The EPPM Solution

Success Guide
How to Select, Deploy and get the most
value from your EPM / PPM Solution

Jerome Quinton
 This document is provided for informational purposes only and
the author makes no warranties, either express or implied, in this
document. Information in this document, is subject to change
without notice. The entire risk of the use or the results from the
use of this document remains with the user.

This book expresses the author’s views and opinions. The infor-
mation contained in this book is provided without any express,
statutory, or implied warranties. The author shall not be held lia-
ble for any damages caused or alleged to be caused either di-
rectly or indirectly by this book

Author: Jerome Quinton

Cover and Design: Harry Lewis

2
Contents

Preface ················································································04

About the Author ··································································05

Chapter1: Overview······························································06
Introduction to EPPM ····························································· 06
Assessing organisation readiness··········································· 10

Chapter 2: Selecting your Solution ········································14

Building the business case ····················································· 14
System selection criteria ························································ 25
Cloud vs On-Premises ··························································· 29
Review of the Microsoft EPPM Solution ·································· 34

Chapter 3: Deploying your EPPM Solution ·····························44

Choosing the right implementation partner ····························· 44
Critical success factors for deploying your EPPM solution······· 48
Pilot versus proof of concept ·················································· 51
Managing the change curve ··················································· 52
Configuring your solution - Start small and keep it simple.······· 56
Wrapping up - Roll-out and culture change ····························· 63

Chapter 4: Looking to the future ···········································66

3
Preface
If there is only one reason for this book, it is sharing best practic-
es. I don’t pontificate that I’ve found the one true way. Rather this
book should be viewed as practical advice for selecting and im-
plementing great software by those who’ve done it and–most im-
portantly–are still innovating.

The extensive guidance shared here is not an end-to-end guide

for everyone, although it could be used as a starter for ten for
most organisations. To make it easier to digest, I have arranged
these best practices in chapters. Each chapter represents a step
along the journey to your PPM future state.

My team at Pcubed are hands-on practitioners. Our motto is, “If

you don’t understand the space well, you can’t solve the prob-
lem.” When it comes to deployment, our “laser focus” meets
pragmatism. No scope creep and no gold plating. We prefer to
put all our energy into the quality of our deployments and robust
adoption of the solution. This book was written to share our
knowledge with organisations that are just starting out on their
respective journeys.

Who should read this book

An executive, PMO Manager, Programme Manager or CIO look-
ing to select or implement a PPM or EPM solution.

4
About the Author

During the day Jerome Quinton is an

accomplished Principle consultant at Pcubed,
the largest global management consulting firm
uniquely focused on program, portfolio and
change management. He is a MSP®,
PRINCE2®, Microsoft Certified project
management professional and technology
geek. He has solid Project and Portfolio
management experience and a strong track
record of successfully delivering and developing pragmatic business
solutions for world class organisations. He specialises in both the
delivery and sale of consulting and solution orientated services
across a wide range of markets, bridging the gap between
technology and businesses to empower organisations to meet their
solution and integration needs. He has written for Microsoft
OnWindows and several news publications.

Outside of work he is an Information junkie, Tech fanboy, Blogger,

Self Help Satirist, eReader addict, Podcast fanatic, father & impartial
Idealist who dabbles in public speaking & Politics. He has learned he
knows very little in the greater scheme of things & that people will
pay for what he does know.

He can be reached on Linkedin @ https://uk.linkedin.com/in/

jeromequinton

5
1. Overview
1.1 Introduction to EPPM

Organisations need to react quickly to fluctuating markets and changing

project and programme conditions. They also need to meet the demand for
visibility and information that can be acted on across distributed project
teams. Regardless of the exact nature of your PMO, teams need to be em-
powered to work better, smarter and faster. Whether that’s through cloud
technologies, or agile processes within a PPM framework, that’s for you to
decide. But one thing is clear: The vanguard PMOs are leading the pack in
innovation and digital transformation because they’re willing to try, or inter-
mingle, methodologies supported with a centralised tool set.

It’s important that your teams have the tools they need to get work done,
but if a variety of PPM tools are being used because there’s a lack of align-
ment in technology, it can be just as inefficient as manual processes and
spreadsheets. Whether you’re working in a centralised or departmental
PMO, it’s important that your organisation—as a whole—is working with the
same technology. That way, everyone can gain visibility into programs, pro-
jects, and portfolios to reduce overlap and keep everyone on the same
page.

A winning strategy for enterprise project and portfolio management is to es-

tablish both long- and short-term goals with regard to strategy; research
the methodologies that best fit your organisation and when necessary, pur-
chase the tools that will help you meet your organisation’s goals. The key is
finding a solution that works from a cultural as well as a technological per-
spective within your organisation. The purpose of this eBook is to provide a
basic strategy for helping your organisation prepare for the selection, de-
ployment and support of that solution.

As denizens of the technology industry, we live in a world rife with three let-
6
ter acronyms. EPM, PPM, IIPA, APM are only the tip of the iceberg. The truth
is, acronyms are a bit dull. But, the way the technology behind those acro-
nyms is changing project management is interesting. A few years ago, the ac-
ronym EPM was a hot commodity and considered the way to go. For modern
organisations to become effective it was not enough to schedule the project.
Management had to extend the project management concept to the entire or-
ganisation. One of the most productive by-products of this era the shift be-
yond person-by-person project scheduling to collaborative project team man-
agement. One of the most exciting trends in the last couple of years has been
towards Project Portfolio Management (PPM). With this new movement we’ve
seen PPM pop up as a new industry within the EPM space in a way that I
think is very exciting.

EPM looks at all of the interlocking projects within an organisation as a collec-

tive whole, and provides an overall picture of an organisation's collective ef-
forts. Whereas EPM is designed to facilitate day-to-day project delivery and
project management, PPM is designed to handle the overarching project,
program, product or portfolio management environment (you can choose
whichever Ps apply), including current and future needs and demands on re-
sources. To summarise, if EPM is about "doing projects right," PPM is about
"doing the right projects."

For the purpose of this eBook I'm going to refer to this all-in-one solution as
"Enterprise Project Portfolio Manage-
ment (EPPM). The EPPM solution in
theory should support individual pro-
jects and programs as well as the
larger enterprise and allow for
"cradle to grave" tracking of projects
-- selecting, planning, and schedul-
ing, status tracking, sharing, re-
source management and storage of
project artefacts. The tool should en-
able project-driven organisations to
manage their programs and projects intelligently -- from small and simple too
large and complex. It should also drive better portfolio management decisions
by providing end-to-end, real-time visibility of relevant information. An EPPM

7
tool becomes the backbone of an organisation’s support infrastructure for
EPPM: it is the tool that project teams use to collaborate, it is the way that
project managers provide status updates, it allows PMs to manage portfolio-
wide metrics, and, of course, it allows for the provision of performance infor-
mation to executives which in turn will help them to ensure that the business
objectives are being achieved.

For organisations that are considering a first-time implementation or a transi-

tion to a new EPPM tool, common issues that you may be experiencing in-
clude ad-hoc or ineffective prioritisation decisions, time-consuming data gath-
ering for management reports, resource bottlenecks and lack of visibility into
resource utilisation, and inconsistent approaches to planning and managing
projects. Some common challenges that EPPM tools address are covered on
the next page.

8
Common Challenges Would it help if you had…?

Lack of Overview: You’ve got a lot of pro- A summary status view of all your programs and pro-
grams / projects and it’s hard to see the big jects that allowed you to drill into any issues you see
picture of whether they’re achieving what at the high level
you need? Are disparate projects, demands,
resources, portfolios, and time-management
activities leading to a lack of accountability
and inefficient business processes?

Poor Control: Programs (or projects) move A means of bringing your programs and projects to-
off in their own direction, dependencies sud- gether in a way that enables them to collaborate bet-
denly cause problems, or projects end up ter, see and understand dependencies and gives you
competing for the same resources? visibility of how they’re progressing

Poor Systems / Processes: You’re using lots A single system that handles everything from sched-
of different systems that need manual updat- uling, risk management, issue control and reporting
ing and effort?

Lack of Visibility: You’re not getting visibility A consistent way of seeing the summary and detail
of what’s happening on your programs / pro- information of your projects that’s based on a single
jects until things have gone wrong? Is the source of data and allows you to compare programs /
lack of visibility making it difficult to get work projects
done or make the right decisions?

Poor Reporting: You can’t rely on the infor- A way of accessing up-to-the-minute information at a
mation you’re getting about your programs / summary and detailed level about any or all of your
project, which may be wrong or so long in programs / projects that is consistent
coming it’s too late to do anything and hard
to make decisions? Is most of our data living
in static spreadsheets?

Poor Prioritisation: It’s hard to get agree- A tried and tested way of getting agreement to what
ment over priorities, or things change and it’s programs / projects should be running and managing
difficult to understand which programs may any necessary changes along the way
be affected? Based on the status of your pro-
ject portfolio today, are we able to see the
road ahead to make the right business deci-
sions for tomorrow?

Poor Resource Management: Programs / A way of seeing your resource capacity against the
projects are all competing for the same re- demand from all your programs / projects based on
sources and it’s hard to understand how best their current up-to-date plans and which allows you to
to allocate them across the programs / pro- make judgements based on the relative priority of
jects? those programs / projects

If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, then you’re likely in the mar-
ket for a new EPPM tool.

9
1.2 Assessing Organisation Readiness
Before you go out and buy your shiny new EPPM tool you should probably
ask yourself if your company is ready to implement one.
A successful EPPM implementation begins by identifying and understand-
ing clearly defined goals, carefully planning the strategy to obtain those
goals, and developing a vision to complete the goals through controlled ex-
ecution. Before you finalise the business case to secure funding, you
should be able to answer a simple list of questions.

Is there a coherent strategy?

EPPM uses project activities to move the organisation towards a goal.
According to research on EPPM, groups and individuals who conduct
strategic planning are consistently more successful at achieving goals
than those who don’t utilise it. The strategy provides a source of shared
vision that should be used to determine which opportunities to pursue –
the first step in portfolio selection.
Are your PM practices institutionalised (and how do you know)?

If you don't have some sort of documented methodology and don't have
the evidence reflecting compliance with those practices, why do you
think introducing a tool is going to make any difference?

Do you have sustainable executive sponsorship and resource

management commitment (and how do you know)?

If you've been trying to sell these two stakeholder groups on the benefits
of adopting a tool, how do you know they're sufficiently bought in? Every-
one wants to have pretty portfolio health dashboards and detailed views
into staff capacity and allocation, but a lot of effort on the part of mid-
and senior managers is required to ensure that accurate and complete
data is being entered by project teams.

10
Can you confirm that the project data is reliable?
You won’t make good decisions based on bad information. This is where
the enterprise-level project management tools with portfolio management
capabilities really earn their keep. Gathering data in such a way that it can
be put into context and become information is where software reigns su-
preme. How long will each project take? How much will it cost? What’s the
expected ROI? What’s the status of the projects already underway? Being
able to view the most salient information on each and every project in
thumbnail-sketch form allows executives to compare apples to apples …
and weigh the relative benefits of apples vs. oranges. What is less certain is
the organisation’s willingness to use these features of the software and to
train the users appropriately. This is a cultural change issue that is often
not well addressed when selecting a EPPM tool.

Who is going to support the tool past the initial roll out (and will you
have sufficient funding for these resources)?

Regardless of whether a EPPM or EPM solution is installed on-site or sub-

scribed to over the internet, you still need internal staffing to provide appli-
cation support to your end users, identify and address coaching or compli-
ance issues, and receive feedback from end users and incorporate that
feedback into on-going improvements to your procedures and the configu-
ration of the tool. Beyond this, depending on your organisation's needs and
the capabilities of your selected tool, you may require software develop-
ment assistance for creating interfaces with your other business systems
and report writers to create custom reports from the tool's centralised re-
pository. Will the costs of providing this support be absorbed by the tangi-
ble benefits achieved by implementing a tool? If not, how will you justify
funding?

How are you going to "sell it" to the primary end users?

Vendors tend to target executives when selling EPPM and EPM tools.
Why? Because dashboards and reports make for great eye candy. Yet in
reality the burden of populating those dashboards and reports falls on pro-
ject managers and team members who do the hard work of entering and
maintaining project data. Will you be reducing (or at least not increasing)

11
 the administrative work for these users?

Do you know what projects already exist?

What’s in the portfolio? Many companies don’t know. An inventory of all the
initiatives competing for resources is a baseline requirement to even begin
portfolio management. Many companies set criteria for what counts as a
project to be listed (for example, only projects that surpass a predeter-
mined threshold number: a schedule of 30+ days or 100+ hours; or a
budget of at least £50,000). Counting projects is a first step towards deriv-
ing value from portfolio management, because certain realities are quickly
revealed: if you schedule 130 percent of your human resources to projects,
for example, a lot of things will not get done (and valuable people will quit
or go crazy). Even this basic step surfaces redundancies and dead issues,
allowing a EPPM initiative to create value almost immediately. The invento-
ry has to include all projects, since resources are working on all projects –
not just on the high-profile ones. And it should include projects that are be-
ing carried out by outsource providers and consultants, as well, since even
those projects have at least someone within the company as a liaison, con-
tract manager, and/or project manager.

Do you have resources available to work on the project?

Another part of the inventory process should be, literally, counting heads.
Who are the project managers? Surprisingly, many large companies strug-
gle to identify project resources.
For some companies, the scarcest
resource isn’t money but project
managers. A critical factor in pro-
ject selection thus becomes: Do we
have a project manager who can
manage it? Ideally other roles that
need to form part of the project
team are the sponsor, trainer, test-
er, Business Analyst, the Process
Owners and an implementation
partner (the technical people)

12
Do you have a PMO in place?
Assuming that you plan to implement EPPM at the enterprise level (which I
recommend), an enterprise level PMO needs to own the project inventory,
prioritisation, selection, and tracking process or, EPPM cannot be done
well. Gartner, Inc. has recommended this PMO strategy, and those compa-
nies that have put enterprise-wide EPPM in place have relied on it. In fact,
while intra-departmental portfolios may perhaps be selected and balanced
without involvement of a PMO, it’s doubtful that anything on a wider scale
can succeed … and you can’t optimise the system by balancing only parts
of it. This is undoubtedly why Gartner predicted years ago that companies
failing to establish a PMO would experience twice as many major project
delays, overruns, and cancellations as would companies with a PMO in
place. New research tells us that companies are moving toward the PMO
as the owner of portfolio management.

If you can't conclusively answer "yes" to all of these questions and have the
data to back up this confidence, then it might be advisable to wait until you
do. Otherwise, the next step is to choose the right solution for your organisa-
tion.

13
2. Selecting your solution
2.1 Building the business case

There are many reasons why organisations decide to implement EPPM so-
lutions. Typically it is to help senior management confidently and consist-
ently answer questions like these:
 Are we doing the right projects, the ones that provide maximum value
to the organisation?

 Are we doing these projects right, meeting the quality, time and cost
objectives?

 Are we using our resources in the most cost-efficient manner?

 Are we realising the benefits from our projects and programmes?

 Can we take advantage of this new opportunity and re-balance our

project portfolio?

 How can we accommodate this “must-do” project within the current

portfolio?

 Are we going to be able to deliver next year’s investment plan?

Whatever the drivers are, before investing in EPPM tools you will almost
certainly be asked to provide a Business Case for the investment. Develop-
ing a business justification and ROI model for a EPPM solution is an im-
portant step once the main business drivers have been identified. This pro-
cess ensures executives have a way to measure the benefits of a new

14
EPPM solution and can evaluate the ROI of the required investment. Present-
ing a compelling business case can also help to secure budget approval from
your CFO. The Business Case for investing in EPPM tools is really no different
to any other Business Case, because it requires you to clearly explain:
 The benefits that will be realised when the EPPM toolset is fully imple-
mented
 The costs of the implementation
 The return on investment and the payback period

Defining the ROI & Benefits of your Solution

As companies worldwide have tightened purse
strings, increased emphasis has been placed on
evaluating spending, internal processes, and imple-
mented solutions. Subsequently, companies are
more intently focusing on the return on investment
(ROI) that various tools bring to their organisations
to justify their continued use. As resources have
grown scarcer and organisations have been forced
to cull projects down to only the most viable, EPPM
tools have been especially scrutinised. Recognising
organisations’ needs for tangible ROI results for
EPPM, Forrester recently concluded that EPPM
programs extend a whopping 250+% ROI to organ-
isations.
Organisations that successfully improve their EPPM
processes by adopting a EPPM tool realise most or
all of the following business benefits:

Strategic alignment across project portfolios:

Aligning resources with strategic priorities is challenging for any organisa-
tion, but by capturing all work across the company—both project-related
and non-project work—prioritisation and trade-off decisions can be made
15
 with full visibility into business impact. Avoiding low-value projects and
“rogue work” is one of the major benefits an improved EPPM solution can
deliver.

Better collaboration across organisational silos:

If a EPPM process and tool is easy to use and adopt, it enables teams
across organisational silos to collaborate. For instance, resource managers
and project managers can better collaborate on project staffing, and fi-
nance can more easily provide regular updates on project costs. This
broad adoption enables real-time visibility into project and portfolio status,
thereby allowing executives and project managers to ensure business re-
sults are being achieved.

Improved decision making and accountability:

A strong EPPM solution will provide powerful business intelligence and re-
porting capabilities to enable a “single source of truth” for dashboards and
reports. This enables more accurate and timely information for manage-
ment decisions about project investments and insight into which projects
require more oversight and controls.

Streamlined PMO processes and templates:

Implementing an overall project management framework, with just the
basic phases and gates and few key controlling artefacts (business case,
project schedule, status report, etc.), enables a common streamlined pro-
cess for the project management office (PMO) while also enabling individu-
al projects to select the right methodology for the project type.

Improved organisational productivity:

An EPPM tool helps implement and supports more predictable processes
and eliminates unstructured data entry and management. In addition, a
EPPM solution should enable customisation to ensure the tool matches the
way your organisation works.
That being said, Benefits Definition and Benefits Management are only truly
effective when the benefits are measurable, and this means that in order to

16
 justify the investment in EPPM tools you will need to measure the way your
organisation is currently working. For example, if you are expecting to re-
duce the time (and hence the cost) of preparing monthly management re-
ports then you will need to measure your current preparation time (and
cost) and to define a target time (and cost) for the future.
Most EPPM tool implementations also involve improvements to the way pro-
jects, programmes and portfolios are run. Therefore, it is important to rec-
ognise that benefits may be attributable to changes in process as well as
changes in toolset. Broadly speaking, there are three types of benefits that
need to be considered:

Direct cost savings

Tangible benefits
Intangible benefits
In the following pages we can explore these benefits in some more detail:

17
Direct cost savings
Each organisation has its own reasons for implementing EPPM tools, and its
own set of expected benefits and operating costs. Below are typical direct
cost savings which can be attributed to the use of EPPM tools.

Benefit Description Benefit Benefit Current Target Expected

Owner Measure value value Annual
Cost
Saving

Reductions in Project Manager Programme Hours per week per

workloads providing progress & PM
updates Project
Managers

Reduction in PMO workload PMO Hours per week per

collating information and PMO person
producing regular reports

Reduction in Programme Programme Hours per month

Manager and PMO workloads per PM and per
Managers,
capturing and tracking PMO person
benefits PMO

Reduction in time responding PMO Hours per week per

to requests from senior PMO person
stakeholders for ad-hoc
reports/information

Reduction in PMO headcount PMO Number of PMO

staff

Reduction in induction time for HR Hours per year per

new staff becoming familiar new joiner
with standards and
procedures

18
Tangible benefits
There are many potential tangible benefits that can be attributed to the
introduction of EPPM tools, as illustrated below. However, it can sometimes
be challenging to establish good, accurate, repeatable measures for some of
these.

Benefit Description Benefit Benefit Current Target Expected

Owner value value
Measure Annual Cost
Saving

Reduction in wasted project Portfolio Number of

costs by early identification of cancelled and
Director and
failing projects (e.g. Business re-scoped
Case becomes invalid, risks Project projects
become unacceptable) with Sponsor
potential re-scoping or
cancellation
Reduced budget overruns due to Portfolio Annual cost of
improved planning and visibility Director overruns

Improved use of scare resources Resource Annual

(e.g. Senior Architects, test Manager, resource,
environments), contractors and contractor and
Finance
capital due to improved planning capital budgets
and visibility Manager

Accelerated delivery due to Sponsor Annual benefits

improved use of resources and realised
capital

Reduction of spend on low value/ Portfolio Annual budgets

unnecessary/non-strategic Director
projects due to improved
prioritisation

Reduction of non-productive time Programme Annual budgets

on projects due to improved time &
recording and tracking Project
Managers

19
Intangible benefits
Intangible benefits are benefits that do not have a directly attributable financial
value. However, often with some creative and careful thinking it is possible to
attribute financial figures to intangible benefits. Below are some typical
intangible benefits from the implementation of EPPM tools.
Benefit Description Benefit Benefit Current Target Expected
Owner value value Annual Cost
Measure
Saving

Maintaining management focus on Senior Annual

delivering and maximising the business business
Management
value of all project investments benefits
realised

More projects delivered on time, scope, Sponsor Number of

cost and quality due to following standard projects
processes delivered on
time, scope,
cost and
quality
Reduction in programme and project start- Sponsor Initiation
up times timeframe
Improved decision making on projects due Sponsor Number of
too accurate, up to date project information
Gateways
being available on-line
passed
Improved communications due to Programme Number of
consistent use of standard processes, & deliverables
procedures and progress measures approved first
Project
time
Managers
Improved accountability for tasks, Delivery Approval
deliverables and Work Packages Team timeframe

Process improvements facilitated by Process Number of

increased use of standard processes and Manager improvements
lessons learned reviews
identified

Fewer surprises for Operations due to Operations Number of

earlier engagement in project lifecycle Manager project reviews
participated in

Improved maturity of project and Senior P3M3® or

programme management capability, similar maturity
Management
leading to increased capacity for change or level
ability to tackle more complex programmes
and portfolios

20
Costs of implementing your solution
The costs of implementing software cover people, process and technology.
The table below itemises the typical cost items for implementing EPPM
software.

Cost item Cost Factor Cost Type Estimated cost

EPPM Software licences Number of users Annual

Add-on software licences (e.g. plug- Number of add-on

Annual
ins, upgrades) licences

Interfacing EPPM software to existing Number of interfaces

One-off
systems required

Infrastructure and hardware upgrades Number of upgrades

One-off
required required

Degree of
EPPM Software configuration and set-
configuration and set- One-off
up costs
up required

Training the users in EPPM software

Number of users One-off
use

Updating in-house processes and

Number of processes One-off
procedures

Training the users in updated

Number of users One-off
processes

Internal costs to run the

As required One-off
implementation project

Communications and marketing costs As required One-off

Other external consultancy costs As required One-off

Annual software maintenance and

As required Annual
support costs

Training new joiners in software and

Number of new joiners Annual
process use

21
Return on Investment and Payback Period
A classic Return on Investment (RoI) analysis looks at the Costs versus the
Benefits, and how long it will take to realise the benefits. Using the information
gathered from assessing the Benefits and the Costs in your organisation, the
following table can help you build the RoI case.

5-year
Description Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year 5
total

Benefits – tangible cost

savings

Benefits – other tangible

benefits

Benefits - intangibles

TOTAL projected benefits

TOTAL projected costs

NET Return on Investment

Benefits estimating assumptions Costs estimating assumptions

Payback period (months) Breakeven Fiscal Year

Payback assumptions

22
Independent Research into the business value of EPPM tools

Forrester Group profiled the payback experiences of four companies that

had deployed EPPM tools. Their key conclusion was that the average
payback period was two months. This was largely achieved through:
 Increased productivity through EPPM process standardisation and
automated reporting
 Cost savings through PMO automation
 Increased accountability for project spend

IDC conducted research into the value added by EPPM with 13 highly
successful companies that had implemented EPPM solutions. Their key
conclusions were that on average:
 The payback period was 7.4 months
 Cost per project was reduced 37%
 Redundant projects dropped 78%
 IT staff productivity increased by 14%
 Project failure rate dropped 59%

Gantry Group profiled the payback experiences of eight companies that

had deployed EPPM tools for at least one year. Key conclusions:
 Six of the eight achieved a positive ROI within one year
 On average the software returned a savings of 6.5% of the total IT
budget by the end of year one and 14% (NPV) over three years of
deployment
 These tangible benefits were achieved largely through
 Reduced project budget overruns
 Avoidance of spend on non-value-adding projects
 Reduced staff costs due to improved staff loading/utilisation

23
 reduced project reporting/governance expense through PMO
automation
 Improved Project Manager efficiency through project status reporting
automation

There is also potential for even greater gains. Portfolio managers who
participated in PMI’s Pulse of the Profession™ InDepth Report: Portfolio
Management speculated they could increase the number of projects
completed on time, on budget, achieving objectives and ROI goals by
roughly one third if portfolio management was practiced more effectively.
A EPPM Solution can more easily facilitate this process.
AVERAGE
Highly effective at Minimally effective at
PERCENTAGE OF % Increase
portfolio management portfolio management
PROJECTS:
Completed on time 68% 50% 36%

Completed on budget 64% 54% 19%

Met original goals and 77% 65% 18%

business intent
Met/exceeded 62% 48% 29%
forecasted ROI

So, how does all of this information amalgamate to determine the precise
value that EPPM solutions bring in order for you to build your business case?
The truth is that there is no easy answer, at the end of the day you have to
look at your own challenges and the benefits that the tool can bring. This
could be done in any number of ways. For instance, you could use a formula
that adds the solution’s start-up costs (out-of-pocket and internal resources),
maintenance (internal and consulting support) and anything else incremental
to enforce it, and then measures this against the cost savings and avoidances
to the company. Or you could take a qualitative approach when determining
the value of the solution by defining a number of recognition events, such as
integrated scheduling, agreed-upon templates, a single source of truth for all
data etc., the success of which would be measuring sticks to determine the
value and impact the EPPM tool had on the company.

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2.2 System Selection Criteria
It is important to find the right tools to support business-driven EPPM for your
organisation and to make sure that they help, not hinder, the process.
Software should mirror your governance process and drive standards and
consistency that benefit every part of your company.

Fortunately for us these solutions are readily available on the market but not
so fortunately often under differently-named offerings. Many of these PPM and
EPM solutions are essentially the same thing, but vendors’ use different
names for them depending on the industry that they are trying to sell them to
or how they are trying to market it. Your task is to make sure you choose a
solution with the right mix of capabilities that meet the current and future
needs of your organisation. Some basic capabilities I believe should be in any
EPM/PPM software tool suite are:

 Demand Management, should enable the capture of all requests in a

central repository to enhance visibility. It should standardise and
streamline data collection by using configurable forms and business case
templates.
 Portfolio analysis, to help you prioritise projects and programs. EPPM can
guide decision-makers to prioritise, plan, and control enterprise portfolios
strategically. It also ensures that the organisation will continue to increase
productivity and on-time delivery.
 Schedule management, give occasional and professional project
managers the flexibility to create and edit schedules on their computer
desktop, device of choice like tablets or smartphones or in a web
browser.
 Resource management. The application should have a single resource
pool to allow for global management and allow assignments to be made
to both generic and real resources. It must also allow for progress
tracking and reporting either by time or work completed.
 Governance, allowing for roles and rules on how to approve and view
information. Provide governance workflows to subject different types of
work requests to the appropriate controls throughout the life cycle of the
issue or project.
 Collaboration, to provide for managed, secure real-time access to project
artefacts, such as process diagrams and documents stored in a central
repository.
25
 "Near real-time data" and historical data analysis and update notifications.
 Business Intelligence & Reporting, including tailored reports, dashboards,
and general business intelligence to look at the project and program data
in many ways.
 Status, which may be similar to reporting, but also allows for good
communication and status updates with quantitative and qualitative
information.
 Financial Management, the ideal EPPM software should offer a flexible
infrastructure that helps standardise the collection of cost and benefit
data for each request. PMO’s should be able to simply add custom fields
to an online business case form to capture multiple year cost and benefit
value.
 Time and Task Management, an effective time and task management tool
should have the following characteristics; an easy-to-use interface; single-
source, to report working and non-working time; ability to capture
projects, operations and administrative time; support for high use in short,
recurring time periods.
 Issue and Risk Management, the solution should have the ability to define
a standard way to assess risk for a new initiative, it should standardise
project risk collection and management, and it should facilitate proper
issue resolution and escalation.

This is not an exhaustive list, but a good basic set of features that should be
provided by an EPPM Solution. When selecting an EPPM Solution,
organisations should use criteria based on identified needs and organisational
objectives. Many commercial tools can seem overwhelming at first, simply
because of the large amount of functionality they offer. In our experience,
when clients identify EPPM as a solution to their problems it follows two paths.
The first is to buy an off-the-shelf EPPM solution, and the second is to use
professional services from a consultancy that has a track record in deploying
and managing the EPPM software.

In my experience buying an off-the-shelf solution ‘as is’ can be less effective

on its own than procuring specialist professional services to use a mixture of
commercial off-the-shelf software and modifying it to fit in exactly with the
customer's requirements. Off-the-shelf solutions are designed to be "one-size-

26
fits-all," which may not fit the unique needs of the business. Mixing in the use
of professional services can ultimately be considered the most cost-effective
approach. Applying the Pareto 80:20 principles, the outside expert can work
with the business to adopt the 80 percent of the solution that fits and tailor the
20 percent of the solution that doesn't. An important consideration is that
automating bad or non-existent processes simply makes your problems come
at you faster. It’s surprising how many organisations fall into the trap of
thinking the tool is the whole solution. The usual excuse is that the tool
already has best practices embedded, so why not just follow those? In our
experience, every organisation is different and requires their own tweak on
“best practices,” to which the tool must be aligned. This approach provides
an immediate competitive advantage to the customer who is not then
operating the same system as direct competitors. There is “no such thing as a
one size fits all PPM solution.” A small or midsize company may have different
PPM requirements compared to a multinational organisation. In addition,
departments within a large organisation may operate at different PPM
maturity levels. As a result, a full
EPPM solution may not be the
optimal solution for all departments
and needs to be configured
accordingly. Select a solution that
can grow with your organisation and
give users the tools to work the way
they want as they need it. It might be
a scheduling tool at first and then at a
later date a full EPPM solution.
Microsoft’s PPM Solution, Project
Online, is part of its Office 365
Offering. It provides all of the
capabilities listed above, but is
designed to be highly configurable in
order to align those capabilities to
your organisation’s processes,

27
governance and frameworks.
Once the business justification has been approved, an organisation will
typically develop a Request for Information (RFI) and/or a Request for
Proposal (RFP) to solicit information from vendors as part of the selection
process. Both an RFI and RFP will contain the following information:

1. Summary of business problem and solution required

2. Vendor selection process and instructions for responding
3. Information requests based on specific criteria and stage of selection
process.

For a EPPM tool, the selection criteria can range from 50 to 250+ items
across a number of dimensions. It’s important to outline the critical business
needs to determine the key dimensions and assign appropriate weighting for
the scoring model. I recommend ranking the top 5-10 critical success factors
for your organisation and mapping these to the selection criteria to guide
development of the vendor comparison matrix. Agreeing on the critical
success factors will help prioritise the important aspects of vendor evaluation,
such as usability, customisation and flexibility, business intelligence, and
professional services, which can significantly impact the success of a EPPM
initiative.
Purchasing the software is the beginning of having an EPPM solution, is not
the end – you still have to implement it. With today’s technology it is possible
to implement a system with less effort and fewer costs than ever before, but
the ability to do it successfully without the proper planning is highly unlikely.

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2.3 Cloud vs. On-Premises Solutions
There are a number of industry innovations that are addressing important
business requirements to improve executive visibility, lower costs, mitigate
adoption risk, and facilitate team collaboration. One of the most important
factors to consider when assessing a EPPM solution relates to fundamental
building blocks of software: the technical architecture. These days we have
to divide our thinking based on our decision to go with an on-premises
deployment or software-as-a-service, otherwise known as an in-the-cloud
subscription.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS)
In the past EPPM appeared to be exclusive to large organisations and that
smaller companies did not have the infrastructure or the resources to
support EPPM. Well, the good news is
that this is becoming more
achievable—consulting does not need
to be expensive. Both products and
services have matured during
implementations with larger
organisations, and therefore, can now
be leveraged by companies of all size,
especially small to medium-sized
organisations. One of the biggest reasons for the growing interest in Cloud
EPPM Solutions resides in the financial benefits. According to Nucleus
Research (leading provider of investigative technology research):

 Cloud Application allows an organisation to have 1.7 times more ROI

than an On-Premise Application
 4/5 of Cloud deployment increases benefits
 Organisations which deploy Cloud-based solution make cost savings on
consulting (40% less) and on personnel (25% less) compared to an on
premise system deployment.

Thus it’s no surprise that Cloud computing has become a major trend in the
industry that is causing many CIO’s to take a “SaaS-first” approach to
investing in expensive software with a lot of up-front costs thus reducing
implementation cost and risk. Costs are reduced because large upfront
capital expenses for hardware and software are exchanged for a lower
29
annual subscription. In addition, SaaS vendors are typically far more efficient
at operating their services than internal IT organisations due to economies of
scale and operational experience. Risk is reduced because SaaS
implementations are usually faster to deploy and business value can be
proven more quickly through a trial or proof-of-concept. Remember
deployment is still required for SaaS; while the technology requirement goes
away, the business requirements for planning and configuration still hold.
SaaS doesn’t remove all the technical questions, there are still a few that will
require your attention. Do you go with a dedicated installation or a multi-
tenant service? What about security? Can you integrate with your own
authentication; do you even want to etc.

Project Online is Microsoft’s Project Portfolio Management in the cloud SaaS

offering delivered through Office 365. Project Online contains all of the key
scenarios that one would expect from an on-premises solution. Included in the
Project Online solution are Demand Management, Resource Management,
Time Management, Financial Management, collaboration and social. What
does this mean for you as the consumer? A safe online environment that can
be used to help determine which projects need to be done, and by whom.
For example, a budget of x amount and yet only a limited number of
resources and a specific timeframe. The online solution can be used to help
determine which projects have priority and where and what needs to be
focused on. The same online environment can also be used to help determine
which projects are consuming the most time and resources. Ironically the use
of Project Portfolio Management in the cloud can free up resources for use
elsewhere, thus acting as a cost savings. Project Online removes the burden
of day to day IT tasks, such as system maintenance and database
maintenance. For those companies who have limited IT budgets, security
concerns, and who would like to know if Project Online is right for them,

30
consider the following advantages:

Easy Access: Executives, portfolio managers, project managers, project

resources, team members, and stakeholders will be able to access the
Project Online system from anywhere provided an internet connection can be
accessed. Project Online can be accessed from multi browsers and multi
platforms.

Easy Installation: How many times have you had last minute changes occur,
or been traveling, and needed to make immediate updates to projects, or had
to return to the office to process some last minute changes? Project on
demand changes all of this. With Project on demand, there is an option to
install Project on multiple PC’s, including home. Changes can even be made
in the air (provided of course Wi-Fi) is present. Additionally, integration with
Office 365 Skype will permit you to send instant messages and kick off instant
conversations, directly from your project. Project for Office 365 can be up
and running within minutes. To accomplish this, Microsoft uses Click-to-run
technology. Click-to-run is a streaming and virtualisation application that
installs quickly and enables you start using a product before it has finished
installing. With traditional MSI (Windows based installations) you have to wait
until the entire application is installed, before it can be used. Click-to-run
solves this problem by streaming the application. If during the installation
process you try to use a feature or capability that has not yet been
downloaded, the Click-to-run technology will immediately stream, download,
and install that feature so that it can be used. Did I mention it was fast?

Share Project Data with Applications: Are you looking for ways to enhance
your project capabilities? If you want to enhance your online capabilities, then
take a look at the free and low cost applications that are currently available in
the Microsoft Project App Store: http://office.microsoft.com/enus/store/apps-
for-project-FX103441147.aspx

Evergreen Service: Worried about staying up to date with licenses and the
current versions of software? Then worry no more. Project Online insures that
you will always have the latest and greatest versions of software. It will always
have the latest and greatest version of PPM, and that can include Exchange
Server, Lync, SharePoint Server, Project, Office, and all of their required
updates and patches. Microsoft handles it all for you. There is no need to
continually purchase physical servers and keep them patched and up to date.

31
Operational Maintenance: The burden of day to day system maintenance,
database maintenance, updates, service packs, internet explorer (browser)
upgrades. Disaster recovery, and more is handled via a Project Online service
which is hosted in a secure Microsoft datacentre. Microsoft insures that
Project Online infrastructure has the latest and greatest set of patches and
updates applied. There is no more worry about making arrangements with IT
and planning for downtime while a service pack or maintenance patch
upgrade occurs. Additionally, preventative maintenance scripts are
periodically run on the databases in order to prevent problems before they
occur.

No upfront infrastructure costs: Project Online does not have any required
upfront infrastructure costs. Customers do not have to purchase servers, or
worry about Windows Server, SQL Server, or other server licenses. Users
are on a simple, per use, licensing basis. Additional costs are not charged for
disaster recovery or other database maintenance costs, or day to day
operations.
Continual Uptime: Looking for 24 x 7 uptime? This is it! Project Online is so
secure Microsoft is willing to provide a financially backed guaranteed uptime
with 24 x 7 support. Continual support where and when you need it.

On-Premises
If you are considering an on-premises installation, you have to think about
what hardware to use. What are the hardware requirements for memory and
CPUs? Will you use physical servers or virtual servers? Will you use dedicated
servers or shared? What kinds of servers might be required? Will you need
application servers, security
servers, web server servers? What about load balancing, disaster recovery,
and backups? What about the database? The list goes on… Once you have

32
answered these questions you move onto installation, test, and production
environments, and then system health and monitoring once the system is up
and running.

When considering an on-premises or SaaS solution you must take into

account the benefits and the costs of such a solution. For on-premises
solutions it is important to know the upgrade policy, the support policy and the
overall total cost of ownership. Given the advantages of hosting a solution
elsewhere, today’s enterprise often opts for SaaS solutions because of the
convenience, flexibility and ability to easily scale and support remote and
international teams. For cloud-based solutions, you need to ask about
security and compliance of the specific vendor and understand how
configurable the solution is to your specific business processes. It is critical to
know how adaptable an off-premises solution is and what level of automation
it provides. Another important consideration for any solution is the overall time
to value. Not every solution is quick to implement or demonstrate value. Doing
the due diligence and discovering what a typical implementation looks like is
important in organisations where there is pressure to gain immediate ROI
from a software investment.

33
2.4 Review of the Microsoft PPM Solution
As a Microsoft certified PPM Professional, I’m naturally a big advocate of the
Microsoft Solution, especially if you are looking for an all-round product that is
also cost effective. Microsoft has been invested in project management for
over three decades with the first release in 1985. Since then, they have been
innovating and setting project management industry trends with timely,
feature rich releases. Over the years, they transformed the Project desktop
application into a fully integrated industry-leading end-to-end project &
portfolio management (PPM) solution with a user community of over
20,000,000 Project users and 10,000 organisations.

These days Microsoft uses the term Project Portfolio Management (PPM) to
refer to a group of components that includes Microsoft Project Professional,
Project Server and Project Web App. It is also used for Project Online
combined with Project for Office 365 which is Microsoft Office 365 cloud
offering that comes in the form of a subscription based service.
Both of these offerings are integrated into SharePoint, delivering a common
collaboration and information platform available to everyone involved in a
project. This combination provides a proven, centralised solution for
successful, enterprise-wide project and portfolio management. It offers a
flexible, end-to-end PPM platform, used by organisations across a broad
variety of industries to automate primary PPM processes. The project and
portfolio management functions in the solution help companies align vision
and effort to prioritise initiatives, select optimal project portfolios, and
34
ultimately deliver on their business strategy. It can be used for all phases of a
project, from gathering project ideas and requirements, to project planning to
execution and management. It allows portfolio managers a high level view of
financial and resource management measures, and project managers access
to standard project and programme management methodology. It is suitable
for small or large organisations that use multiple PPM tools but want to
achieve a more cost effective, unified solution.
The Microsoft PPM Solution allows users to effectively manage and prioritise
projects and resources across the enterprise, and is designed for
organisations that require strategic portfolio capabilities, strong team
coordination, standardisation in managing projects and programs, centralised
resource management, as well as high-level analysis and reporting. From the
creation of a project or an organisation ‘s project portfolio, to the objective
evaluation and prioritisation of competing investments, to detailed portfolio
and project planning and management, the Microsoft Office PPM Solution
provides an organisation with the tools and insight necessary to optimise
investments, reduce and manage risk, and drive shareholder value across the
entire portfolio lifecycle. The PPM Solution helps organisations meet the
following business imperatives:
 Intuitively capture all requests within a central repository and manage
them using governance workflow – Demand Management

 Objectively prioritise, optimise, and select project portfolios that best align
with your organisation’s business strategy – Portfolio Selection and
Analytics

 Proactively and reactively manage resources throughout the project

lifecycle – Resource Management

 Easily create and communicate simple and complex project schedules –

Schedule Management

 Control and measure project and portfolio financial performance –

Financial Management

35
 Simplify the collection of time and task status updates from team
members – Time and Task Management

 Better connect disparate teams to share information and drive

collaboration – Team Collaboration

 Identify, mitigate, and communicate issues and risks that could adversely
affect project success – Issues and Risk Management

 Effectively measure project performance and gain visibility and control

across all portfolios – Business Intelligence and Reporting

 Initiate, plan, and deliver strategic programs – Program Management

Rather than review a bunch of features let’s asses the solution based on
some of the challenges one might build their business case on.

Challenge: There is no definitive list of Projects or work packages

Solution: One-stop source for information about all projects. Capture and
manage all in-flight projects in a predefined central repository to see summary
information about multiple projects and review detailed information about
specific projects.
A typical challenge is “there is no definitive list of Projects or work packages”.
Ideas typically flood into an organisation through a variety of structured and
informal sources: customer requests, hallway conversations, e-mail
exchanges, executive decisions, business maintenance activities, and so on.
The varied nature and form of ideas can make it difficult for Organisations to
gain visibility and control of initiatives across the enterprise. By capturing all
requests in an easily accessible, central location and standardising the
collection of metadata and metrics, organisations can quickly gain visibility
across all requests and ongoing products to help improve decision-making
and ensure that they are working on the initiatives that are right for the
organisation.

36
Project online offers a unified view of all work in a central location by
capturing and managing in-flight projects in a central repository called Project
Center view. This is your one-stop source for information about projects. You
can see summary information about multiple projects and review detailed
information about specific projects. The Project Centre help organisations
quickly gain visibility into projects and operational activities, standardise and
streamline data collection, enhance decision-making, and subject initiatives to
the appropriate governance controls throughout their life cycles.

Challenge: Our Organisation needs to make timely decisions based on

objective information.

Solution: Enterprise reporting from a single source

One of the great challenges organisations face is how to collect, categorise,
understand, and make decisions about project data. Conventional reporting
offers tools and methods to collect, aggregate, display, and communicate
data. However this is not always enough as an organisations effectiveness
depends on its ability to pull together accurate information in real time that is
standardised and tailored to the needs of the audience. Project Online and
PowerBI that the concept of business intelligence to the next level by
providing visibility and helping organisations with decision support for
proactive work management,
By using our standardised collection of data and performance metrics in a
central repository, organisations can more easily facilitate enterprise
reporting.

37
Project Online in conjunction with PowerBI or Excel translates data into highly
visual reports and dashboards for executive analysis. It integrates all of the
vital information about projects and programs from provides reporting from
that consolidated data. You can drill down into data groups and exceptions to
see what's behind the numbers. It encourages compliance with established
processes and provides visibility using ‘real-time’ progress. Once these
reports are shared with decision-makers, executives can make data-driven
allocation decisions to increase operational efficiency and cut costs.

Challenge: We need more visibility and control over what people are working
on!

Solution: Predefined Project lifecycles, a single approval centre and

Timesheets view. Manage projects using standardised workflows, review and
approve workflow stages, timesheet submissions and task updates with
Approval Center
The next challenge is - We need more visibility and control over what people
are working on. Microsofts answer to this is Governance.

38
Governance provides a best-practices framework and set of guidelines that
help organisations effectively create, control, and deliver all types of work,
enhance accountability, and optimally align spending with the organisation’s
strategic imperatives. Project allows Governance workflows to be configured
that that can be continuously refined based on empirical data and lessons
learned to improve process expediency. Utilising prebuilt workflows provides
the tools required to define, standardise, communicate and enforce steps
throughout an entire project.

Project’s Approval Center also helps drive governance, compliance and

control. Using the Approval Center, executives can designate approvers,
either individuals or groups, who must sign off on certain workflow steps
before the implementation can continue. It also simplifies the review and
approval of completed assignments, and helps managers better understand
where their team really are compared to project schedules, and how their
project work is affecting the budget. Utilising the same intuitive interface as
the Tasks View, the Approval Center offers options to group, sort, and filter
tasks, helping organisations streamline approval activities. It allows
organisations to route task updates and time submissions directly to specific
managers. PMO’s can also create automatic approval rules for assignments,
which can help reduce administrative burden.

39
Challenge: We need to avoid cost overruns
Solution: Proactively manage costs and track financial data throughout a
projects lifecycle by standardising the collection of costs and benefit data.
Pressure to reduce or maintain budgets has led to sharper scrutiny of
discretionary spending. Furthermore, providing project accounting views can
be a challenge when financial data is spread across multiple lines of business
systems. Effective financial management processes help improve cost and
benefit estimating as well as track cost performance, ensuring that each
project finishes within budget and delivers the forecasted benefits.
The solution delivers flexible and
extensible financial management
capabilities throughout a project’s
entire lifecycle and consolidates data,
and driving project accounting reports.
It offers a flexible business case
infrastructure that helps standardise
the collection of cost and benefit data
for each request. PMOs simply add
custom fields to an online business case form to capture multi-year cost and
benefit values. After capturing the data, analysts can build formulas to derive
metrics—ROI, Internal Rate of Return (IRR), and so on—to better understand
and communicate a project’s financial value.
The solution helps organisations manage and effectively track financial data
using the following:
 With the Budget Resources and Cost Resources features, project
managers can approve project budgets and capture associated costs
(e.g., equipment, materials, travel, training, contractor costs, etc.). These
features help managers establish baselines for comparing and managing
actual costs against budgets.
 In addition Multiple billing rates can apply to each resource. Companies
can use this technique to calculate the cost of the resource based on the
amount of work. In addition, resources can be tied to cost centres.
40
 Project participants on the other hand can utilise the solution to fill in their
timesheets and provide task status information on project, non-project,
and nonworking time .

Challenge: No ability to manage Project Risk and Issues

Solution: Predefined Project Templates, Registers and Libraries. Establish
enterprise standards by utilising best practice templates and artefacts on
predefined project workspaces to enhance productivity, governance and
visibility of standardised data.
The next challenge is a relatively simple one to overcome - No ability to
mange Project Risk or Issues. Project Online leverages SharePoint
capabilities to provide teams with a collaborative workspace per project to
help teams communicate and share information throughout the project. The
Project Site provides a collaborative and intuitive set of features to track the
project management controls such as Governance, Change Management,
Documents and RAID and Impacts. This in turn provides a central location for
identifying and managing issues and risks which enforces a standard process
for definition, assessment, escalation, and resolution of issues and risks.
Project managers and team members can use Risk Forms to identify product
risks and to capture their potential impact and probability of occurrence. After
identifying risks, you can document and manage appropriate mitigation plans
from the same central location so that all involved stakeholders can be aware
of status and next steps.

41
Challenge: We have no understanding of Resource Capacity
Solution: Central Enterprise Resource Pool. Leverage the Resource Center
to consolidate all resources in central repository to analyse the resource pool
and determine the organisation’s overall capacity
Another conmen challenge is having no understanding of Resource Capacity.
Resources are often an organisation’s most valuable asset — and potentially
its biggest expense. By properly managing and optimally utilising your
resources, your organisation can develop and retain its world-class workforce
while simultaneously realising its business strategy.
Project Online provides a powerful
set of capabilities to help analysts
and project managers maximise
resource utilisation and manage
capacity across a project’s
lifecycle.
Offering a central location for all of your resources and related information
with predefined resource metadata, It helps resource managers search the
enterprise resource pool to find the best available people to work on a project.
Predefined metadata represents discrete resource properties such as role,
team, geographic location, and billing rates — that managers can effectively
use to tap the resource pool. The solution supports the management of
consumable resources such as concrete and lumber or inanimate resources
such as machinery, hardware, and facilities. In addition, managers can create
generic resources for capturing resource requirements at the skill level early
in the project life cycle.
The solutions capacity-planning feature helps compare resource demand to
capacity and proactively reschedule projects to maximise resource utilisation.

Challenge: Slightly different versions of the same project being run in

different departments

Solution: Portfolio Optimisation

42
In today’s competitive environment, companies need to stay agile, be able to
make quick, informed decisions and ensure that resources (monetary and
human capital) are being utilised efficiently. They have dozens, if not
hundreds, of current and future projects that require funding. Another
concern is how to allocate their limited resources into the most valuable
opportunities. This means that, in addition to every other optimisation lens, it
is even more important to have a flexible portfolio.
Portfolio optimisation is about making strategic choices — which markets/
countries, products, and technologies your business will invest in. It is about
resource allocation — how you will spend your scarce resources. It focuses
on project selection—on which new area to explore in or which development
projects you should choose from the many opportunities that you face. And it
deals with balance — having the right balance between numbers of projects
you do and the resources or capabilities you have available. The decision to
decide on which projects to fund require extensive data in order for
executives to make appropriate funding decisions. Using a PPM Solution,
organisations can standardise all project data collection (e.g., resources,
costs, etc.) in a single solution, and make objective decisions based on that
data. The Solution supports a logical rather than subjective approach to
portfolio selection and provides a structured process for measuring the
alignment of spending with strategy, by maximising resource utilisation.
In a nutshell this is done by
 Defining your Business Drivers.
 Prioritising drivers with pair wise comparison
 Prioritising projects based on strategic contribution to prioritised drivers.
 Analyse portfolio by applying high-level Cost and Resource constraints.

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3. Deploying your EPM solution
3.1 Choosing the right implementation partner

Regardless of whether you went the SaaS or on-premises route, you still
need to select an implementation partner with in-depth knowledge of the
tool, and project management and business processes that will help you
maximise the benefits that these tools can bring to your organisation.
For the purposes of this section I am going to assume you have taken my
advice and chosen Project Online as your solution of choice. Thus a good
place to start is to choose a Microsoft Gold Partner specialising in Project &
Portfolio Management (PPM). Ask if your partner has a Microsoft Gold Cer-
tifi-cation in PPM, or if they only dabble in PPM. To qualify as a Microsoft
Gold Partner with PPM competency, an MS partner must have at least four
architects pass three exams and, most importantly, the partner must pro-
vide at least -five deployment references in current technologies. I would
advise looking for an MS Partner that has also has resources with Business
Intelligence and SharePoint skills.
Why do you need a partner with BI Skills?
Users of Project Online or Project Server can take advantage of all the
tools included in the Microsoft BI platform, such as PowerBI, SQL Report-
ing Services, Excel Services, PerformancePoint Services, Visio, PowerPivot
for Excel, SQL Reporting Services, and more. Partners with skills in BI can
help you get the most out of your investment and satisfy the critical needs
of higher-level executive for bespoke dashboards and reports.
Why do you need a partner with SharePoint skills?
Partners with these skills have additional depth for SharePoint configura-
tion—the underlying base of Project Online and Server. Their proven ex-

44
pertise in taxonomy, work‑ow, web parts, and Business Data Catalogue are
among the many very useful SharePoint features that have great value in
achieving more benefits for your EPPM efforts.

When selecting the right outside expert, consider the following factors:

Do they have Project, Program, and Portfolio Management skills?

A consulting partner in Microsoft PPM must demon-
strate technical skills, as well as skills in IT govern-
ance. To best configure the tool sets to support the
customer’s process, or to help develop new process-
es, requires the consulting them to have a holistic
view and be especially knowledgeable about soft-
ware-enabled PMO; they must also possess the es-
sential skills to help improve overall project manage-
ment maturity.

Do they have experience in the latest technology stack?

Make sure they have Project Online or Project Server 2016 experience. As
Microsoft EPPM evolves, becoming more sophisticated and complex with
every release, it is more important than ever to select an PPM Partner who is
keeping up with current technology in order to serve your organisation’s best
interests.

Resourcefulness and Global Reach

Whereas you might consider a "local" firm as being better suited to guide you
through your EPM implementation process, a consulting firm with multiple lo-
cations has the advantage of breadth of experience.

Plain Talk
45
The best expert will be able to lead an efficient requirements workshop to pull
out and identify the range of issues, scope and requirements your organisa-
tion faces in implementing EPM. Those questions will drill down on the busi-
ness' willingness to spend, its current information systems "scene" and the
level of IT support you can expect in house for sustaining your efforts. Asking
the right qualifier questions and investing in an assessment with the consult-
ant will help you reinforce your choice of consultant and also find the direction
for seeking out the problem definition. Eventually, out of these conversations,
the problem definition will emerge and you'll be able to identify the resources
needed to help firm up the requirements for addressing the problem. A mas-
terful advisor will help you to rephrase the data gathered from the client re-
quirements workshop and confirm everybody's un-
derstanding of it -- without MBA "babble" or jargon.
He or she should be able to lay out various alterna-
tives and explain the benefits and challenges of
each.

Managing Transformation
Change management will be a major aspect in an
EPPM implementation. Project failure is a certainty
if people don't adopt the new solution because it
seems foreign to them, they don't see the connec-
tion to their work, or it doesn't seem to fit -- let
alone improve -- their processes. The advisor you
choose should recognise the importance of this aspect of the work, from envi-
sioning the need for EPM right through to its implementation, training, hando-
ver and support.

Those Proposing the EPM Solution Will Also Execute It

There's nothing worse than bringing in a consultant that helps you select the
solution then walks away. That's like hiring an architect who never gets out on
the job site once the drawings have been handed over. That's why it's im-

46
portant to bring in advisors who not only understand what is being recom-
mended but also will bring experience from similar projects, and stick around
and get their hands "dirty" during the deployment.

Experience and Connections Count

When you're evaluating potential advisors to assist you in implementing
EPPM, do two things: First, make sure they're committed to the solution you
have in mind. You can do that by vetting their level of certification with the
vendor you are considering, which requires a given level of training and finan-
cial investment every year. An advantage of this commitment is that the con-
sulting firm enjoys a strong relationship with the vendor in the case of complex
support issues. Second, the advisor should show evident knowledge about
areas of implementation that are new and compelling to end users, including
cloud deployment, the use of data analytics, and facility with mobile devices.
How do you know when there's real familiarity with those topics and not just a
superficial understanding? Because they're out in the industry participating in
events such as those put on by the Project Management Institute and publish-
ing insights online to expand the body of knowledge.

The Spirit of Goodwill

The best consultants are those who don't have to turn a meter on every time
they advise you. Signs of goodwill should be evident, where the expert goes
the extra mile to make sure the customer - you - are comfortable with your
new surroundings and able to take advantage of all that EPM has to offer.

47
3.2 Critical success factors for deploying
your EEPM Solution
How do you ensure your EEPM project will start out positioned for success?
You've gone through the RFP process, completed the vendor evaluation, and
have decided on the technology. But before diving into requirements and
design, you also need to spend time in the project initiation phase, ensuring
the project's critical success factors (CSFs) are defined and socialised, and
that a plan for implementation is developed. Be sure there is a common
understanding of the importance of the CSFs and how they differ from project
objectives and success criteria.
Like the old computer science maxim “garbage in, garbage out,” the
usefulness and success of your EPPM solution and deployment will only be as
good as the time and effort you spend setting it up and adding good data. To
have any sort of success with an EPPM rollout, ensure that you have a top-to-
bottom, left-to-right commitment from business stakeholders to feed good
information into the system regularly. Policies and procedures need to be put
in place that will emphasise the importance of entering accurate data in a
timely manner into the system and the executive suite should be responsible
for both implementing these procedures as well as adjusting them as
business reviews warrant. Based on my experience of deployment challenges
see below for a list of recommended Critical Success Factors:
Business Focus
 Ensure clear alignment with the overall business strategy and goals
 Capture requirements for the future, not just for today
Technology Focus
 Build a solution that works with the business processes, does not enforce
complexity where not needed and is performant specifically on high
volume tasks.
 Do not over-engineer to meet specifics and configure, avoiding
customisation

48
 Be wary of making software the focal point and regarding it as an IT
implementation. For those of us in the technology business, we’re most
guilty of this and really, most of us know better. Yet, somehow, the
temptation to believe that the availability of technology means the
problem is resolved is hard to resist.
Change Management Focus
 Success requires a team spirit where individual success is seen as part of
the total organisation’s success, with people helping and involving others.
There must be a culture of clear commitment and single unified view of
requirements
 Ensure the solution is adopted by all and delivers the required benefits
 Everyone should undertake role based training, at an appropriate level
and focus, to drive a consistent understanding of EPPM processes and
the value of EPM and to ensure localised resistance and reluctance are
overcome.
 Knowledge Transfer: At the start of the project, you need to address how
the knowledge needed to manage the solution post go-live will be
garnered and disseminated during the project. The knowledge transfer
plan should go beyond the scope of the traditional training plan--because
when the project launches and the project team disbands, the knowledge
of the project team needs to be maintained.
Ownership Focus
 Provide visible senior management ownership and commitment.
 Each business process should have a clear owner responsible for
adoption.
 Prepare to Monitor the New Environment - Once your new solution is up
and running there will be an element of Administration overhead in
ensuring that the system is performing as expected without any problems
and accept change requests.
Process Focus
 Align process to the maturity and capability of the organisation ensuring
they are practical, and adaptable, are fitted to business needs and add
value to all participants.

49
 They must be practical, adaptable and add value to all participants and it
is essential users are involved in their development.
 Develop Clear and Complete Business Goals, Requirements, and Usage
Scenarios. Having clear requirements and realistic expectations of the
benefits to be derived from the adoption of an PPM Solution should help
sell the initiative to the organisation. If there are no clearly defined
requirements and objectives the perceived success of the initiative may
be open to interpretation.
Delivery Focus
 Provide pragmatic and effective long term support to ensure continued
adoption.
 Make a realistic schedule - There is no one who wishes that an EPPM
deployment will take a long time. It’s common to hope that the project
can be accomplished in days or a couple of weeks rather than the
months that is most common. There is also a common challenge of not
getting the resources for an “internal” project such as EPPM as readily as
a client-based or commercial project. For these and other reasons, it’s
common to make a project schedule with resource requirements that are
woefully insufficient.
Allocate Sufficient Up-Front Time
 Fail to plan, plan to fail –a bit clichéd but anyone with project experience
will tell you that getting ready is the secret of success. Try to avoid being
railroaded into an implementation before the groundwork has been done.
Embedded PMO Structure
 There needs to be recognised expertise in all areas of processes, tools
and data, providing day to day, at elbow, support, resourced to manage
peaks as well as troughs and help User Groups realise specific benefits
aligned to functional role.

50
3.3 Pilot vs. Proof of concept
Some organisations prefer to conduct a pilot or a proof of concept before
rolling out to the entire organisation. To this end some clarification on the
definition of each is required.
Proof of concept
In software terms, a proof of concept (POC) should be designed to prove
something. The key takeaway is that you need to know what you want to
prove because if you plan to conduct a proof of concept, and you have no
notion of what you're trying to prove, how will you know if it's a success or
failure? In addition, there are many things that are required to make a proof of
concept a success. First, there will need to be input from management and
line-personnel for any aspect of the organisation that is implicated in the
deployment. Next, there will need to be time for configuration, assistance from
technical services to link to other enterprise systems, management
sponsorship, time for training, and, yes, money. If you don't have any of these
things, then there is a risk that your POC will be a shadow of what you desire
at best. In today's in-the-cloud age, you can probably get access to a system
that is fully hosted so that you can at least not worry about buying servers and
software, but just having a system installed is a fraction of the work required
to make even a basic deployment of your proof of concept system.
Pilot
A pilot project is a real, in-production,
live deployment. It typically involves a
subset of the total user base that is
being considered for the system being
evaluated, and therefore a pilot
project is likely to take some time. While the needs of the complete target
user base are considered from the beginning, the pilot program focuses on
doing a real implementation for the pilot users. They will actually be managing
their projects in the new system. The same challenges that a complete
production deployment will face are also faced by the pilot implementation,
with the exception of the volume or complexity of data. The most common
challenges of Pilot projects I’ve seen include a lack of sponsorship, insufficient
budget, time and resources and, probably worst of all, a lack of articulate
goals to know how to determine if the pilot project was successful or not.
Making a pilot project successful takes some thinking.

51
3.4 Managing the change curve
Companies are making strides to change. They have to. Technology is
evolving, and now is the time to implement, adapt, or be left behind. Changes
include transitioning from on-premises to cloud technologies, integrating
social and mobile capabilities, and implementing ways to manage big data
and deliver analytics—all of which are forcing businesses to change the way
they work. From a technology standpoint, it’s a lot to manage—and we
haven’t even mentioned people. As the systems employees use every day
begin to change, user perspectives and habits must change as well. And
change can be difficult.
When organisations decide to embark on a significant change—whether it be
to a process, work environment, or technology, the people involved—and
their subsequent reactions—are often the last to be considered. This
oversight is perplexing given the people will need to perform in the new
environment, use new technology, make critical decisions, and at the same
time try to maintain or improve the quality of the operation already in place.
Research shows that the critical points of failure for EPPM implementations
are ease of use and adoption by the user community. Change management
consistently ranks as the biggest hurdle to EPPM and PMO success,
according to research by analyst firms Gartner, Forrester and IDC. Yet many
EPPM software tools require a year or more to deploy and impose granular
time tracking on unwilling users that impedes, rather than improves, team
productivity.
Implementing new technology requires a gradual, well-thought-out process.
It’s not solely about training or re-training if something is going wrong. Finding
the real problem could be the difference between tens or even hundreds of
thousands of dollars for your company.

52
Organisational change management (OCM) helps to manage the people
aspect of technology change. Upon implementing a new technology, OCM
outlines phases that help organisations successfully transition from one piece
of technology to the other, or move to technology from no technology at all.
There are many aspects and elements based on different change
methodologies, but some of the basics include:
 Communications plan: Reach out to targeted audiences, outlining what’s
being changed and why
 Sponsorship: An active executive sponsor playing a major role in
communications or removing barriers
 Coaching: Often between the direct user and reporting manager or
leading stakeholders to influencers within the organisation
 Learning: Not to replace the communications or coaching efforts, but
instead to augment with knowledge and skill building for direct users
 Resistance management: Identifying and mitigating pockets of resistance
throughout the broader audiences
The importance of effective OCM cannot be overstated when considering its
impact on the eventual success or failure of projects that ultimately require
people inside organisations to change the way they’re doing something. The
“people” part of the change equation is the most critical component and is at
the heart of effective OCM. When a project calls for technology or process
changes, such as when implementing a new business technology solution,
the changes to the technology and process are much easier to predict,
prescribe and manage than the changes that will take place to the people
component. By nature, humans are different, often unpredictable and
inherently resistant to change. While carefully managing the people
component should be a top priority, it’s often more of an afterthought and just
assumed that people will simply “accept and deal with” change.
When new technology implementations fail, it’s usually less about the chosen
technology (it likely didn’t change dramatically since when it was evaluated
and selected) and more about a lack of true business readiness, including
how well the people involved were prepared, managed and supported
through the changes associated with implementing and using it. When this

53
occurs, the benefits that should be realised are undermined or even
sabotaged by a lack of adoption in the user community.
Best practices insist that OCM is a change curve - which can be different for
each individual - to be managed. Implementing technology isn’t just about
training users to get them up to speed, it’s about planning, communication,
executive sponsorship, and discipline. However, more often than not, the
assumption is made that roadblocks in user adoption or technology success
is due to a lack of knowledge or skills—thereby requiring more training. But
that’s not always the case.
In technology-based change, user adoption of new tools, solutions, and
related processes is a broad and potentially expensive symptom of what
might be a more straightforward problem. Declaring that users aren’t well
trained infers that a lack of knowledge or skills is the direct and only
contributor to low adoption. But is that the real root cause of the adoption
gap? It’s easy to point the finger and declare that training is the issue. But in
the world of training, a major undertaking would be similar to an expensive
transmission repair. In an effort to respond quickly, resources are hired or
reassigned, elaborate strategies and plans are built, and a large portion of the
workforce is required to attend more training—all of which equates to tens or
hundreds of thousands of dollars. And when all that is said and done, the
underlying problem causing low adoption may never have been identified.
The actual problem could be one of many. To thwart potentially superfluous
training costs, keep these two items in mind when adopting new technology,
solutions, and processes: sponsorship and discipline.

Sponsorship
To affect change—particularly in large, technology-based organisations—
efforts need an executive sponsor. Leadership endorsement is needed to
demonstrate support of the tool and encourage timely and effective
participation within the new solution and/or processes. Actively expressing
support in forums or one to-one conversations reinforces the importance of
the implementation and user adoption. These actions are forms of
demonstrated support. It’s less about dictating what needs to be done with a
“get-on-board-or-else” mentality, and more about engaging with people on
the topic and explaining why it’s important. Effective demonstrations of
support must be repeated genuinely and often. Without demonstrated support
54
or direction, it’s easy for team members to find other priorities instead of
taking the time to explore and use the new tool. And if the executive sponsor
finds themselves saying, “I’m really busy today, I’ll get back to that tomorrow,”
then it’s easy for everyone else to do the same. Demonstrated support
bridges the gap between “executive row” and the everyday user. It creates a
real sense of ownership and autonomy when executive sponsors lead by
example.

Discipline
With a communicative executive
sponsor in place, it then comes down to
discipline. That falls to everyone in the
organisation. And it’s not easy.
Discipline—or lack thereof—reflects a
deeply rooted culture that takes time
and commitment to improve. However,
without support and discipline, new
technologies, solutions, and related
processes may as well fall to the
wayside. It’s much easier for teams and
people within an organisation to
participate if they know others are, too.
Behaviour can be contagious—particularly if the benefits of a new tool are
known. Again, this ties back to good sponsorship and communication. It’s
another chance for leaders to express the desired focus and behaviours
within the environment in question. If an end user knows how a new
technology and their participation in using the tool impacts the bottom line,
they’ll be more likely to invest the time and discipline needed to reach the
desired outcomes from the change.

55
3.5 Configuring your solution - Start small
and keep it simple
When seeking to implement enterprise project management tools, it's
valuable to note that deployment timelines aren't usually driven by the speed
at which the technology can be deployed. Instead, these are decided by the
rate at which the supporting processes can be implemented and the solution
adopted by the end user. End user adoption is the key to deriving value from
any investment in management tools.
Success in end user adoption is driven in several ways: through delivery of
meaningful communication and appropriate training; through active
engagement with users to assess their attitudes, and to identify and
understand process gaps; and through governance practices that are in step
with the changes to data capture and reporting through the new tool
technology.
In order to best align and configure the solution to your organisation, the
business needs to determine what "outputs" they need; these should
ultimately be business decisions. To make those decisions, what reports,
analysis, and, ultimately, data inputs do you need? The answers to these
questions will ultimately provide you with the design and building blocks
required in the form of data elements, calculations, workflows and reports that
will need to be configured in the system. This configuration exercise can take
weeks or months depending on its complexity.

One of the biggest challenges faced when starting an EPPM deployment is

establishing a credible roadmap for producing the intended result. Regardless
of the amount of time that has passed since my first implementation,
something that’s remained constant is the desire of senior management to
have tangible results as soon as possible. What is EPPM from your
perspective?” I’ll often ask. The responses might be:

Project Portfolio Management: “It’s about project portfolio management for

us,” someone might say. “For us, enterprise project management would
mean managing one level higher at the project level. We would need to
group projects into portfolios or groups of projects, and analyse and report

56
 on them together. We’d need to be able to track progress at this
summarised level as well as implement stage-gating.”

Enterprise Project Management: “That wouldn’t be enough for us,” someone

might say. “For us, enterprise project management would mean that our
project management data would be integrated. We would be able to get
reports that would show our schedules in an integrated, summarised report
and we would be able to manage the impact from one project to another.”

Basic Project Management: “For us, enterprise project management would

mean that everyone would be doing project management the same way
and using the same tools.”

Communication and Collaboration: “We need to facilitate talking to our

people. Can you help us connect our project teams that now include not
just planners but also senior management, clients, users, sub-contractors,
outsourcers and team members?”

Resource Management: “For us, enterprise project management would mean

resource capacity planning. We need to know not only if we can take on a
new project and what the impact might be on existing commitments, we
also need to know, based on project progress and resource availability,
what the status is of managing the work we’ve already committed to. “

57
Business Intelligence: “What we need is good management Information in the
form of dashboards and reports. We need a report that pulls from project
management, finance, HR and other internal systems to make roll-up
reports for management and decision making.”

Budgeting and Cost management: “For us, enterprise project management is

all about the money. We budget at the beginning of the year. We then
budget for each project and the only thing that matters for us is tracking
the money against the plan, month after month.”

Timesheets: “We need to know what people actually spend their time on, just
doing that would put us light years ahead of where we are now”.

Integration with Line of business systems: “We’ve got a big ERP/Finance

system which is great except that we don’t have any of the forward looking
projections for deliverables and costs that come with project management.
We need to connect the project management tool with our ERP/Finance
system.”

Workflow: “We want a solution that tracks not just tasks but procedures in an
automated fashion. We’d like project managers to fill in an online form to
request project funding which would then go to the person responsible who
would then, in an automated fashion, accept or reject the request. If
approved, the project would instantly be included in the EPM system. We’d
like to do the same with all our project documents. In fact, we’d like to
automate all our project management procedures in this way through
workflow management."

So, what’s the right answer? They’re all right. In fact, it’s probably not an
exhaustive list. EPPM can mean so many things to so many people and is
highly dependent on the perspective you are looking at the problem from.
When we do this with senior management, what often happens is that there is
no one of these aspects that is not desired. Yes, people want all of them. And,
when they ask if all of this is possible in a Microsoft PPM Solution deployment,
the honest answer is, “Yes”.

The problem is that each of these aspects of EPPM can be considered as a

vector or a direction in which you can push the EPPM environment. If we
decide to push on all of these vectors on the first day, the size of the project
we’ll end up designing will be so large, so potentially disruptive, so complex,
58
and involve so many other corporate systems that it will have little chance of
success.

Remember, an EPPM deployment isn’t just technology. If it were, the

implementation would be over in a few days. No, an EPM deployment involves
Strategy, People, Process and Technology. Successful Microsoft EPM
Solution deployments virtually always consider the project a ‘Change
Management’ project rather than a technology project. What we’re looking to
accomplish is to change the way the business works. How? Well, depending
on which direction an envisioning exercise goes, the direction could be very
different. If we try to implement every aspect and every direction at the same
time, we could end up creating a huge project that is complex and very
difficult to understand, and that makes the deployment much riskier.

It is impossible to deploy a new enterprise system and not affect the

organisation's processes. Even if you are abandoning one centralised
enterprise system and moving to its competitor, processes will change. In
fact, if you don't want your processes to change, then it is entirely possible
that you don't have a problem that needs solving, and herein lies yet another
challenge. When a person's daily routine changes, it causes upset. This is
true even when the process change will result in a better process! So thinking
about how the processes will change and working with those who will be
affected is critical to the success of the project. Based on industry experience
and research I would make the following recommendations for your first
implementation:

 Keep it simple and leverage an iterative design and build process to

release functionality incrementally.
 Use standard EPPM best practices and tools to manage schedules,
tasks, issues, resource assignments, and other project essentials.
 Provide visibility to project status and health to make better decisions.
 Enhance decision making to incorporate ranges of value based on risks
and uncertainties.
 Optimise portfolios for value based on a systematic understanding of
value drivers.
 Leverage standard and advanced EPPM processes and solutions for their
relative benefits.
 Integrate standard and advanced EPPM solutions to share data and
ensure value optimisation continues throughout the product development

59
 lifecycle.
 Change Management should underpin all activities.

The key to easing adoption is leveraging a phased iterative design and build
process to release functionality incrementally, and in line with process
definition and people upskilling. This approach reduces transitional risk, since
each iteration presents an incremental step in the organisation's maturity.
Simultaneous release of multiple new functions would require an immense
training and learning period, reducing end user productivity and increasing
the risk of frustration and change resistance. Deploying functionality
appropriate to current organisational maturity, then incrementally improving
tool capability in line with process enhancement and user skills, creates a
perception for the end user of having less down time. The approach allows
you to respond to changes in the environment. This combination provides a
much greater chance of successful end user adoption. There are a lot of
reasons for it. Here are a few:
 First, the organisation starts to receive a Return on Investment early in the
process. This serves to safeguard the implementation and validates to
management their decision to do an EPM deployment in the first place.
 Second, the deployment tackles technical challenges in waves rather
than all at once. As the complexity of the system grows, so, too, does the
maturity of the organisation in handling that complexity.
 Third, the deployment eases the culture change into the organisation over
time, which is always easier. It’s a truism that change causes upset. That
there will be some upset at such a change in managing projects is a
certainty. Deploying the entire vision over time lets the users adapt to the
different way of doing business.
 Finally, no matter how much time the organisation spends in doing the
original design, it is bound to change its mind as soon as it sees the
system in operation. Getting that first phase of the deployment into
production earlier lets the organisation learn from it as they move forward.

If I’ve made you think twice about doing an EPPM deployment, that’s probably
a good thing. Not that you should not do it, but a successful EPPM
deployment always starts off with a bit of extra thinking. If you’re wondering
how to get started, here are a few suggestions:

60
 Envision:
Start with a facilitated vision session with senior management. If you use
external assistance in no other aspect of the project, you’ll find that it’s
most useful here. Having someone who has been involved in several other
EPPM deployments is the key to success. We’re not just talking about
someone who has been a user of an EPM system, but someone who has
worked through some of the issues we’ve described above and who has a
good understanding of both the capabilities of the Microsoft PPM Solution
and the process of managing projects in an organisation.

Who’s who:
One of the things you’ll need to decide early on is ‘who is the “enterprise”?’
The enterprise could mean whatever you decide. Is it your department,
your division, your entire company? One common mistake made by
people doing a deployment is making a plan for an entire company but
only having authority over their own division. The hope is that others will
come on board if the system is available. It’s a variant on the Field of
Dreams approach and it makes for a solution that’s not attractive to those
other divisions and not useful for the ones who you do have authority over.
So decide early who will be involved, and make sure they’re included in
the planning.

Make a Project Plan:

Just like you would do with any other project, take the time to make a
proper project plan. There are numerous plans available online that will
give you guidelines on some of the subjects that you need to cover.
They’re a good place to start, but you almost certainly have all the skills
required to make a proper project plan for an EPM deployment.

So, if you are considering or have started a deployment of the Microsoft PPM
Solution, then focus your deployment by considering these three points:
 Treat this project as a project. Use all the skills you already have for
managing projects to manage the Microsoft EPM Deployment project.

61
 Remember that it’s primarily a change management project, not a
technology project.
 Break the project into manageable pieces and treat each phase of the
project as a sub-project with its own success metrics, schedule, budget
and resources. You’ll get some of the benefits of the overall system faster
and that will serve to get even more support from management.
 Remember that Return on Investment has to work at every level. It’s not
enough to make a system that works for senior management but doesn’t
work for the people who have to manage it. Or, a system that works for
the project managers but doesn’t deliver the reporting required by senior
management. Or, a system that works for the project managers and
senior management but is too hard or too much effort for individual users.
Each person who must invest time and energy into the use of the system
should be considered in terms of their own return on investment.

If you’re designing a deployment that follows a phased approach and uses the
basic project management methodology you already have for other projects,
then you’ve got a great chance of success.

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3.6 Wrapping up - Roll-out and culture
change
It's time. Your enterprise project and portfolio management system is
developed, configured and ready to go live among all of the users. What
happens next is crucial, because it will determine how well your team
manages the transition and cutover of the new system.
It also ensures that the foundation is built for post-implementation support,
and that the handover is executed effectively. In this section I have called out
key success factors that will carry you through this vital stage of your EPPM
deployment.

Make Sure You Understand What Can Go Wrong.

If you take a realistic view of your go-live process, you'll do a better job of
managing risks and issues. That includes an honest assessment of how the
go/no-go decision will be reached. For example, is there a plan B process in
place if a formal decision cannot be made within the scheduled time? The
assumptions and pre-requisites you've documented along the way must be
reviewed to ensure that the components and people mentioned are available
and in position. Dependencies that impact deliverables with other projects or
vendors need to be considered. For instance, it may be necessary to back up
sensitive supplier data or user profile data before you move to your production
environment as part of a formal agreement with the supplier. Meeting with
vendor groups and incorporating those kinds of dependencies into the plan
will help in better cutover management.

Develop and Document a Robust Cutover Plan.

I recommend that you develop a detailed implementation and cutover plan to

manage your systems delivery and to communicate the plan to your users
and vendors. This plan should encompass a structured schedule of tasks that
need to be completed to ensure a working system. Typically, part of the
implementation plan, it will also describe in basic terms how the cutover
strategy has been drafted and outline the overall approach.

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I suggest three sections for the cutover details:
 Pre-cutover: Agreeing on the cutover plan, putting governance controls in
place, ensuring the system is ready, confirming user acceptance, and
planning communications)
 Cutover: Infrastructure configuration and application migration to
production; and
 Post-cutover: Go-live monitoring and support.
By "detailed," I mean even the tiniest of details: setting up user profiles on the
production environment, issuing user name credentials, what pre-go-live
communications will go out to users and the channels through which such
communications will be relayed.

Involve the Users.

In order to get to the finish line with

an EPM implementation, make sure
you manage the change.
Successful implementation of EPM
is mostly about people and partly
about the tool. Presuming that
you've already engaged with users
from early in the project cycle, now
is the time to pull out those test
cases you've co-developed with
them and put them to good use.

Also, to ensure adoption, keep up with your "why EPPM" communications to

stakeholders to reiterate the potential benefits. To bolster confidence, make
sure those communications reference that you've "heard user feedback' and
are incorporating the input from the users during the user acceptance testing
(UAT) phase. During and after cutover, you'll want to continue the "drumbeat"
of communications with the users in the form of teasers: what's new; how
things are expected to change; how the new EPM solution is expected to

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make a difference to operations and company leadership. After the cutover,
you'll also want to communicate usage statistics with management and user
groups in order to continue expanding awareness and expedite adoption.

You may want to schedule sustainability reviews to ensure the change is

embedded into the organisation and sustained after go-live. This is also the
time to prepare surveys to be taken by the same groups engaged in the UAT
phase to understand what's working well, and whether project managers and
team members are facing technical or process workflow-related problems
while coordinating with one another during projects delivery.

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4. Looking to the future - Getting the
most out of your solution

Over the years one of the biggest pitfalls I’ve seen to the selection and
deployment of enterprise software is the thinking of the implementation as
fulfilling a static purpose.

It’s possible this is just a sign of our times as we attempt to sound-bite

everything in our world. “It manages our projects” “It’s our timesheet” or
“It’s our ERP system” or “We have an EPM system” minimizes our having to
continuously think of all the aspects of our business that may be touched by
our enterprise system. Yet those organisations I’ve encountered which
have been the most successful at deploying an enterprise project or
enterprise timesheet system inevitably think of them as a “living system”; a
system which is continually evolving by design.

If it’s true that there is a better chance of success in an enterprise system

being thought of as a dynamic environment, why do so many organisations
consider their enterprise system as a fixed piece of software?
In the time it takes to implement an enterprise system like Project Online,
the organisation implementing it is bound to change. There will be new
clients, new personnel and personnel who depart. In the time it takes to
choose and deploy the EPPM system, other competing products will
emerge. I’ve seen organisations paralyzed by this phenomenon. Due to
concern that they will not select the perfect product, the release of another
product by another vendor has the selection group pause its work to
consider the new product. Or, the release of a new version of one of the
products being considered has everyone worry that their evaluation will not
consider all alternatives. These groups start over and over and over again.
A final decision is never realised because the organisation requirements and

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the solution options never stop changing. The problem for these organisations
is that the business challenge that had them look for a solution in the first
place doesn’t go away, and in the absence of a decision, they are not solved.
Enterprise system deployments will have a better chance of success if they
are living environments. They should grow, evolve and adapt to the changing
conditions around them. One of the biggest challenges faced when starting
an EPM deployment is establishing a credible roadmap for producing the
intended result. While I have deployed EPPM systems for several years, one
thing that hasn’t changed is the desire of senior management to have all the
results yesterday. However, to reduce risk I advocate an iterative approach to
deployment utilising phases and releases. To so however requires a roadmap,
since if you do not know where you are going then how can you get there?
Thus before determining the scope of further EPPM implementation phases, I
would recommend you build out an overall roadmap to further improve
organisation performance by developing core areas and defining a desired
future state which will help to identify areas for improvement and indicate
where implementation efforts need to be focused. Like any journey,
directions require two things: A destination and a point of origin. When we
apply this analogy to an EPPM deployment we have to think in similar terms:
a) Point of origin defined in
technology, process, and personnel
terms
b) Destination defined in business
terms and prioritised
We typically define some
‘waystations’ or interim stops where
you can regroup and replenish your
supplies for the next leg of the voyage – these are phases and underlying
releases within phases. This is only one of several things you can do in order
to avoid being stuck in a static deployment paradigm. Below of I have
highlighted some of the key considerations.

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Make phases in your implementation plan, and never run out of
phases.
If you adopt a phased approach to the enterprise implementation, you can
concentrate on a first phase that is much more modest. Our consulting staff
are taught to identify not the most we could do but the least. We tell them to
“look for the most minimal deployment, the deploying of which will produce an
ongoing positive return on investment.” The great news about this is that
value from the system will start much, much more quickly and in the use of
the system, even at a more minimal level, the requirements for future use will
become clearer.

Make a budget that allows for evolution.

One challenge we’ve seen in many deployments is the “one visit to the well”
thinking where a request for an enterprise system can be made only once.
Making a phased budget instead, with the expectation that the first couple of
phase budgets are quite detailed but future phases are less so, is consistently
more successful.

Support your EPPM Solution with a Governance Plan & Council.

Once your EPPM solution is live, there are going to be several changes,
enhancements, and removal of features that will come up. Unless you set a
standard on ‘how’ these changes are performed, you can rest assured of a
solution that is in complete chaos down the road. If you do not take the time
to plan, design, and execute a governance process around the management
of your EPPM solution, you can rest assured that the solution will get filled
with stale data, bad design changes, processes that are out of sync with
actual organisational processes, and the list goes on. Just like a car that
never receives maintenance, your solution will stop yielding the ROI that is
expected out of it. Your users will become passive, and either stop using the
solution or vociferously advocate a different solution.
Don’t make the mistake of “our IT guys can handle this.” I have seen many

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good implementations fail because the IT staff is not experienced nor
equipped to provide support for an EPPM tool suite. Delegating such
important forward-looking tools to IT and expecting them to “just work” is
short-sighted and will not result in an effective EPPM deployment.
When you start considering setting up a governance plan for your EPPM
solution, you need to consider which areas you actually want to govern. There
are many theories and models for establishing a governance plan for
enterprise solutions, and you are free to choose the best one that fits your
organisation. In this article, we will discuss one of these models that will fit
most of the EPPM implementations. The simplest way to figure out the areas
of governance needed is to consider the areas where changes are likely to
happen, and then set up a governance plan for managing those changes. In
general, there are three key areas where changes could happen for your
EPPM solution.
1. Information Governance
When your EPPM solution is implemented, it is reasonable to assume that
you start with good ‘master’ data in the solution. For example, these
include Enterprise Resource Details, Enterprise Calendars, related custom
fields and so on - essentially all the ‘master’ data that will enable you to use
your EPPM solution effectively.
However, as you keep using the
solution, people change departments,
some leave the organisation, calendars
need to be updated with new holidays,
time reporting periods need to be
created, fiscal periods may need to be
changed, and the list goes on and on.
Obviously, if this data is not kept
updated, then all your reporting will be
inaccurate, and so will be your security configuration. Information
governance is taking responsibility to keep this data updated and complete
so that the rest of your solution can take advantage of this core data.

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2. Design Governance
The second area that needs to be part of your governance plan is the
maintenance of “design” of your EPPM deployment. As you continue to use
the solution, there are going to be requests to tweak the solution design.
These could arise out of a particular group wanting to change the way they
use the tool, or wanting to take advantage of new features. A classic
example is switching the way time reporting is done. You might have
chosen to go with a % Work Complete method, whereas with a new
department added, you might need to switch it to the ‘hours worked per
period’ method for the sake of integration with other financial solutions. So
the question is who will evaluate the impact of this change across your
solution, and how are the changes going to be rolled out. Design
governance is the plan to manage changes that impact your overall design
of the EPPM solution.
3. Process Governance
It is easy to think of this area of governance as part of the design
governance, because most of the time, process and design go hand in
hand. However, holistically speaking, this area covers more than just the
design. It addresses the governance of processes inside and outside of the
EPPM solution that drive its effectiveness. For example, take a scenario
where your PMO is supposed to
submit a report to senior
management every Wednesday
AM. You might have setup a
process to make sure that the
timesheets are submitted every
Friday by a certain time, and all you
project managers update and
publish their project plans by
Monday AM, before the reporting
happens. Now, let’s say the senior
management asks for reports to be sent Monday AM instead of every
Wednesday AM. This triggers a change in the process as to how the EPPM
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 solution is used, rather than a change to the design of the EPPM solution
itself. These kinds of changes will need to be governed by a standard set of
rules, defined as part of process governance.
4. Infrastructure Governance
This is another one those areas that appears to be easy to silo, however it
can overlap the other three areas mentioned above. Simply put, the
infrastructure that supports your EPPM solution should be maintained with
the installation. Even software as a service will require infrastructure
governance in terms of how it integrates with the rest of your IT estate. On
one side of the equation, the decision to install something or not is purely
merit based (for example, whether it will impact any current production
solution adversely). The other side of the equation of any infrastructure is to
look into the ‘process’ or ‘design’ changes that will be caused by the
installation. In some cases, the infrastructure change could be the result of
any changes in the other areas.
A key component of any governance strategy is the team that actually works
the governance plan. While there are several ways to slice and dice as to
what this governance team should look like, the one recommendation that all
schools of thought will agree on is to keep it simple. Possible team structure
could be:
 Governance Area Owners: These are the owners of each of the
governance areas mentioned previously in this article. In general, any
change requests that will impact the designated area for these
governance owners will become the responsibility of these owners. It will
be their role to evaluate, provide recommendations, set up governance
around the new features, and so on.
 Central Governance Committee: This would be the team of decision
makers who can approve or reject the recommendations made by the
governance owners. Having a central governance committee not only
helps reduce bureaucracy, but also helps bring all ideas to a common
platform, and evaluate them in cognisance of one another.
While it is difficult to predict and plan for every change that can occur to your
EPPM solution, it is important to have a strategy in pace that is flexible and

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scalable to any scenario. As parting thoughts, please consider the following
basic common-sense approaches to building your governance strategy.
 A governance plan does not need to be a tome with a lot of obscure
terminology, and language that no one can use in daily life. It can be as
simple as an Excel sheet, with quick answers to the key questions.
 A governance plan needs to be easy to be implemented, and should
integrate well into the existing processes of the organisation. It is not
necessary to reinvent the wheel.
 Understand that governance of your EPPM solution is a constantly
evolving process. It is important to not get hung up with paralysis of
analysis. Start small, deliver
value and then scale it up.

Make a permanent system

enhancement team.
The team that assembles the
requirements for the enterprise
system will be looking at business
processes, system functionality,
integration with other key
enterprise systems and more.
Having these people abandon the
system once it’s installed makes
future evolution very challenging. Place your new shiny solution into long
term evolutionary care where the needs of the organisation and the system
capabilities are evaluated on a regular basis. You should have a support plan
in place. In large installations, you will also need on-site support and
maintenance that can be provided by direct staff or on contract. Smaller
implementations and organisations should have either a part time admin or
support. These complex applications do not run themselves.

Don’t abandon all of your implementation team when you go

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operational. Keep key resources going forward.
This is an extremely common challenge. Often in an enterprise deployment,
the organisation is drawn to assigning its most experienced and skilled
resources and that certainly helps get the system selected and implemented.
However, those resources are the very ones who will be needed on the next
critical project and they are likely to be pulled off of this one just as the system
goes live and is at its most critical juncture. Planning in advance to have
certain key resources stay with the implementation for a longer period can
make an enormous difference.

Get your system into production early.

This is so much easier in today’s world than it was even 5 years ago. You can
take advantage of cloud-based installations and remotely-accessible services
to get your system running quickly. Most enterprise systems which have both
cloud and on-premises offerings have methods of evolving from one to the
other. This is certainly true with Project Server. It’s true for our systems also.

Ensure there is a feedback loop that results in system enhancement.

Some implementation teams discourage suggestions for improvement,
concerned that they will keep people from using the system they have already
deployed. Our experience is that those who make suggestions for
improvement are usually the biggest allies of the enterprise system. Even if
an idea can’t be implemented right away, it should be welcomed. Creating a
system for identifying and encouraging new ideas for the enterprise system
keeps everyone invested and can bring enormous benefits.

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Don’t abandon hope too quickly.
Some firms will say “The problem is in the software” and jump ship before
there’s a chance of success.
EPPM goes far beyond technology and software isn’t a magic bullet that will
instantly give you results. It’s a tool, one of many on the path to good results.
Just as obesity can’t be cured with a simple pill, obtaining a good overall
picture of the status and deliverables of your major projects and initiatives
can’t be completed with the installation of one system. It isn't the cart before
the horse, you can't build an EPPM solution and think people will come.
Success with EPPM is more a function of how you are going to manage the
performance of people using the system than it has anything to do with the
software. Getting status updates and resource information into the system is
a process, and finding the right personnel and rhythm to keeping it updated is
also a procedure that must be implemented.
So, is your organisation planning to implement an EPPM or EPPM solution this
year? I would love to hear your fears and experiences on the subject. One
last thought – “A fool with a tool, is still a fool! & if you build a monster you
have to feed a monster!”

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