At this week’s Microsoft Project Conference in Anaheim, attendees packed into the session about Benefits Realization wanting to know what they can do to better achieve project and portfolio benefits. UMT360’s Ben Chamberlain presented the Benefits Realization session and told the crowd that it is essential to start looking at projects as business investments. That means you have to begin to integrate financial management capabilities with PPM so that financial controls are in place to make you aware of issues so you can make needed adjustments throughout the life cycle to ensure benefits realization.
Ben suggested that organizations take a phased approach to integrating financial controls:
- Establish the Financial Management Foundation – Establish your financial structures, cost benefit, investment governance, controls and integrate within your PPM system, your planning and execution system. Have the data related to your strategic initiatives in one place.
- Integrate with System of Record – The ERP system plays a very important role in providing the actual cost information for a project.
- Automate Management Reports – Time taken to build reports takes time away from analysis so automating the reports allows the PMO to focus on more strategic elements of the process.
- Analyze/Optimize Capital Spend – Use variance analysis to help you dynamically reallocate funds based on the overall project performance to continuously maximize value and the ROI you’re getting from your portfolio.
Ben’s presentation is available here. Want to learn more? Contact UMT360 for a free demo to see how it works.