Project Portfolio Management today must be highly responsive, especially because decisions on project priority and funding directly impact organizational success.
PPM decision-making, however, is a deeply complex process with many environmental and human factors that can either boost an organization’s bottom line or derail it. When we understand PPM as a dynamic, sometimes even volatile process, requiring constant flexibility, it’s clear that we must enhance and support the PMOs decision-making in as many ways as possible.
The decision-enhancing strategies presented in this paper have all demonstrated the positive organizational impact of continuously gathering and strategically incorporating data into every decision. Copious, real-time data that is presented visually will allow organizations to be fully transparent, identify and mitigate early-stage conflicts, and forecast for ideal resource allocation. When rendered in the form of multiple future scenarios, giving PMOs the fullest possible vision of what could happen when any number of variables shift, this kind of data is shown to aid in sound decision-making that brings maximum benefits.
Ultimately, organizations need data to help compensate for and overcome all our human shortcomings and biases in order to make decisions based on evidence and informed predictions—data that illuminates project interdependencies, resource conflicts, and competing objectives. And data that leads to maximized resources and overall portfolio success.
