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Project mismanagement and failure drive the need for professional IT management…
In today‘s digital world, an ever increasing number of business operations rely on IT. This drives the need for professional IT portfolio and project management. Several studies indicate that a startling 70 % of companies experience failures in technology projects (citations: 1, 2). Next to poor requirements management, fuzzy business objectives, or human factors, like improper management involvement or skills, reasons can be traced back to unprofessional IT management, which effectively leads to:
- Technical failures of IT projects:Quite often companies do not have sophisticated and flexible mechanisms in place to properly evaluate their technical and project risks in an early stage of the project.
- Project and budget schedule overruns:
Surveys show that only 40 % of projects meet schedule, budget and quality goals. (citation: 3) Closely linked to this issue you find: - Invisibility of low-value projects:
It is critical to quickly identify and analyze projects that are not performing as expected, be it due to poor planning or project execution. An insight into current project figures is essential for management to take adequate business decisions, e.g., to cancel a project before it consumes even more budget. - Limited transparency in the availability of IT resources and project status:Insight into availability of critical project resources is important because they can delay or even stop project execution and impact the project progress. Proper business analysis and project monitoring is vital to any project success (citation: 4).
- Mismanaged IT projects that result in poor scheduling quality:
Mismanagement on all layers eventually results in projects not being executed according to set out goals. Portfolio and project managers need to have sophisticated methods and tools at hand to best perform their tasks.
There is a solution:
If any of the above mentioned issues sound familiar, the SAP Portfolio and Project Management rapid-deployment solution for IT management may just come as the right choice to you. Implemented as a pre-packaged offering in less than 12 weeks, it enables IT organizations to holistically manage IT project portfolios and resources. It introduces transparency into IT projects, IT service operations and critical IT resources. It leverages existing integration with SAP ERP to facilitate project costing. This rapid-deployment solution resides on three pillars:
- IT portfolio management:
Helps you plan your IT portfolio and align it with corporate objectives. Additionally, it offers a structured approach to plan budget and capacity on a portfolio level and to break it down to the project level. You are supported in prioritizing the most valuable IT projects and receive guidance throughout the IT portfolio planning processes. In a portfolio review you can prioritize and approve project proposals and document the approved budget for each project.
- IT project management:
Employs sophisticated project management methods that drive transparency of project cost and resource availability. Project template functionality provides you the ability to define best practices for executing projects in your company in a standardized fashion. A role-based resource management concept helps you assign the right resources to different tasks and enables an extended staffing process for line managers. If integrated into SAP ERP, you can also leverage project calculation and accounting, as well as time confirmation of project team members via cross-application time sheets. Use the embedded status reports and evaluations to control project progress, budget, and timing .
- IT portfolio monitoring:
Facilitates continuous verification that all IT projects are running on time, to scope, and on budget and that all risks are effectively mitigated. It enables you to handle necessary project changes on a portfolio level that are related to budget overruns, budget cuts, and scope and portfolio strategy changes. It can help you consolidate and verify all respective projects, facilitate project status reviews, and approve or reject budgeting decisions.
In a nutshell: The top 5 reasons to go for this solution
1. Properly and consistently applied, you can expect to reduce project failure rates through improved budgeting, scheduling, and sophisticated risk assessment. You can plan and monitor your budgeted finances and capacity down to a detailed project level, have it aggregated, revised, and approved until it meets your specific business needs and constraints for project execution. Using questionnaires which can be flexibly customized, you can now better evaluate your project risks.
2. You increase the visibility in resource planning, especially for critical IT resources. The role-based resource management concept facilitates proper project staffing. Dashboards showing resource availability indicate were you immediate staffing activities are required so that you do not run into a bottleneck situation.
Project Planning – Staffing Overview: Create and maintain roles, assign tasks to roles and staff resources
3. The solution helps you to minimize project overruns and costs by increasing transparency.
Portfolio monitoring tools like charts, dashboards, and reports show how well your projects are performing and whether actual project costs stay within the budgeted limit, for example. You have immediate insight into which item require change approval to initiate budget cuts and avoid overruns. This significantly reduces your administration efforts.
4. You can benefit from an out of the box ERP integration to handle project calculation and accounting. All your costs can be collected in your SAP ERP application on internal orders or WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) elements. In addition, you can leverage Easy Cost Planning (ECP) for your project calculation. Planned and actual costs can be rolled back to your PPM portfolio structure, so that you can easily monitor your financial planning.
5. This package comes with a fixed scope and fixed price offering securing predictability of implementation time and costs. SAP experts provide comprehensive support: from installation checks to requirements confirmation workshops, package customizing, unit testing, knowledge transfer to key users and going live support. All these activities are predefined and tailored so that you can go live in as little as 12 weeks!
Where can you find more information?
You can find this solution on: SAP.com (for an overview) and SAP Service Marketplace (for details on the solution, requires S-User authorization).
If you want to gain more visibility into the performance of your R&D (research and development) or investment portfolio across all departments, look into this solution:
- SAP Portfolio and Project Management rapid-deployment solution for portfolio analysis in SAP Service Marketplace (for details on the solution, requires S-User authorization).
If you are looking for monitoring and decision making support for operative projects running in your SAP ERP Project System (PS), check out this solution:
- SAP Portfolio and Project Management rapid- deployment solution for portfolio monitoring in SAP.com (for an overview) and in SAP Service Marketplace (for details on the solution, requires S-User authorization).
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