So, thank you everyone for joining this webinar.
I appreciate you guys taking your time out from your busy schedule and attending this
webinar.
This webinar is about the portfolio analysis from the Project Server 2013.
This is me.
I'm Partive, I work form EPMA.
I'm a consultant over here.
I've been working...I've done my MBA from the University of Houston and been working
with EPMA for more than one and a half year, just over one and a half year.
It's been a great experience working with some of the best people in the industry.
Just a little bit about EPMA, these are some of the clients that we have worked with, or
are currently working with.
EPMA is an Enterprise Project and Portfolio Management consulting firm.
We mainly focus on Microsoft Project, we are a Gold Partner for Microsoft.
We are the third largest EPM company in the United States.
We work very closely with PMI and the University of Houston, The Bauer College of Business.
We are their preferred training provider.
We actually have one of the largest dedicated EPM training center, right here in our Houston
office.
So just a little bit about ourselves.
This is not a marketing webinar, so I'm just going to jump right into the webinar, the
purpose of this webinar.
So what is this webinar about?
So before we even start, I will be assuming that you guys have a basic understanding of
how Microsoft Project works, you know, basically how to create projects, how to load tasks
in there, and how to assign resources to these projects.
In this webinar, I'm not covering any technical aspects of how to configure Project Server
for using the Portfolio Analysis, we're not going to discuss any workflows or how to implement
any workflows in your Project Server.
Essentially what we're going to cover, are these three items here on your PWA homepage,
your Project Web App homepage.
Basically, the driver library, driver prioritization, portfolio analysis.
We'll talk about, you know, what each and every thing does, but just to make sure that,
you know, we're just going to cover these three parts in the next one hour that we have.
So let's hear this, as I said, everything I'm going to show is going to be on the Project
Server 2013, but the steps for Project Server 2010 are very similar, I don't think there
is much difference in the 2010 and the 2013 environment as far as the portfolio analysis
part goes, so whatever steps I do, if you are using the Project Server 2010 right now,
you can still follow the same steps and still get the same results that you're looking for.
So, let's start with, what is Portfolio Analysis?
So the Project Portfolio Analysis, you know, it is a proven process that has been used
by a lot of people to improve the overall project and, you know, your organizational
performance.
Using this analysis, basically what happens, is you have a lot of projects in there, you
go ahead and rate these projects based on the objectives that these projects accomplish,
the benefits of these projects, what costs they have, what risks they carry, things like
that.
You can go ahead and rate these projects for these and compare each other, compare these
projects against each other and select the best projects to maximize your return on investment.
Now this process can be used in many ways.
You guys can use this process in a lot of ways, but most organizations are going to
use it...90% of the time what you're going to use this processes for...project selection.
So you have a lot of project requests coming in, you need to pick the projects that actually
provide you the best return on investment, everybody has limited resources, whether there
is limited resources that you can have, limited budget that you guys can have.
So you need to pick projects that are best for your company that best maximize the return
on investment.
Now this tool also lets you do what-if analysis, so let's say, for example, you selected a
bunch of projects and then you can do some what-if analysis, you an move some projects
to start later to see how it impacts your portfolio, how it impacts your return on investment.
You can change the budget that you have, maybe initially you have budget of, say, a million
dollars and then you can change it to let's say two million dollars and see what you can
do, things like that.
This tool has a lot of capabilities with it.
So this tool easy to submit, by that, what I mean is, there's a lot of work that you
need to do before you can actually start using this portfolio analysis part of Project Server.
It's not a simple process.
So let's start and see what you need to do to prepare for the portfolio analysis part.
So there are three steps that you need to do in order to accomplish your portfolio analysis,
enough to do portfolio analysis using Project Server.
The first thing that you need to do is define business drivers.
Now business drivers could be anything, we're going to talk in a lot more detail about all
these three steps.
But you need to define your business drivers.
You need to prioritize these business drivers, say which business drivers is more important
to you.
Then you also need to configure your resource pool.
So as you can see, there's a lot of steps that you need to do before you can actually
start using the portfolio analysis part of Project Server.
So what are business drivers?
Loosely defined, business drivers are just crucial factors that lead to success in business.
For example, let's say you could have...a particular company could boast of having solid
customer service, some can say that they can deliver projects quickly, some say that they
have excellent marketing people that can market their projects and market their products.
So, we can see that all these success factors, they differ wildly depending on the industry
that you are in.
The scope of your projects or even the, you know, there could be a lot of market dynamics
that play a role in what factors effect your business success.
So you can see that this is not in any way an easy task to perform and define your business
drivers.
Microsoft recommends that you define anywhere between five and 12 business drivers.
The reason being that any less than five typically does not capture enough complexity of your
organization, and anything more than 12, you'll have a tough time defining the priorities
between these business drivers and all of that stuff.
So anything between five and 12 is usually considered good.
Of course that will differ wildly depending on the industry that you are in.
Now while defining these business drivers, you also need to associate them with quantifiable
impact statements.
You should be able to measure the impact of these drivers.
You should be able to easily tell what impact a particular project has on these business
drivers.
So lets start with this.
Let's start and go ahead and define some business drivers in Project Server.
I have a dev server that I have created internally over here.
It is a 2013 environment, so people that have not seen a 2013 environment, this is what
the PWA homepage looks like out of the box.
As you can see, most of the things are similar.
You have the quick launch bar on the left that shows you the projects, the resource
center, the time sheets, and things like that.
So let's go to the driver library, this is where we go ahead and define our drivers.
Now I've already gone ahead and done...defined some of the drivers so that we don't sit here
and start typing stuff.
So, let's go ahead and look at one of these drivers and see how we define them.
So basically, we would go ahead and give a name to the driver, basically expand into
new market segments.
Let's say that's your driver.
You put a description for your driver.
If you have departments you can filter these by departments, whether you want to have it
active or inactive.
And then you define the impact statements for these drivers.
So for example, this particular driver does not impact our revenue at all.
If it's low, it affects our review by, let's say, less than $500,000, and things like that.
For each impact statement you will define how these drivers affect your project.
You need to define them.
So I've gone ahead and defined, I think I have around six or seven of these drivers
defined, all of them are active right now.
And you can track when they have been modified and who modified these driver statements.
Now, you can have multiple stakeholders in your organization that have completely different
view of how your business should go forward.
Maybe you will have to go ahead and, in that case, you might have to go ahead and define
these drivers for each stakeholders, and then combine those two outputs from the portfolio
analysis and cherry pick these projects that most affect your organization.
So, what's next?
After you have defined these business drivers, what do you do?
Let me get back to my slide.
The next step is to actually go ahead and prioritize these business drivers.
Basically saying, which of these business drivers are more important to you as compared
to the other one that is being defined in there.
Now in order to do this, you have to go ahead and sit with the stakeholders and perform
pairwise analysis to identify the relative priorities between each of these drivers.
Say example, business driver A is more important that the business driver