Building your business case for a new PPM solution

Project

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Executive summary:The numbers say it all

In terms of business benefits, deploying Microsoft’s Project Online is an easy win for most organisations. As a low cost, powerful, industry-standard planning tool with numerous advantages over earlier Portfolio and Project Management (PPM) solutions, Project Online is, in most cases, the obvious choice.

Sometimes those closest to the solution or behind the business requirements immediately understand the benefits of Project Online, yet they find conveying the benefits to other stakeholders who are further removed from the solution challenging.

This eBook is intended to help here by providing guidance on building your business case for Project Online.

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Preaching PPM to the not-quite-converted

Software has long been a central pillar of successful project management. Over the decades, solutions have evolved to cover programme, resource and portfolio management; allowing standards, governance, flexibility, reporting and transparency to their users. Along with wider trends in enterprise IT such as the move to cloud services, the technological cost of change has drastically reduced. What once depended on powerful servers, lengthy training and specialist skills can now be deployed at the click of a button.

Microsoft has long been seen as industry leaders in PPM Solutions and Project Online is a firm cloud favourite, according to Gartner’s 2015 Magic Quadrant for PPM Software Tools¹. While the benefits of upgrading to a modern, cloud-based PPM tool may be obvious to project managers and IT leaders, senior executives and other stakeholders who are a step removed from the software may struggle to understand the value of upgrading.

1 Berniz, Angel. 2016. 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for PPM Software Tools Review. Available online: https://projectmanagers.org/gartner-magic-quadrant-ppm-2015/

The long-term benefits of moving to Project Online mean obstacles like these can be countered with proven facts and convincing arguments. The rest of this eBook provides a series of steps to help you build your business case for Project Online.

When requesting investment into a new project platform, it is not uncommon to encounter certain objections:

Don’t we already have a PPM tool?

Do we need to spend

more money on this?

Is this really top of my

priority list?

We don’t have the

budget to invest right

now.

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The ‘recipe’ for a successful business case for Project online

To ensure your business case is complete and convincing, use the following five steps based on CPS’ best practice guidelines.

1. Understand what you currently have

If you hope to prove the value of your company investing in a new tool, you will first need to understand your current practices and processes. By documenting your current set up it is easy to see what work you have already done to support Project Online deployment and what will be left to do. You should:

• Carry out interviews with colleagues Speak to other users to understand what they currently do, what they think the team can do better and what they believe the key needs of the solution are.

• Collate current practices Gather copies of current project communications, status reports, resourcing reports, milestone reports, dashboards etc., to understand what information the solution will need to deliver.

2. Understand Project Online and its functionality

Understanding the feature set available helps you build a vision for the future. Project Online is Microsoft’s strongest platform to date and includes multiple features to help you manage your portfolios, programmes and resources for optimal outcomes.

Major PPM functions in Project Online are:

• Robust portfolio management Simplified ideation - Enable teams to submit project ideas, so you can capture portfolio suggestions from all organisation levels.

Strategic alignment - Compare project ideas against business objectives to evaluate competing requests, and streamline project initiation.

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3. Understand the benefits

Depending on your needs you can catalogue potential benefits to build out your business case. Typical benefits include:

• Reduce administration overheads of project delivery By having a single source of data, Project Managers and Resource Managers have the information available to them to build and deliver on plans (this could be assumed to be a time saving of around 20% of a project manager or PMO’s time).

Portfolio optimisation - Run optimisation scenarios based on specific factors, like budget and resource requirements.

• Enterprise resource management Consolidated view - Consolidate all potential project resources into a single view so that resource managers can compare demand and build best-fit teams.

Optimised resources - Allow resource managers to manage resource requests depending on availability and portfolio across the portfolio.

• Efficient project management Mobile time and task entry - Improved time and task entry let team members submit updates from the browser or from IOS apps. Project managers get instant visibility to make informed decisions faster.

Optimal resource use - Features that let you systematically handle resource requests. Intuitive reports help you forecast and manage resource use.

Multiple timelines - Built-in multiple timelines help you effectively represent complex schedules and understand all aspects, or just specific slices, of a project.

Understanding your needs against this functionality allows you to start to consider the value and the change impact of deploying Project Online.

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• Reduce the burden on Project Managers Building out templates and communication plans. In Project Online, project sites (with security built in) are created automatically (this could be assumed to represent as much as five days per project). • Reduce reporting time Reports will be a by-product of people doing their job (updating plans and resources) rather than a bureaucratic overhead (this could be assumed to be a time saving of around 20% of a project manager or PMO’s time).

• Reduce overruns and mitigate risk Building better plans, managing risk and sharing live data reduces the risk of failure and the cost of overruns (Forrester indicates that a project solution can help reduce project cost overruns by 10%²).

• Eliminate low-value projects Running Portfolio Optimisation allows you to save time and make the right investment decisions and eliminate low-value projects (Forrester indicates a project solution can help reduce the number of low-value projects by 10%³).

• Improve collaboration Using intuitive online tools means that the wider project team can collaborate and share live project data reducing the needs and the inherent costs of in-person meetings (including time lost, travel, report building etc.).

2 Forrester. 2009. The ROI of Project Portfolio Management Tools. Available online: https://www.forrester.com/report/The+ROI+Of+Project+Portfolio+Management+Tools/-/E-RES479823 Ibid

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The benefits of using Project Online to deliver the solution also include technology benefits to the deployment.

• Get started immediately There are no infrastructure costs as all services are deployed as part of Office365. So you can start immediately without any infrastructure investment.

• On-Demand tried & tested solid infrastructure Join hundreds of millions of other users on Office365.

• Easy User Adoption Familiar tools with an intuitive interface mean that there are lower costs of change (training/support).

• Grows with your Organisation You only need to buy the licenses that you require and there are no scalability issues.

• You will never need to do this again! By moving to Project Online (an evergreen, always updated PPM solution), the platform will continue to evolve without you having to plan expensive upgrades or migrations ever again.

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4. Understand the costs

When you move to Project Online, there are no upfront infrastructure costs. Instead, you will need to manage licensing costs and the cost of change (training, support etc.). Under-valuing these costs can lead to the setting of unrealistic expectations and under-supported deployments. So what are the costs that you need to calculate?

Project Online allows a simple mix of licenses to deliver the functions required to your users:

• Project Online Essentials Allow for Project Team members to manage tasks, timesheets and collaborate on Documents, Risks, Issues etc.

• Project Online Professional Allows for Project Managers to manage schedules (using the desktop tool or in the browser), manage the project team and collaborate on all items.

• Project Online Premium Allows PPM Administrators and Portfolio Managers / Executive to manage portfolio optimisation and Resource Managers to manage demand requests.

Project

Essentials Professional Premium

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You also need to factor in the cost of change, which is less straightforward. These include your current capabilities and your future requirements, so you need to consider some of following to estimate the cost of change:

• Do you have enough stakeholder buy-in (executive and end user)?

• Do all users see value in the solution (there needs to be benefits for the organisation, the Project Managers, the Resource Managers and the Team members)?

• What training will be required for users?

• What support will be required for users?

• What will be your delivery approach? Will you need a roadmap to build incremental sustainable change?

• What skills will you require? Reduce cost of deployment and mitigate risks by engaging an experienced partner who has successfully delivered Project Online and Change Management many times.

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5. Build a better business case

You should now have enough information to build a compelling business case for Project Online. Remember a business case is a form of marketing. You need to make sure your audience realise they have a problem (that they may not even be aware they had), and understand that you have a solution to it.

When completing/reviewing the business case, check the following:

• Have you built a structured narrative by focusing on a problem, then shown how you can solve it?

• Is it patronising or condescending? Ensure you support your arguments with clear, compelling facts.

• Is it also human? Humans love stories, so don’t get too attached to a plethora of dull statistics. Instead, bring your business case to life with ‘real world’ examples to engage and inspire your executive team.

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Project

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Contact details

Visit our project management blog series at:www.cps.co.uk/blog/category/project/

Sign up for our upcoming project management webinars at:www.cps.co.uk/events/

Download our eBook: The 10 ‘must do’ steps to ensure successful and rapid adoption of your new PPM solution

Join the UK Project Community: Subscribe to product updates and access relevant Project Management content and free webinars at www.microsoft.co.uk/project

Learn more about project management success:

About the authorDuncan Griffin

PPM Solutions Consultant

When it comes to global experience, few Project Portfolio Management (PPM) consultants can compete with Duncan. With more than 15 years’ experience and a track record that includes work in Edinburgh, London and San Francisco, Duncan brings a wealth of experience in designing,

deploying and managing successful PPM solutions. He has worked across multiple sectors including banking, insurance, government, hi-tech,

bio-tech, manufacturing and major games events, bringing a level of expertise that few in the industry can match. He is also contracted to

Microsoft as a PPM technical solutions professional where, as a trusted partner, he provides PPM advice and consultancy directly to its customers.

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+44 (0)1628 895600

hello@cps.co.uk

www.cps.co.uk

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