Enterprise Project Management (EPM) is a systems approach to achieving organizational goals by aligning people and projects to strategic objectives. Enterprise Project Management leverages people, processes, and technology to create the change needed to keep the organizations pulse current and competitive.
The Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution is a flexible, end-to-end PPM platform,used by organizations across a broad variety of industries to automate primary PPM processes. The EPM Solution helps organizations accomplish the following business imperatives:
- Intuitively capture all requests within a central repository, and manage them using governance workflow – Demand Management
- Objectively prioritize, optimize, and select project portfolios that best align with the organization’s business strategy – Portfolio Selection and Analytics
- Proactively and reactively manage resources throughout the project life cycle – Resource Management
- Easily create and communicate both simple and complex project schedules – Schedule Management
- Control and measure project and portfolio financial performance – Financial Management
- 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
Demand Management
Demand management offers a unified view of all work in a central location. Its purpose is to quickly help organizations gain visibility into projects and operational activities; standardize and streamline data collection; enhance decision making; and subject initiatives to the appropriate governance controls throughout their life cycles. The Microsoft EPM Solution provides flexible demand management capabilities to help organizations accomplish the following:
- Build governance workflows to subject different types of work requests—for example, a help desk ticket, or a project of any size—to the appropriate controls throughout the life cycle of the issue or project.
- Standardize and streamline data collection by using configurable forms and business case templates.
- Capture all requests in a central repository to enhance visibility.
Portfolio Selection and Analytics
In uncertain economic times, many executives are being asked to do more with less. Pressure to reduce or maintain budgets is driving sharper scrutiny of discretionary spending, and increases the importance of effectively identifying, selecting, and delivering project portfolios that best align with an organization’s business strategy and that maximize ROI. Best-practice portfolio selection techniques provide a handshake between value optimization—that is, alignment with business priorities and maximizing ROI—and resource utilization, or understanding resource capabilities and availability. Together, they help PMOs recommend not only which projects to undertake, but to forecast when projects can be delivered.
Aligning spending with business strategy can be very subjective. It is made less so if organizations adopt structured techniques for defining, prioritizing, and communicating business imperatives, and consistently evaluate each competing initiative that contributes to strategic priorities. Adopting a structured process enforces a rational rather than emotional approach to decision making, and in addition, ensures that projects are funded based on business priorities rather than on a “first-come, first-served” basis.Adopting structured portfolio selection processes and techniques helps organizations accomplish the following:
- Define and communicate the business strategy
- Drive executive consensus around business driver priorities
- Objectively prioritize competing projects from multiple dimensions
- Identify the optimal portfolio under varying budget and portfolio constraints
- Effectively communicate tradeoffs
- Maximize resource utilization
Resource Management
In today’s competitive and changing markets, organizations are looking to maximize ROI and drive efficiencies to sustain the business and support future growth. Resources are arguably an organization’s most valuable asset and potentially its biggest expense. Proper management and optimal use of resources is key for an organization to realize its business strategy. With intelligent resource management, an organization can develop and retain a world-class workforce.
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