A recent Forrester Consulting report commissioned by Microsoft examines the costs and benefits of deploying Office 365 Project and Portfolio Management. The bottom-line? According to Forrester, a typical organization can realize a 301% ROI over three years! That’s a pretty bold claim, so let’s take a look at how they arrived at that figure.
An impressive three year rate-of-return
The report is based on the experiences of four companies with multiple years of using Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365 Project and Portfolio Management platform. From this information, Forrester designed a “composite organization” based on characteristics of the interviewed organizations. In their financial analysis, Forrester revealed some pretty startling results that a typical organization with 5,000 employees might realize over three-years by deploying Microsoft’s cloud-based PPM platform:
- ROI: 301%
- NPV per user: $12,546
- Payback period: 6.7 months
- Total benefits: $8,359,959
Breaking down the benefits
Based on their research, Forrester’s composite organization would experience a variety of benefits by adopting Microsoft’s cloud-based PPM platform, including:
- Improved visibility into project performance reduced project budget overruns by 5%. Excluding labor costs, visibility into project performance allowed organizations to make timely decisions and address issues as they arose, preventing project delays and reducing budget overruns by $2,629,761 over three years.
- Increased project management performance and project throughput generated $1,864,209 in savings over three years. Office 365 PPM, by streamlining reporting and reducing the amount of administrative workload on project managers, allowed them to be more productive and increase their annual project throughput by 14%.
- Improved resource management led to $3,103,119 of savings over three years. Office 365 PPM provides the ability for resource pools to be more effectively managed while improving alignment of skillsets.
- Migrating to a cloud-based SaaS PPM solution allowed organizations to save $162,000 annually. In addition to a reduction in annual maintenance and infrastructure cost avoidance, organizations were able to save an additional $360,000 in avoiding the upgrade of their on-premises project management software.
Choosing the right vehicle for your PPM journey
Of course, there are lots of additional savings to be realized for organizations that take a more strategic approach to managing their project and program investments. It all begins by first establishing a solid PPM foundation. By tapping into the right technology and the right expertise, it’s relatively easy to then decide how much further you’d like to take your PPM capabilities.
As the Forrester report reveals, Microsoft’s powerful PPM platform might not be a bad place to start your journey. If you have seen similar success with your PPM tool, let us know about it in the comments!
