Managing Portfolios with Project Server 2016 / 2019 / Project Online

For portfolio managers and their support staff that use Project Web App and Project Server or Project Online

About This Course
This 2-day course prepares project portfolio managers and their support staff for managing their portfolio more effectively with Microsoft Project Server. The portfolio management features into Project Web App allow organizations to dramatically improve their project portfolio management. Improvements can be made in terms of the realization of the corporate strategy, the demand for versus the utilization of resources and the overall balance of the portfolio.

Each participant will receive a copy of the course manual and an electronic certificate with PDUs upon completion.

This course is based on the Standard for Portfolio Management (third edition) from PMI®.

Learning Objectives
After this course, you will:

  • Be able to select the optimum portfolio of projects to accomplish the corporate strategy
  • Be able to create, compare and analyze portfolio what-if scenarios
  • Be able to assess and improve the balance of a project portfolio
  • Be aware of some portfolio analysis and optimization techniques for project portfolios:
    • Efficient Frontier (Markowitz)
    • Theory of constraints (Goldratt)
    • Earned Value of the project portfolio per year
  • Know the strengths and weaknesses of these different techniques
  • Be able to apply these techniques using Microsoft Project Server
  • Assess how projects are performing (key performance indicators in the project center)
  • Be able to create project portfolio reports that are meaningful to executives
Course Topics
    Review of the current project portfolio management theory
    • PMI® standard: The Standard for Portfolio Management
    • Portfolio governance
    • PMI® Process groups and processes
    • Portfolios have constrained resources - the importance of project ranking
    Realizing the corporate strategy
    • Capturing the business case for a project: the project proposal in the Project Detail Page (PDP)
    • Capture project risk information in the project risk register custom Project Detail Page (PDP)
    • Selecting the projects:
      • Formulate business drivers
      • Define the following scoring categories for business drivers in order to score projects: none, low, moderate, high, and extreme. (a.k.a. as impact statements)
      • Rank the business drivers by pairwise comparison: weighted business drivers
      • Score the projects against the business drivers
      • Review the project prioritization
      • Be able to model any dependencies between projects in a portfolio like mutually inclusive projects or mutually exclusive projects etc.
    • Create portfolio analyses and what-if scenarios:
      • Using internal resources only or internal & external resources
      • Changing project start dates
      • Forcing in/out projects
      • Hiring new resources
    • Compare several what-if scenarios side by side
    Key performance indicators
    • Schedule, Cost and Quality performance indicators
    • How to develop formulas for these indicators in Project Server
    • Thresholds, traffic light indicators and screen tips
    • Traffic-light report: cost, time, quality and risk performance indicators and thresholds
    • Tracking Gantt chart: out-of-date projects, latest forecasts of the finish dates relative to the baseline finish dates
    Checking if the project portfolio is in balance using bubble charts across the following dimensions:
    • Strategy buckets: improvement of operational efficiency versus increasing revenues versus organizational transformation
    • Short term versus long term
    • Buy side versus inside or sell side of the organization
    • Workloads across different resource roles within the organization
    Efficient Frontier (Markowitz)
    • The Efficient Frontier depicts the optimum combinations of investment level relative to the level of strategy accomplishment.
    • Given an investment level, the percentage of strategy accomplishment can be calculated, or vice versa.
    • The technique allows you to identify mandatory projects and to incorporate limited money and skill availabilities.
    Theory of constraints (Goldratt):
    • The critical resource determines the throughput capacity of an organization
    • Determine the most critical resource in the 0-3 month look ahead window (with fixed resource capacity). Explore how to decrease the workload for this resource and/or how to increase the throughput for this resource. Then stagger the projects based on the availability of this critical resource.
    • Identify the over-allocated resources in the 3-6 month look ahead window (with flexible resource capacity). Decide if you should hire/train more people in these critical skills, or if you need to trim non-critical resources to balance the organization.
    • Pivot table: resource utilization by role, department or region
    Earned Value of the project portfolio by year
    • Normally, the Earned Value technique is applied on a single project, but here we will apply it to a portfolio of projects
    • Earned Value: Cost Performance Index and Schedule Performance Index over time

    (PMI, PMP, PgMP, CAPM, PMI-SP, PMI-RMP, and PMI-ACP are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.)