management maturity in the company. Make sure that you document this.

Not everyone in the company will be enthusiastic about the creation of a PMO, so you will need all the good feedback about positive changes that you can get.

Our tip: Start your work as project management officer by documenting the company’s level of project management maturity. This can help you achieve some quick wins and later clearly demonstrate the improvements and added value.

5. Stakeholder Analysis – What Does Each Person Want?

Knowing what everyone wants will help you define the PMO’s goals. The stakeholder analysis is a helpful tool in determining: What are the PMO’s interest groups and what do they hope to gain from the PMO?

Possible stakeholders range from managers and executives as well as decision-makers and team leaders / Scrum Masters, to project managers / Product Owners, the controllers and, finally, the employees.

The PMO is a service provider whose success depends on the satisfaction of its “customers”, namely, the stakeholders in the project environment. Each of these stakeholders has their own expectations of the PMO.

Our tip: Start by doing a good stakeholder analysis to ensure that you have a clear understanding of every stakeholder’s expectations of the PMO. This will let you set the right goals and lead to greater acceptance of your work.

6. Gap Analysis – What Does the Target / Actual Comparison Show?

After you have analyzed the current situation and defined the expectations, it is time to do the gap analysis. This analysis depicts the gap between the current status and the desired status of project management in the company.

The information can then be used to create a prioritized list of recommended actions. The list should also include measures that can be quickly and easily implemented, so-called “quick wins”.

Here are a few ideas for quick wins when you set up a PMO:

• A clear project-worthiness analysis
• A signed project order for each project
• A prioritized list of projects
• A good stakeholder analysis
• An up-to-date project status report

You can sustainably close some of the gaps defined in your gap analysis by, for example, defining a PM maturity model that can be introduced in stages.

Our tip: Complete the quick wins identified on your list as early as possible. These early successes will help boost the PMO’s acceptance.

Step 2 for PMO Setup: Preparation and Specification

The next phase involves developing the concept. Here you define the PMO’s work, its position in the hierarchy, and its competencies. The PMO should have a clear understanding of its mandate and the services it is expected to provide.

The scope of services is often broad, and the stakeholder expectations are high. Possible PMO services can be seen in the following list.

• If training and coaching are the focus of the newly established PMO, then it will organize professional development activities for the project managers and project teams.
• The PMO’s project services activities will consist mainly of providing support. For example, it can host workshops or temporarily assume the role of project controller.
• If methods and processes constitute the PMO’s core competencies, then it will focus primarily on these and make suitable IT tools available to those needing them.
• Multi-project management monitors the progress of various projects and defines the control measures. In this case, the PMO gathers project information and prepares this for the decision-making committees.
• The Strategic Project Management Office (sPMO) is responsible for setting up and managing the projects. It chooses the projects and prioritizes them. The PMO also conducts cost-benefit analyses and defines the overall conditions for project management.

Once you have established a PMO, it is a good idea to start by focusing on only one or two of these responsibilities. You want to avoid over-burdening the organization. Make sure that everyone is aware of the PMO’s mission.

A newly established PMO is still a “strange newcomer” in their midst. It will take a while for everyone to accept it as an integral part of the organization.

Stakeholders often tend to overburden the PMO with activities.

It is important to remember that the PMO will not be able to please all the people all of the time. It has one key responsibility ‒ the one derived from the stakeholder analysis ‒ and this should always be its primary focus.

Our tip: Ensure that the PMO’s mission is one that is both practical and tailored to your organization. Get stakeholder input and agreement on this. Doing so ensures that the PMO’s scope of responsibilities is realistic.

Other key requirements:

• Communication: Make sure that everyone knows that a PMO exists and what its responsibilities are. This ensures that everyone’s expectations are clear.
• Internal marketing: Publicize the PMO’s services so that people actually request and use these services. To be truly accepted as part of the company, the PMO has to offer clear benefits.
• Staffing: The PMO staff must have the necessary qualifications and motivation ‒ this is vital. The employees must be service-oriented and have the required interpersonal skills but also be able to say No when necessary.

If you have already been using change management to facilitate the transition from one phase to another, its role will grow in importance in the next stage of your PMO implementation.

Our tip: Ensure that the new PMO’s scope of responsibilities is clearly communicated to all the stakeholders. One idea is to set up a PMO homepage on your company’s intranet with information about the PMO team, its services, and project management workflow processes.

Step 3 for PMO Setup: Implement the Plans

If it has not happened already, this is the stage in PMO setup, where the PMO staff receive their final training and are helped to prepare for their duties.

You will need their expertise to implement the PM processes and methods defined in the concept phase step by step. This generally includes agile methodology as well as the traditional together with hybrid approaches that combine these two methods.

Our tip: Select a senior employee to lead the PMO. Choose someone with good organizational skills and many years of project management experience. Make sure this person also has the truly necessary interpersonal skills.

Project Launch – Traditional, Agile, or Hybrid?

One of the PMO’s responsibilities can be to decide whether a project should be handled using agile, traditional, or hybrid methodology. It can define criteria for the degree of uncertainty in the requirements as well as which solution should be used based on this uncertainty. A Stacey Matrix can be helpful here.

Please note: Do not expect your project managers to switch between agile and traditional too often. Our experience has shown that this can jeopardize satisfaction and process stability.

Methods – Which Are Vital?

Traditional methods that the PMO must use in any case are:

• Project order (as a refence)
• Status report
• Final report with Lessons Learned

The following graphic shows several other methods common to traditional project environments that the PMO may need to consider. The PMO also provides a suitable IT infrastructure, offers training, and assists users in applying the methods and tools.

Processes – At What Intervals Should These Occur?

One of the PMO’s key responsibilities can be summarized as:

The PMO ensures that everyone knows what is important and right.

In traditional as well as agile project environments, the PMO is responsible for ensuring that the required processes are carried out at the right intervals. The right information needs to be made available with a regularity that ensures it is both up to date and reliable enough for good decisions.

The following graphic shows how to collect and disseminate information in such a way that this is shared with the organizational levels involved as often as needed.

Recommended reading: Comparing Project Management Methods: Agile, Traditional, or Hybrid? – What you should know about how agile differs from traditional and hybrid methods, and how to decide which method is best for your needs and when.

Portfolio Meeting – What Do You Need to Keep in Mind?

The PMO is responsible for ensuring that the portfolio meeting, whose purpose it is to monitor and manage the multi-project environment, achieves its objectives. The key is to have all the necessary information readily available and up to date. Having this information is a prerequisite, as it enables the decision-making committee to make fast, reliable decisions based on the most current data.

To ensure that the project information presented in the portfolio meeting is up to date, a weekly plan can be used, for example. This enables you to remind the project staff and project managers on time to provide the necessary information in accordance with a periodic deadline.

Make sure that everyone submits their input before the editorial deadline, 2-4 hours before the meeting begins. This gives you enough time to be well prepared, and it avoids any last-minute changes.

What kinds of topics are discussed in a portfolio meeting? Here are a few typical items:

• Project conclusions (final reports, successes, and lessons learned)
• Information on new projects (project orders)
• Information about key projects (status reports, risk analyses, milestone trend analysis [MTA], etc.)
• Upcoming decisions to be made
• Presentation of the resource situation
• Solutions to resource overload / underutilization

Before the portfolio meeting ends, you should discuss and reach an agreement on how the information about the meeting’s key conclusions will be communicated to the staff. This helps ensure that the employees feel well-informed about the decisions that affect them.

The project portfolio meeting is the place to discuss any project problems, such as those showing a red alert. Having the right tools lets you “drill down” from the project portfolio level into the details of any individual project. The PMO is responsible for providing the tools needed to do this.

A solution according to the TPG PPM Paradise model provides this capability:

At the end of the portfolio meeting, you should finalize the wording and approval of the information about the most important results for the workforce. This ensures that employees feel well informed about decisions that are relevant to them.

Resource Management – What Is Everyone Working On?

One of the PMO’s key duties is allocating resources to the various projects.

A prerequisite is, therefore, having a complete overview of each employee’s activities – both project-related and non-project-related.

However, do not make the mistake of being overly detailed in your resource planning. Find the right degree of granularity. For example, you do not want to make your plans so detailed that one person calling in sick throws off all your plans.

Our tip: Aim to make your resource plans as good as necessary for decisions to be made at the portfolio level. More details are unnecessary.

Resource management involves all the levels:

• Decision-makers (which projects are (still) possible, given the resource situation?)
• PMO (prepares the resource utilization overview for that time period so that portfolio decisions can be made)
• Team leaders (schedule the team members and their operational and project-related duties)
• Project managers (work with the team leaders to coordinate the procurement of the resources needed for the projects)
• Team members (report the hours worked, progress, and remaining work to be done)

Recommended reading: Resource Management in Project Management – Basics and Areas for Beginners

Knowledge sharing is also a key success factor in minimizing the risk of resource bottlenecks and project delays. Avoid having “gurus” ‒ experts who prefer to work alone and not share their knowledge ‒ as these can become a resource bottleneck. The problem here is that the project can come to a standstill if this person is suddenly unavailable.

As project management officer, it is your responsibility to ensure that this critical knowledge is shared by several people in the team. This helps you avoid any unnecessary downtime in the project. Make sure that your company’s team leaders understand this as well.

Step 4: Make the PMO an Integral Part of Normal Operations

After establishing a PMO, it becomes part of normal operations. If the PMO was implemented by an external consulting firm, it is now time to transfer responsibility to company employees.

In some cases, it may be advantageous for the PMO to retain the consulting firm’s services as needed for specific questions. Depending on what progress has been made in developing the necessary expertise, you may want to consider providing coaching for the company’s project managers and possibly also the project management officers.

In this phase, continue to optimize your processes and methods. Good communication, right from the start, is the key to fostering acceptance of the changes.

Another important point to remember when highlighting the advantages of having a PMO: the company’s corporate culture plays a key role in the PMO’s success. Because ensuring transparency in the project environment is one of the PMO functions, its success will also be measured by this benchmark.

Our tip: When judging your PMO’s long-term success, ask yourself what degree of transparency the company actually wants and whether everyone involved is really trying to be more open about everything.

Change Management – A Key Success Factor Right from the Start

Throughout all the phases ‒ from the analysis of the current situation to the transition to the PMO being part of normal operations ‒ change management is done concurrently to all the other work. As explained above: it is important to demonstrate the benefits of your newly introduced PMO to all the stakeholders as quickly as possible to convince them of its advantages and thereby gain their acceptance.

This is generally achieved in three phases:

Phase 1: If the PMO can show some quick wins, the stakeholders will initially be happy that someone is finally tackling the issues that need to be taken care of. They will then be more willing to accept the PMO.

Phase 2: In this next phase, after the new structures and expertise have been introduced, reality sets in. As everything becomes more transparent, people become more skeptical. They begin wondering what effect the new PMO (and its objectives) will have on them personally and whether any of these effects will be detrimental.

Phase 3: If the implementation is successful, people will eventually recognize the advantages of having the PMO. Their previous skepticism will be transformed into positive collaboration. Now, the PMO can gradually introduce a new project management culture within the company and bring it to life.

The below info-graphic is based on a German-language podcast episode on the TPG Podcast. It describes the four steps outlined above in a little more detail.

The 10 steps from the podcast illustrated in an info-graphic: Feel free to share it on your social networks:

Conclusion – PMO Setup and Success Factors

This article has helped you understand that PMO setup is best handled as a project. After project initiation comes planning, implementation, and then regular operation. You have also learned that there are other factors, beyond simply following the right steps, that can influence the success or failure of your endeavor:

• Smart change management
• Having the support of top management
• A desire for more transparency within the company

Remember that even the best PMO cannot be successful unless the stakeholders recognize the value of this new organizational entity and are willing to actively cooperate with it. Once you have their recognition and willingness to collaborate, you will have the acceptance necessary for the PMO to be successful.

This is the list of 10 key PMO success factors for PMO setup:

1. Honest analysis of the PM weaknesses
2. Complete stakeholder analysis
3. Clear differentiation between project work and general operations
4. Determination of baseline expertise so that progress can be measured and documented
5. Achievement of quick wins
6. Clear definition of PMO duties and expertise
7. Manageable scope of responsibilities
8. Clear communication of the PMO’s mission
9. Use of change management right from the beginning
10. Visible support from top management

Our final tips:

Get to know the individually adaptable “PPM Paradise” – the optimal environment for your enterprise-wide project, program, portfolio and resource management. Download the eBook now (just click, no form).

And sign up for our bi-weekly blog newsletter to make sure you receive all our updates.

What words of advice would you give someone trying to set up a PMO? Please leave us a comment.

Der Beitrag Successful PMO Setup in 4 Simple Steps (with Downloads) erschien zuerst auf Blog Project Management for Companies.

The article has the following chapters in store for you:

• Why is control over your project pipeline important?
• Jira tips for your project pipeline
• Multi-project filters
• Dashboards
• Automated reports
• Conclusion: Jira tips for traditional / agile project management

Let us dive in!

Why Is Control over Your Project Pipeline Important?

Projects can develop fast and gain in complexity. When organizing multiple parallel projects, it can also become difficult to keep track of everything and ensure that things run smoothly.

Without an effective method of organizing your project pipeline, such an environment can quickly lead to chaos and frustration for all involved. As a powerful platform for task and project management, Jira can help you in the role of project manager. It supports you in staying on top of your project pipeline.

In traditional and agile project management, Jira allows you to visualize your processes, set priorities and make better use of resources. This enables you to concentrate on the essentials and to maximize the results of your projects.

From beginning to end, Jira makes it possible to see exactly where your project is and which steps are yet to come. This gives you the confidence that you are in control of all aspects of your project and can respond to potential issues proactively.

Find out how 3 Product Owner Jira tips make using the tool really easy.

Jira Tips for Your Project Pipeline

Jira is not only suited to the single project environment. Due to the versatile configuration options of this software, it can also be used for the project pipeline. To this end, you can make use of the board function in Jira.

Using the board function, you can set up any number of boards for one project. In this context, boards are a customizable display of the project information.

As the contents of the board are filtered freely, you can also set up boards across multiple projects. This allows you to map the following use cases, among others:

• One Jira project and several project teams: Each team has its own team board on which only a subset of the information is displayed, e.g. filtered by label or category.
• Several Jira projects and an aggregate board: The aggregate board also displays the contents of all other Jira projects. It is even possible that these Jira projects differ in their project type (software or business) or other properties.
• Team-internal view and view for external viewers: In the team-internal view, all data is shown. With the aid of filters, only subsets are displayed in the view for external viewers, e.g. only tasks with the status “In progress”.
• Requirements management as a higher-level Kanban board: For instance, the requirements are described as Epics. And the teams working on them integrate these Epics via filters into their board.

As you see, there are many different ways to configure Jira for the project pipeline and for multi-project management. Below, you will learn how to set up and use several Jira projects and an aggregate board with the overall status using an example.

Good Practices for Working with Jira in Your Project Pipeline

Multi-project filters

To display the information from several projects on one board, you must edit the board filter. To do this, click on the three dots at the top right of the board or the backlog and then click Board Configuration. In the General tab, open the filter query for the project by clicking on the link Edit Filter Query.

Now, you can edit the filter and, for example, load the Items of multiple projects. In the following example, we are loading all Items from the projects “ST” and “PIPE” in one board. In addition, all Epics from the “Projektplan” project are displayed, provided their status is “In Progress”.

In this place, it would also be possible to filter by assigned team, category, label or other Issue properties. Hence, higher-level but also team-specific or lower-level boards and views can be freely configured.

In the example presented here, there is a parent Jira project listing major requirements (i.e. “Anforderung 123” in the illustration below) and entire projects (e.g. “Projekt A”):

What is more, there is a Scrum Team working on multiple projects and requirements that is presented with both of these as Epics in the Backlog:

Are you a Scrum Master? Check out our 3 Scrum Master Jira tips.

The idea is to work on Epic basis only in the parent project. Therefore, the Backlog Items of the teams involved are not shown. This means that the filter of the PIPE project remains untouched. Yet, once you click on the Epic, you will get to see all linked Items from the other Jira projects, too, in this case the team’s “User Story” (see “Child issues” in the illustration below).

Another interesting read: 7 Multi-Project Management Success Factors

Dashboards

In addition to the option of setting up team-specific backlogs, it is also possible to configure the reports in the dashboard individually. A multi-project view might show the statuses of the Epics, for example, as well as data across multiple projects.

The example shows bugs across all projects and diverse project-specific or team-specific data. You have the options to either create a dashboard for yourself only or share it with your organization or your team.

To do this, click on the three dots in the top right corner and select Rename or share. In the subsequent dialog, you can add viewers and editors of the dashboard.

Important note: Once you have made your selection, click Add before saving the result. Otherwise, the selection will not be applied.

Automated Reports

With the aid of automated reports, you will keep your tasks in view. You can also re-use the filters you previously set up for the dashboard or the multi-project view. For example, if you wish to receive an overview of the open issues by e-mail every Friday, this is how it works:

1. 1. Create filter or use an existing filter
   2. Add a new subscription in the filter details

3. Choose recipients, sending frequency and sending time

With this setting, you can have all possible filters evaluated and sent automatically by e-mail. Thus, you could also create a filter for open issues which have not been updated for X days. This would enable you to send reminders by e-mail to ensure tasks in Jira are kept up to date.

Interested in reporting? Read our articles on the topic:

• Project Status Report
• PPM Report
• PMO Reports

Conclusion: Jira Tips for Traditional / Agile Project Management

Jira is a powerful tool for companies of every size. It is easy to customize and use. Used appropriately, Jira will enable you to plan and manage your projects in traditional / agile project management efficiently and identify problems before they arise.

In addition, it will make collaboration with other people on your team easier for you. The wide range of reports and dashboards gives you a quick overview of the progress of your projects in the multi-project environment. You have received a few important tips for this in the article.

The Blog Series “Jira for Roles in Project Management”

This article with Jira tips for traditional / agile project management is part of a series in which we describe the options Jira and Confluence provide for different roles. Find an overview below:

• Jira for Product Owners
• Jira for Scrum Masters
• Jira Tips for Filters, Dashboards and Reporting (this article)

Our final tips

Get to know the individually adaptable “PPM Paradise” – the optimal environment for your enterprise-wide project, program, portfolio and resource management. Download the eBook now (just click, no form).

And sign up for our bi-weekly blog newsletter to make sure you receive all our updates.

Further good tips are provided in the three Atlassian Jira training courses offered by TPG as company seminars that are taught online, partly by the author of this article.

Do you have further questions or comments regarding our Jira tips for traditional / agile project management? Let us know in the comment area.

About the author: Patric Eid has been a freelance trainer, consultant and agile coach for project management with a focus on hybrid and agile project management, Scrum and software training (Jira et al.) since 2013. Previously, he worked in the roles of Scrum Master, (agile) project manager and software developer, and he incorporates this experience into his consulting mandates and trainings.

More on Patric Eid on LinkedIn.

Der Beitrag Jira Tips for Traditional / Agile Project Management – Filters, Dashboards & Reports erschien zuerst auf Blog Project Management for Companies.

In this article, you will learn how to determine the ROI for a PPM tool using a sample calculation. In addition, you will get a benchmark list of the ROIs of different PPM tools. You will also find out what to pay attention to when presenting your arguments to management. We will cover the following topics:

• What is the ROI of a PPM tool?
• What makes the ROI so important for decisions on PPM tools?
• What added value does a good PPM tool provide?
• Which items should be included in the ROI calculation?
• How to calculate the ROI for your project management tool: A practical example
• Benchmark: According to Forrester, this is how high the ROI of PPM tools is
• Conclusion: Using ROI calculations to make strategic tool decisions
• Frequently asked questions (FAQ) on the ROI for PPM systems

Let us get started.

What Is the ROI of a PPM Tool?

The return on investment (ROI) for a PPM tool measures the ratio between the benefits achieved and the investment costs incurred. The formula is as follows:

ROI (%) = (Total benefit – Total investment) / Total investment x 100

Thus, an ROI of 300% means that investment in a PPM tool creates four times the economic benefit in relation to the investment costs.

What Makes the ROI so Important for Decisions on PPM Tools?

If your company has a PMO, it will probably take care of choosing a suitable PPM tool. Where there is no PMO (yet), another role will be responsible for this. Either way – ROI calculation is particularly relevant if you:

• Must justify the business case for a new PPM tool by presenting arguments in favor
• Wish to evaluate the economic success of the existing PPM solution
• Want to compare various providers based on hard facts

Our tip: The ROI helps you not only to name the benefits of a PPM tool in terms of quality (e.g. better usability) but also to provide reliable figures. Use these figures to convince people, especially when talking to colleagues in finance and IT.

Still, let us start with a brief overview of the qualitative benefits of a modern PPM tool.

What Added Value Does a Good PPM Tool Provide?

An advanced project and portfolio management tool offers you more than functions for project planning, resource management and reporting in a multi-project environment. Above all, it adds strategic and operational value, for example:

• Transparent portfolio overview – all projects, budgets and statuses in one central cockpit
• Real-time reporting & dashboards – automated key figures instead of manual Excel data collection
• Resource planning & capacity management – identify bottlenecks at an early stage and optimize capacities
• Automated workflows – save time by reducing manual routine tasks and speeding up processes
• Prioritization & strategic alignment – weight projects according to corporate objectives
• Proactive risk management – proactively identify risks and plan countermeasures
• Budget & cost control – variances immediately visible, informed financial decisions
• Better collaboration & communication – one central platform instead of isolated e-mail threads
• Compliance & governance support – manage standards, audits, and approvals in an audit-proof manner
• Data-based decision support – what-if analyses and scenario simulations at the touch of a button

All of these benefits have a measurable economic effect. This is where the ROI calculation for PPM tools comes in.

Our reading tip: PMO and PPM Tools Software and Recommendations

Which Items Should Be Included in the ROI Calculation?

To convince the decision-makers at your company with the return on investment calculation for a project management tool, you should consider the following points:

Typical investment costs:

• Licenses (cloud SaaS model vs. on-premises)
• Implementation / Set-up / Interfaces
• Training, support, operational expenses
• Internal effort (e.g. project team)

Typical benefit categories:

• Time saved due to better coordination via the tool
• More efficient meetings thanks to better reports and faster decision-making
• Successfully implemented projects and fewer project delays tie up fewer resources
• Central data storage “single source of truth” prevents time-consuming document searches
• Better resource utilization through the knowledge of who is working on what and still has capacity available
• Faster project launches due to better visibility into resource availability and scenarios in the portfolio
• Improved internal communication prevents costly mistakes and redundant work
• Documentation in the system and central data availability ensure better transparency of decisions and are important for compliance issues
• Elimination of obsolete software licenses (e.g. for outdated desktop tools without a central database)

Our tip: Calculate the payback period in addition to the ROI figure. This shows when the tool will pay for itself – often after only 6 to 12 months.

How to Calculate the ROI for Your Project Management Tool: A Practical Example

To make ROI calculation for a PPM tool tangible, let us take a company as an example. We define this company as follows:

• 1,000 employees, including 150 in project-based roles, who are to use the new tool
• Implementation of an integrated PPM tool (e.g. based on Microsoft 365)
• Observation period of three years (36 months)

The following table shows the investments.

Our tip: Use realistic values specific to your company for salaries, time spent and project size. When in doubt, err on the side of caution – this will keep your business case credible.

The economic benefits of a PPM tool are apparent in the following table, which takes into account various benefits:

According to the formula named above, the ROI is calculated from the net benefit and the investment in our example as follows:

→ Total investment over 3 years: € 582,000
→ Overall benefit over 3 years: € 3,470,900
→ ROI = (3,470,900 – 582,000) / 582,000 × 100 = 496%

Download tip: > Download the Excel file from which the screenshots were taken. Simply enter your values and quickly calculate the ROI of your planned PPM solution.

Benchmark: According to Forrester, this Is how High the ROI of PPM Tools Is

Many software manufacturers commission independent analysts such as Forrester to conduct “Total Economic Impact” (TEI) studies. These are often commissioned by the respective tool manufacturers and hence should be interpreted in the light of the underlying assessment framework.

Still, these studies give an overview of the dimensions of these standardized ROI calculations.

Study / Solution	Author / Organization (Publication)	Calculated ROI*	Link to source
The ROI of Project Portfolio Management Tools	Craig Symons, Forrester Research (2009)	> 250%	PDF
The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Project Online	Forrester Consulting, on behalf of Microsoft (2018)	387% ROI over 3 years	PDF
The Total Economic Impact of ValueOps by Broadcom (Clarity PPM + Rally)	Forrester Consulting, on behalf of Broadcom (Nov 2023)	471% ROI over 3 years	PDF
The Total Economic Impact of Planview (Tasktop) Viz	Forrester Consulting, on behalf of Planview (Feb 2021)	640% ROI over 3 years	Report page
Total Economic Impact Study – Cora PPM	Forrester Consulting, on behalf of Cora Systems (Sep 2023)	187% ROI over 3 years	Article

Table 3: ROI comparisons from Forrester TEI studies on PPM solutions
(*All ROI figures are based on the Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) framework and relate, if not stated otherwise, to a three-year model calculation at a composite company.)

The Forrester Total Economic Impact framework calculates net present values of benefits and costs. In addition, it takes into account risks and discounting. The observation period is usually set at 3 years.

Note: Learn about Project Online Retirement in 2026 and migration options

The range of the ROI in the above examples spans from 187% through to 640%. Assumptions which impact these differences include the assessed scope, implementation costs, company size, licensing model, process maturity, etc.

What these numbers show: ROI calculation for PPM tools delivers impressive results – provided that the tool is implemented correctly.

Conclusion: Use ROI Calculations to Make Strategic Tool Decisions

Implementing or replacing a PPM tool is a strategic decision – especially in times of tight budgets. A structured ROI calculation for PPM tools provides you with a sound basis for demonstrating the economic benefits of your investment in a transparent manner.

The ROI serves as a door opener. However, make sure you also consider the impact on qualitative benefits when arguing in favor of a new tool! This includes for instance greater satisfaction with the tool environment, which also has an impact on the project success rate and faster decision-making cycles.

With the practical example and the > Excel table for download, you can now make your own calculations. To convince your internal decision-makers, also use the independent market studies provided, for example Forrester’s.

Below, you will find frequently asked questions (FAQ) on the topic.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) on the ROI for PPM Systems

1) How does the project management maturity level of my company affect the expected ROI?

A study by the PMI arrives at the following result: the higher the PPM process maturity, the better the project cost and schedule performance – and the higher the achievable ROI. (Source)

2) How does corporate culture affect the ROI of a PPM tool?

Corporate culture plays a crucial role when implementing a PPM system. A culturally driven resistance to changes can negatively affect the ROI, whereas an open and adaptive culture can maximize the benefits of a PPM tool. (Source)

3) What role do training and change management play in the ROI of PPM systems?

Training and effective change management are essential to ensure employees use the PPM tool efficiently. Without adequate training, the ROI can drop significantly due to inefficient use and lack of acceptance. (Source)

4) How can integrating a PPM tool with existing systems affect the ROI?

Seamless integration of a PPM tool with existing systems such as ERP or CRM can increase ROI by ensuring data consistency and eliminating redundant processes. However, problems with the integration can cause additional costs and decrease ROI. (Source)

5) How does choosing the right PPM tool affect the long-term ROI?

The choice of a PPM tool tailored to the specific needs and processes of a company is crucial for a positive long-term ROI. An ineffective tool can lead to inefficient processes and additional costs. (Source)

6) How do I take qualitative benefits into account when calculating the ROI of a PPM tool?

Demonstrate “soft” benefits such as greater employee or customer satisfaction with rating scores or monetary estimates (e.g. lower turnover costs) and add them as bonus cash flows to the hard, measurable benefits. (Source)

7) What impact does cloud vs. on-premises have on the ROI of a PPM system?

Cloud solutions tend to generate lower initial investments and faster time-to-value while on-premises solutions offer more control but higher CapEx & IT operating expenses – this often reduces short-term ROI. (Source)

8) How often should the ROI be reviewed after implementing a PPM tool?

Carry out an initial post-implementation review (PIR) after 6-12 months and annually thereafter; this helps you record actual benefit effects and identify areas for optimization. (Source)

9) Which financial indicators best complement ROI when evaluating a PPM investment?

Also use net present value (NPV) and internal rate of return (IRR) to represent the time value of the money and capital expenditure; payback period and cost-benefit analysis will complete the business case. (Source)

10) What are the risks of imprecise ROI calculations for PPM systems?

An imprecise ROI calculation can lead to poor decisions by misrepresenting the actual benefits or costs of a PPM tool. This can result in wasted resources and missed opportunities for efficiency gains. (Source)

Our final tips

Get to know the individually adaptable “PPM Paradise” – the optimal environment for your enterprise-wide project, program, portfolio and resource management. Download the eBook now (just click, no form).

And sign up for our bi-weekly blog newsletter to make sure you receive all our updates.

Please leave a short comment below: what is your opinion on ROI calculation for PPM tools?

Der Beitrag ROI Calculation for PPM Tools: How to Make Informed Investment Decisions (with Sample Calculation and Excel Download) erschien zuerst auf Blog Project Management for Companies.

This article introduces you to the requirements for reports in project, portfolio and resource management. You will learn what information is relevant for the stakeholders and how reports contribute to fast decisions. In addition, you will get tips for efficient data collection and data quality checks. Lastly, there is a checklist of the ten most important questions to help you set up your reporting system.

We will look at the following topics:

• Why project management reports should be at the beginning
• Requirements for PMO reports in project management
• PMO reports for different stakeholders at the company
• Reporting periods in the project environment
• What reports make sense?
• Selection in the multi-project environment
• Possible contents for reports of individual projects
• Efficient data collection as the basis for PMO reports
• Ensuring data quality
• Checklist on reporting and determining factors
• PPRM tools for modern PM reports
• Conclusion – PMO reports for project and portfolio management

As part of the article, you also receive a checklist on reporting and examples of possible content for individual reports which would be useful for you as the PMO.

Let us begin with who is responsible for the contents of reports.

Why Project Reports Should Be at the Beginning

The Project Management Office (PMO) is responsible for the reports in project and portfolio management (PPRM).

This task encompasses not only the structure and the selection of the information presented. Among the PMO functions there is another important task that is not always easy. The PMO has to ensure the quality of the reports with regard to currency, correctness and the requirements of the target groups.

In a study, Gartner arrived at the following conclusion:

PMOs often do not provide the data senior managers need. This creates a gap between expectation and reality. More data is not automatically better. PMOs should adapt their reports step by step to make sure they really support executives. Senior managers do not have much time. They need short, precise and clear information. The PMO should collaborate with them and provide exactly that.

Source: “Seven Best Practices for an Effective Project Management Office”, Gartner, 2016

The problem: when introducing project and portfolio management solutions (PPRM) the reporting topic is often considered too late.

Does that sound familiar?

It would be ideal if your PMO reports came right at the beginning. In such a case, the PPM system would be planned around the reports and the needs of their users and be supported by PPM project tools.

Reading tip: ROI Calculation for PPM Tools: Making Informed Decisions

After all, only very good project management reports make you realize what is happening and what needs to be decided with more or less urgency. You will only get the most out of your PPRM system, if you focus on the essentials and take into account what the recipients of the reports expect.

But this is only half the battle. To enable you to react to the developments in the project environment really fast, your reports need to be up to date and flexible, too.

Below, you will read about the requirements for reports in project, portfolio and resource management.

Requirements for PMO Reports in Project Management

These days, IT solutions allow you to present reports in project management quickly on the screen, both in color and in the desired level of detail. When it comes to what information e.g. a PMO envisions for the company, we know from our consulting experience that classic fixed notions for project management reports come into play. They are expected to be:

Accommodating these wishes in a single document is not easy. The actual reporting requirements are more realistic. They can be summed up in one sentence:

Actual reporting requirements in a nutshell: you must make relevant information available to the right people in a meaningful and efficient way to control projects optimally.

So, you should always ask yourself the following questions when setting up a reporting system:

• What do I aim to plan and control?
• What information will I require for this?
• Which level of detail makes sense?
• What do I want to achieve with which report?
• Who will be working with the reports afterwards?
• Will the target group of the reports be able to grasp the contents?

Our tip: Honest answers to these questions are an important prerequisite for your future reports. Their creation needs to be efficient, without unnecessary data baggage. A prior stakeholder analysis to determine the needs of the different roles is advisable at any rate.

PMO Reports for Different Stakeholders at the Company

As a rule, every company has several different levels requiring different reports. The higher up in the hierarchy, the more condensed the information needs to be.

Still, a drill-down to the details needs to be possible on demand. This allows users to comprehend the consolidated report information in the case of inquiries.

Decision-makers

Top management requires consolidated information for management control on a regular basis. For instance, they consider the adherence to the strategic focus, risks or investment risks.

PMO

The PMO is the body that often prepares the reports on projects and resources at portfolio level for top management. It requires a project list with the status to be able to check with project managers when this seems necessary. Any escalations identified are reported to the top for decision-making.

Team leaders

Team leaders are responsible for their resources. For this, they require the corresponding overviews of their teams’ workload and availability. In addition, they need to be able to make reliable resource commitments for projects to the project managers.

Project managers

When planning individual projects, the project manager uses e.g. the status report, the work breakdown structure, the milestone overview or possibly a Milestone Trend Analysis.

Project team members

Project team members want to see their work packages. What is more, they are interested in who else is working on the project and in time tracking. This is less about classic reports but more about available information.

Note: To demonstrate the benefits your PMO provides you should define a set of key performance indicators and align them with your stakeholders. The right PMO KPIs will assist you in this endeavor.

Reporting Periods in the Project Environment

Reports are the basis for coordination meetings. They help us understand what is happening at the company at this moment. And where decisions are at present necessary.

The higher up in the hierarchy, the more condensed the information and the less frequent the reporting.

The figure below clarifies how the reporting periods at the individual levels result from the individual meetings. Relative to the hierarchical level, the information becomes increasingly condensed while the frequency of reporting decreases accordingly.

What decisions may or must be made where? Subject to this, you must ensure that the required information is available in the form of meaningful reports.

In the process, you also need to decide which element is useful for which report. You do not need a wealth of data in every report, but its message must be easy to understand. You must aim for maximum clarity and intelligibility in your reports.

What Reports Make Sense?

The question of which reports are useful always requires a very individual answer. The figure below provides an overview. It shows which reports make sense across the hierarchies. Naturally, this depends to a large extent on your company’s:

• size
• processes
• industry

Unfortunately, there is no ONE project management report that is right for all. While reports tend to look similar, you must always adapt them to the respective processes and needs of the company. This always depends on the intended use and the recipients.

It might help you to work out the reporting requirements and their possible implementation in a workshop with important stakeholders and the support of an experienced PMO consultant.

Below, you will find an overview of possible reports from the PMO environment.

Report Showing a Portfolio Dashboard (Example)

Project Pipeline Report (Example)

Report for Resource Utilization & Roadmap (Example)

Project Status Report (Example)

Learn more in our article on contents and creation of the Project Status Report.

Report for Team Planning and Utilization (Example)

Project Overview as an Interactive Website (Example)

Current Status of the Portfolio (Evolution-Over-Time Perspective, Example)

Current Developments (Example)

Review of the Portfolio (Example)

Earned Value Indices (Example)

Find more information on Earned Value Analysis in this article.

Our tip: As the PMO, it is wise to keep an eye on the number of reports. Over time, this is very likely to increase, as new ones tend to be added continually. A periodic consolidation can ensure that your reporting retains its efficiency as a whole.

Selection in the Multi-Project Environment

Often, the PMO is responsible for the preparation of the portfolio meeting. In a multi-project environment and in project portfolio management, the selection of projects is a particular challenge. From the project portfolio, which can be very substantial, you need to specifically select certain projects which are to be covered in the time available for the portfolio meeting.

The right selection process ensures that the need for decisions is identified early, enabling you to make the necessary decisions in the time available.

The following list provides criteria by which you in the PMO could make a project selection for the project portfolio meetings:

• Declared need for decisions (manually set indicator)
• All projects with status RED (Overall, resources, schedule …) + 3 YELLOW + 3 GREEN (as samples to check for data quality, more detail further below)
• All projects in the top 3 risk categories
• Top 10 in terms of variance (cost, schedule, work)
• Top 10 strategic contribution / priority
• All projects above a threshold value (order / investment volume, contractual penalty …)
• Problem areas (technology, regions, project manager, product categories …)

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Possible Contents for Reports of Individual Projects

What information should you provide in the reports of individual projects? Suggestions for results, deliveries and states could be:

• Achievement of milestones (standard milestones)
• Completion of phases (phase model)
• Acceptance of deliveries planned / effected (payment milestones)
• Completion of work packages / deliveries (definition of “done”)
• Completion of tasks (not started / in progress / completed)
• List of open issues (open / started / completed)
• Earned Value Analysis (Baseline and %Physical Complete)
• %Complete (no appropriate statement below 100% … 99% syndrome, i.e. the danger of the permanent 99% value)

For quality assurance, the report should include plausibility checks, such as:

• Comparison between remaining effort and reported stage of completion
• Relation between %Cost / %Work / %Time / %Physical Complete (relation of the values to each other)

To determine the plan-actual variance we recommend the following information:

• Deliveries: Plan / actual of quality, scheduling, effort, cost
• Work outstanding: Clarity of proof of concept, work / budget, cost / budget, schedule / plan
• Resources: assign, shift, withdraw

When it comes to decisions on the next steps, the following information is helpful:

• Order / follow-up: entered or not (continue regardless?)
• Budget: available or too low (continue only after increase?)
• Resources: committed or too few (escalation or postponement?)
• Risk situation: manageable or unfavorable (any known alternatives?)
• Chosen option: Method A or B (documentation of the decision including reasons)

Once your PMO has prepared the meeting, it is important to ensure one thing. During the meeting, the necessary data to provide answers to the decision-makers’ questions must be available – preferably at the push of a button.

Our tip: The report after a meeting is also an important medium. Communicate the results of the meeting to all parties concerned. This is the only way to make them adjust their further actions to the results of the meeting.

Find further detail about report contents in our PPM Report article.

Efficient Data Collection as the Basis for PMO Reports

At many companies, collecting the data for the reports takes longer than the actual analysis and preparation. For you, too?

You can handle this much more efficiently once you do not have to collect various Excel files and consolidate them.

It is best to work with a suitable database from the start. This database should allow you integration with other systems through integration middleware and central data evaluation for reports. This leaves you with more time for the analysis of the reports. The analysis in turn enables decision-makers to make well-founded and fast decisions based on up-to-date data.

Get to know the results of a survey on PMO / PPM Tools conducted by TPG in 2024.

Ensuring Data Quality

The PMO is also responsible for ensuring the reports’ data quality. But how do you recognize whether the data of a project report is complete, correct and up to date?

The challenge is to determine which projects vary from the plan, e.g. with the aid of plausibility checks. Is the stage of completion, which the project manager indicated in the project report, actually correct?

Among other things, the following information can help you check whether the data is complete, correct and up to date:

1. Complete

• All projects (vs. operations)
• All deliverables per project
• All relevant resources with all activities (project availability)

2. Correct

• Check for planning plausibility
• Complete coverage of all cost types and efforts
• Stage of actual completion

3. Up to date

• When was the data entered?
• At what time was the transfer of data from external systems?
• When were the reports created?

Our tip: Use samples to improve data quality. Project managers have a tendency to make their reports look particularly inconspicuous. As the PMO, you should therefore pick out a few projects with green status alongside those with red and yellow status indicators. This takes away the certainty from project managers that a green traffic light will keep them “off the radar”.

Checklist on Reporting and Determining Factors

Do you want to modernize your PMO reporting? This checklist with the ten most important questions can help you to think in the right direction:

Checklist: The 10 Most Important Questions on PMO Reporting

1.   Who should have permissions for what?
2.   How often should the data be updated?
3.   How often should the reports be issued?
4.   Do the reports have to be available online or offline?
5.   Do you require ad-hoc analyses?
6.   Will the reports need to be printed?
7.   Should there be an option to comment on reports?
8.   Does the data need to be historized?
9.   Will the reports need to be archived?
10. Do you wish to be able to modify reports?

Below, you will find a few additional notes on some important points from the list.

Permissions control who is allowed to see what. If you decide for too much complexity, adjustments can become very complicated when people change roles. It is also important to involve the employee organization regarding the internal resource data.

Comments in reports should point very clearly to issues that require particular attention. This enables readers to grasp critical points quickly. Explanations for the states presented are also advisable. For instance, they might clarify why a traffic light is red.

If a report is historized, that means the state of the report on a particular date can be retrieved at a later stage. On the one hand, the underlying data from that time needs to be available. On the other hand, the original layout of the other page needs to be recoverable pixel by pixel. Archiving is best managed by creating PDFs. It is possible to save them automatically to a database. In such a case, they can be retrieved specifically in their original version, even after a long time.

Our tip: Use standard tools! If you in the PMO are able to modify reports, you have greater flexibility. For this reason, you should use standard tools as much as possible. You can make changes as required, fast and without external help.

PPRM Tools for Modern PM Reports

Do you lack visibility in your project environment? Are you struggling to maintain an overview due to time-consuming and error-prone manual reporting? In this case, you are not working with advanced PPRM software that is tailored to your needs and eliminates these problem areas.

Take a look at TPG ProjectPowerPack, the tool based on Microsoft 365 and Power Platform. This modern environment provides you with 40 reports at the touch of a button: on the project status, resource utilization and the portfolio. This allows you to control your entire project portfolio with KPIs – if desired also based on data from integrated external systems.

Conclusion – PMO Reports for Project, Portfolio and Resource Management

In this article, you have found out what requirements PMO reports in project, portfolio and resource management should meet.

You have learned:

• That you require different depths of information and frequencies of coordination for the different stakeholders at the company
• Which criteria are important for a project selection when preparing your next portfolio meeting
• What information you should be able to find in reports
• How you cater for quality assurance, record plan-actual variance, and prepare decisions on the next steps.

In addition, you have found out:

• That an efficient data collection is the basis of a fast and reliable reporting system
• How you can check whether the data is complete, correct and up to date

Lastly, a checklist has familiarized you with the 10 most important questions on reporting – as a guideline for your next steps.

Our final tips

Get to know the individually adaptable “PPM Paradise” – the optimal environment for your enterprise-wide project, program, portfolio and resource management. Download the eBook now (just click, no form).

And sign up for our bi-weekly blog newsletter to make sure you receive all our updates.

Please leave a short comment below: which reports do you use in the PMO environment?

Der Beitrag PMO Reports: Requirements for Reports in Project, Portfolio and Resource Management erschien zuerst auf Blog Project Management for Companies.

The good news: whether you still need the full power of Project Desktop, want to modernise your Project, Portfolio and Resource Management (PPRM) environment with the Microsoft Power Platform, or prefer a hybrid solution – there are three clear options we can recommend.

Read on to discover three options for future-proofing your PPRM environment without data loss and without disruption for your teams. These chapters await you:

• Why is Project Online being retired?
• Option 1: Migration to Microsoft Project Server SE with Project Desktop
• Option 2: Migration to PPRM tools based on the Microsoft Power Platform
• Option 3: Migration to a hybrid scenario
• Why choose TPG as your partner for the Project Online migration
• Free consultation on the end of Project Online
• Conclusion on the end of Project Online
• FAQ on the end of Project Online

Let’s get started!

Why Is Project Online Being Retired?

Microsoft is retiring Project Online because the service is based on an older, SharePoint-based architecture. The company wants to consolidate its project and task management solutions on a unified, modern platform centred on the new Planner, based on Power Platform / Dataverse, Copilot / Project Manager Agent, and Microsoft Teams integration. The old foundation limits new features as well as current and planned AI scenarios.

Attention: After 30/09/2026, your projects and data in Project Online will no longer be accessible. Therefore, back up your data in good time and migrate to suitable platforms such as Planner or Project Server SE to avoid data loss.

Microsoft recommends working with experienced partners who already provide mature solutions based on the Power Platform for migrating data from Project Online. TPG ProjectPowerPack is one of them.

Now to the three options for migration to other systems.

Wondering about alternatives? Read Microsoft project management tool overview.

Option 1: Migration to Microsoft Project Server SE with Project Desktop

If you still require the full capabilities of your Microsoft Project Desktop client for schedule, cost and resource management, migrating to Project Server SE (Subscription Edition) is the logical choice.

You can operate Project Server SE on premises, in co-location, or in Azure VMs. This way, your teams retain familiar functionality while moving to a long-term supported platform.

In addition, the TPG PSLink middleware, in combination with the Project Desktop client, enables integration with your enterprise systems, opening up new possibilities for data automation.

Option 2: Migration to PPRM tools based on the Microsoft Power Platform

For many organisations, the Project Online end of life is an opportunity to modernise. TPG ProjectPowerPack is based on the Microsoft Power Platform. This PPRM product is fully integrated into Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365.

With TPG ProjectPowerPack you get:

• Advanced scheduling and resource management with TPG Scheduler and Resource Planner
• Integrated timesheets
• A flexible architecture with Power Apps, Power BI and Teams
• Enterprise integration (SAP, Primavera P6, Oracle, Azure DevOps, Jira and more) via TPG PSLink
• Scalable governance and reporting for PMOs, departments and portfolios
• AI-enabled assistance with Copilot and automation

TPG ProjectPowerPack combines the modern user experience of Microsoft tools with enterprise PPRM capabilities. It can therefore be seen as the natural successor to Project Online – a future-proof solution.

Option 3: Migration to a hybrid scenario with Project Server SE and Microsoft Power Platform

Some organisations need the best of both worlds. For this, we suggest the hybrid scenario. Here, they use Project Server SE for scheduling, cost and resource management. In addition, TPG ProjectPowerPack provides functions such as risk management, issue tracking, timesheets and much more.

This secures continuity for experienced project managers while introducing a modern platform for wider user groups – with Teams, Power Apps and intuitive dashboards.

“The Project Online EOL represents more than just a technological change. It’s a chance to evolve project management practices, remove legacy constraints and adopt tools that are more collaborative, intelligent and future-ready. TPG stands at the forefront of this change.”
Christopher Pond, Head of Client Solutions, TPG UK & Ireland

Why Choose TPG as Your Partner for the Project Online Migration?

TPG The Project Group has been a trusted name in Project, Portfolio and Resource Management for over 27 years. As a Microsoft Partner, our software solutions combine deep Microsoft expertise with proven proprietary PPRM and integration products, plus decades of experience in transformation projects.

We don’t just migrate your data – we advance your PPRM processes, modernise your tools and deliver measurable business value.

Free Consultation on the End of Project Online

Given the significant uncertainty expected among organisations using Project Online following Microsoft’s announcement, we are offering a free consultation with immediate effect. Here we discuss your current individual situation and migration options so that you have a clear idea of how to proceed.

If you are interested, please send an email to info@theprojectgroup.com with the subject “POL Retirement”.

Project Online Migration – Options on Video

Please see below the recording of the webinar from 9 September 2025 on this topic, including technical explanations and details on the migration options.

Der Beitrag Project Online Retirement in 2026 – Now It’s Certain! Options and What Organisations Need to Know erschien zuerst auf Blog Project Management for Companies.

This article will shed some light on this key role. It will cover the following topics:

• Product Owner Definition
• Do only Scrum teams have a Product Owner?
• Product Owner duties
• Responsibilities of the Product Owner role
• Qualifications: What must a Product Owner be able to do?
• What is product backlog management?
• Metrics used to measure the value of the product
• Challenges for Product Owners
• Conclusion: Product Owner

Let us get started!

Product Owner Definition

The Scrum Guide defines: “The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the development team. How this is done may vary widely across organizations, Scrum teams, and individuals.”

Do Only Scrum Teams Have a Product Owner?

The role of Product Owner originated in Scrum. However, many agile development teams have someone who handles the associated tasks – even if they do not use the Scrum methodology.

In extreme programming (another agile approach besides Scrum), for example, there is the role called “on-site customer” or “customer proxy”. Although this person is part of the product development team, their role is to represent the customer when dealing with the developers.

It quickly becomes clear why this role is necessary: most agile teams are working with innovative solutions. They often bear complete responsibility for “their” product, from development to further enhancement and maintenance all the way to its replacement someday. Naturally, the team needs one person to take responsibility for ensuring that this work is heading in the right direction from the start. This person can be the Product Owner.

Product Owner Duties

The person in the role of Product Owner ensures that the product:

• Serves the market and offers solutions to address existing or newly awakened demand
• Retains its competitive standing or, better yet, is ahead of the competition
• Keeps the stakeholders – and especially the customers – happy at a reasonable amount of effort and cost without letting the requirements wish list become endless
• Provides solutions that are truly sensible and useful, with a reasonable amount of effort (applies to internal product development for other departments within the organization)
• Meets the requirements agreed upon by the stakeholders as soon as possible and the development team understands these requirements. Ideally, everyone involved should be able to identify with the solution.
• Can reach a stage of advanced development within the given timeframe, possibly incrementally in the form of agreed intermediate results.
• Delivers quick wins to ensure the necessary liquidity for further development.
• Fulfills internal and external expectations regarding quality.

Find out about 3 Product Owner Jira Tips.

For this purpose, the Product Owner’s key duties are in detail as follows:

1) Set goals and define the vision

• Sets goals and pursue them
  Product Owners must set the overall goals and track these over the long term. The developers, on the other hand, perform the technical work to achieve these goals in iterations.
• Develop a vision for the product
  The stakeholders collaborate with the development team to develop the product vision, which then guides the efforts going forward. (One example: The “BestDoc” app is a platform for finding a doctor, checking their ratings, and booking an appointment. People use it to search for the best doctors in their region. However, it can also be seen as a slogan or something inspiring or motivating.)

2) Involve the stakeholders early and often
To understand the stakeholders’ interests, the Product Owner must also understand the stakeholders themselves. It is the Product Owner’s duty to address these interests and, if necessary, filter them for the development team.

3) Handle the high-level planning

• Plan the iterations in advance
  Prepare the content of the next 1-3 iterations in a timely manner and present the overall plan for achieving these objectives to the team.

• Plan the release packages
  Set the overall objectives and develop an efficient plan: for example, which functionality will go live and when.

4) Measure the success and benefit
Define metrics that can be used to reactively measure the product’s actual benefit and added value.

5) Create and maintain a product backlog
Always keep this overview up to date and refine it or ensure that someone else creates it for the Product Owner.

6) Prepare the sprint reviews
Which key stakeholders will be invited, and what will they be shown? What feedback do you need from them? Which team members are available, and what functionality can they show in the demo?

7) Actively participate in the retrospective
What progress has our team made? Do we have the right tools and processes? How can we improve? The Product Owner as well as the team members pursue team-internal efforts to promote continuous improvement.

Responsibilities of the Product Owner Role

In the contrary, open-ended triangle of the agile environment, it is the Product Owner who bears primary responsibility for balancing and prioritizing the scope, cost, and timing of the product.

Together with the implementation team, the Product Owner is also responsible for making sure that the quality requirements are met. Some of the triangle models consider this as an additional dimension to be considered.

Reading tip: Before starting a project a role clarification workshop can help.

We can therefore say that Product Owners handle many of the duties traditionally handled by project managers.

However, project managers are also responsible for creating the project team, assigning tasks to the project team members, and monitoring their work. They can also be involved in initiating the project, for instance in selecting the projects or doing feasibility studies.

This is usually different for the Product Owner role:

Solution-oriented product perspective

Agile Product Owners take care of a solution-oriented product perspective along the entire life cycle of their product. They think about their product and its users, including operational processes after initial development. In doing so, they detach themselves from pure project thinking.

Initial backlog

An early task of the Product Owner is typically the creation of an initial backlog (the list of all requirements for the product) together with the stakeholders – and possibly the development team or representatives thereof.

Detailed implementation of the product

The undertaking has already been decided e.g. by product management, which in an agile context usually has a superordinate portfolio perspective. The Product Owner, on the other hand, is dedicated to the implementation of a product in detail.

Support from agile coaches

Team development, conflicts, process design and rules for cooperation are the business of agile coaches (in Scrum: Scrum Master). They also help Product Owners with their tasks, so that they always have support when needed.

Consultation / Coordination with the development team

The self-organized development team is responsible for the distribution of tasks. It also takes over the responsibility for quality in the iterations to a large extent. However, the team often has to coordinate with the Product Owner to ensure that it does not deviate from goals, requirements and market realities.

Joint responsibility with the development team

Instead of reporting, the developers show where they stand with regular demonstrations of their work results (e.g. new functions in the product). At the product review for stakeholders, at the end of the iteration, the Product Owner and development team do this again together for everyone outside the agile product team. Together they take responsibility for their own results.

Reading tip: Agile Project Management Certifications – A Comparison

The key responsibility of the Product Owner role is to evaluate and balance various factors such as:

• The cost, profitability, and financial return of the product development against customer satisfaction and marketability
• The often endless list of stakeholder wishes and requirements against the capacity and capabilities of the development team
• The team’s productivity (output) against the quality and benefit of the results (outcome)
• Proactive measures (risk analysis, development of new features, integration) against reactive measures (tests, bug fixes, quality control, maintenance)

Ideally, Product Owners in their role can strike a good balance between these often divergent factors. This is not an easy task, however. To truly understand these factors, the person in this role should possess and use the knowledge and skills that are also important for project managers.

Qualifications: What Must a Product Owner Be Able to Do?

To fulfil his or her responsibilities, a Product Owner should possess the following qualifications, knowledge and skills:

• Profitability calculations
• The ability to ensure that the solution developed provides the expected benefit (benefit engineering)
• Risk analysis methods
• Requirements analysis and prioritization techniques for managing the product backlog
• Stakeholder analysis and a talent for dealing with these people
• Confident manner and good negotiation skills
• An awareness of innovation
• People skills, also in dealing with the development team

The Product Owner must have more skills than just what the Scrum Guide demands of someone in that role.

What Is Product Backlog Management?

The Scrum Guide provides information on this, saying that it involves the following:

“Product backlog management encompasses:

• Documenting all entries in the product backlog clearly and accurately
• Sorting the product backlog entries in a way that optimally advances the goals and objectives
• Optimizing the value of the work performed by the development team
• Ensuring that the product backlog is visible, transparent, clear to everyone, and shows what the Scrum Team will work on next
• Ensuring that the development team has the necessary understanding of the product backlog entries”

Of course, even this list from the Scrum Guide does not cover everything found in practice. However, it was not intended to be all-inclusive. A good Product Owner is someone who manages to handle requirements engineering in an agile context.

Refining the product backlog involves activities such as:

Making decisions about the contents of the backlog

What should be in the backlog and what not? Being able to say “no” to stakeholders about requests that are inappropriate or unrealistic at this stage. A company must respect the decisions of the Product Owner, even if it is sometimes difficult. This also includes: adding new entries as soon as it is necessary and deleting those that have become superfluous.

Making decisions about the types of entries

Functional descriptions, specifications, bug fixes, non-functional requirements such as security, scalability, maintainability? Or the result-oriented solution description from the customer’s point of view (user stories) in one short sentence? The mixture makes sense, since none of these entry types fully meets all the requirements of a product.

Making decisions about requirements and timing

What are the requirements for which iteration and release? Specifically, this is the responsibility of the whole team in iteration planning. Most stakeholders also want to have a say in this. A user story map can be helpful.

Preparing cost estimates

Obtaining rough, relative effort estimates with story points or similar by the team. Because at the product backlog level, requirements are formulated primarily from the user’s perspective. The breaking down into tasks is only done in the iteration planning. The tasks then go into the iteration backlog.

Prioritizing the entries

Normally this is simply a linear list in the product backlog. This means that the priority results from the order: Things that are high up in the list must be implemented earlier than entries further down.

Our tip: Focus only on the backlog’s top entries when formulating and evaluating the entries. The entries at the bottom of the list are less important because these can still change or be omitted entirely.

This strategy, aligned with the “Just-in-Time” principle, helps you avoid wasting energy on requirements that aren’t immediate. It uses the DEEP criteria. This helps you ensure that when working with product backlogs, you follow agile principles and not simply waterfall planning under a new name.

Our tip: If using a flat, linear strategy to prioritize the backlog entries is not sufficient, you can also use User Story Mapping for multidimensional backlog management.

Metrics Used to Measure the Value of the Product

What are metrics to measure the value of the product? This, or something similar, is a favorite question in Product Owner certification exams such as Scrum.org. Initially, it looks like a difficult question. How can we, as a team, measure our product’s value? Certainly not solely based on our productivity. It can be high, but if the results are wrong, it is not helpful.

However, “Evidence-based management” defines several metrics, some of which are still not that well known. Product Owners may find these quite helpful though.

Evidence-based management recognizes four main categories for the individual metrics:

• Current Value: Measures how well the product is accepted and used by the market. It also takes into account the morale of the team developing it. How satisfied are the potential investors?
  Sample metrics: this category includes, for example, customer satisfaction indexes (such as those provided by surveys and product feedback), measurements indicating the relationship between the usefulness of individual functions and how satisfied customers are with these particular functions.
• Time-to-Market: This metric indicates how long it takes from the moment a new requirement is initially formulated until the originator receives the solution. How fast are we able to process new information and make use of it?
  Sample metrics: release frequency, integration frequency, processing times for backlog entries, and lead time.
• Ability to Innovate: This metric indicates how innovative the process for finding a solution is. How innovative is the product and its functionality? Ask this question when further developing a mature system in a large enterprise.
  Sample metrics: benefits of the individual functions in comparison to others, effort or expense of new developments (as a percentage) relative to activities such as maintenance, and amount of time the team is actually spending on the product (as compared to other tasks).
• Unrealized Value: This metric considers the (as yet) unrealized potential. Is it worth taking a closer look at this?
  Sample metrics: market share, user expectations vs. what users have received

Our tip: These metrics are most helpful when they are tracked over a longer period of time because then the developments and trends are more visible.

Challenges for Product Owners

So far, we have taken a close look at the role of Product Owner and a few of the key tools and tasks. Now you will learn about the challenges Product Owners face in their daily work.

Surveys of Product Owners and developers conducted by agile coaches have shown that the main challenges they face are these:

Time pressure faced by Product Owners

Possible problems: the role may not be filled out full-time, but must still be done alongside line work. Too many products and teams have to be managed at the same time. The balance between time for stakeholders and time for the teams is difficult.
Possible solution: cause analysis: what is really the reason for the time problems? What can you change? Are there time management methods that could help? Maybe a reprioritization of projects and requirements would help?

Lack of knowledge about the tasks

Possible problems: the Product Owner knows too little about his own role and agile development. The role is often simply assigned without further explanation or training.
Possible solution: further education, literature such as the highly recommended book “Product Owner: Leveraging Scrum as a Competitive Advantage” by Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham.

Lack of tool expertise

Possible problems: the Product Owner does not know necessary / important documents and metrics for his work.
Possible solution: discussion of tools for creating product visions, impact, story and roadmaps, release planning strategies, evidence-based management, stakeholder analysis tools

Lack of decision-making power

Possible problems: the Product Owner is not authorized to decide. Escalation paths are too complicated and lengthy.
Possible solution: escalation and discussion of such problems on meta level with the management

Problems involving stakeholders

Possible problems: lack of stakeholder participation and interest, conflicts among stakeholders regarding priority setting, too many stakeholders.
Possible solution: stakeholder analysis, learn and apply moderation techniques, requirements analysis together with stakeholders, e.g. with a product vision canvas, involvement of agile coaches.

Problems with the organizational structure

Possible problems: high organizational complexity and silo symptoms
Possible solution: shorten feedback loops with the help of agile coaches

Overly complex projects

Possible problems: projects with many different companies as participants. The Product Owner and the developers belong to different companies.
Possible solution: this does not necessarily have to be a problem, but it is a topic that should be dealt with consciously: contract design and team agreements help.

Highly regulated environments

Possible problems: the environment / industry makes lightweight working methods difficult due to process superstructure.
Possible solution: situational intelligence and concentration on a good error culture and learning as fast as possible in the face of external circumstances.

Products owners cannot ‒ and should not have to ‒ solve all these problems alone. Doing so generally requires the participation of management and all stakeholders as well as good coaching.

Our tip: If you have encountered any of these problems in your organization, it is a good idea to address these issues as quickly as possible by reporting them to the person or office responsible.

Conclusion: Product Owner

In this article, you have learned about the duties and responsibilities of a Product Owner, challenges this role needs to master, the metrics used to measure the value of a product and the specifics of product backlog management.

To summarize, a good Product Owner can make a valuable contribution to the company’s success in the market. This person has a very exciting and influential position offering numerous opportunities. However, the person in this role may also face difficult challenges.

If you are (or wish to be) a Product Owner, get ready for continuous learning involving methodologies, tools, and especially human interaction.

Does this sound appealing? If yes, then go ahead and explore the use of agile methods in your team and with your projects.

Our final tips

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Do you agree with our view of the Product Owner role? We look forward to your feedback, please leave us a comment.

Author: Antje Lehmann-Benz (PMP, PMI-ACP, PSM expert / instructor in Agile Methodology)

Antje Lehmann-Benz, PMP, is a project management instructor with a special focus on agile issues and Scrum seminars. She also has experience in providing software training (JIRA and Confluence) and consulting. In addition to instructing on frameworks and theory, she is also experienced in the use of agile games and practical exercises to reinforce the knowledge gained.

Read more about Antje Lehmann-Benz on LinkedIn.

Der Beitrag Product Owner – Definition, Duties, Responsibilities and Challenges in Agile Teams erschien zuerst auf Blog Project Management for Companies.