subject: Why Online Project Portfolio Management Is So Popular Among Professionals? [print this page] In spite of a continuous debate over what project portfolio management has in common with modern investment analysis, a good number of software vendors boast products for online project portfolio management that seem to get a warm welcome among project managers all over the world. Project managers have always been under pressure to perform and, as far as investment analysis methods can do no make any harm but only assist their efforts to efficiently manage portfolios of corporate or public projects, project managers are happy to bag additional software tools and functionality aimed at optimizing the overall project management process. Furthermore, by borrowing techniques from investment analysis, project portfolio management goes to a new level of analysis, incorporating methods that produce good results elsewhere and which evidently can be customized to meet the needs of the project management community.
Estimated and actual cost, resource allocation, planned and actual progress over time are among the attributes of projects that project managers have to deal with. During the early days of software industry, project and program managers have had to familiarize with spreadsheet software solutions that closely resembled pen-and-paper approaches used before the widespread use of computer technologies. To their credit, project managers constantly pressured software industry to work on and unveil more sophisticated solutions, getting in result advanced software tools that deal not only scheduling and timing but with flexible resource allocation and complex inter-dependencies across numerous projects. Thus modern project management software applications were born within less than a decade.
Instant messaging and online collaboration were only an exotic idea a couple of decades ago but businesses worldwide rapidly realized that the future lies with online collaboration and flexible work environment that allows for remote access to resources used in day-to-day activities. Thus tools for online project portfolio management were developed and proved highly successful within a few years time.
Those online software products provide a unique opportunity to collaborate on design and subsequent management of portfolios of projects, while offering to project managers the chance to avoid the ad-hoc, one-off analysis of individual project offers and apply a modern approach based on Applied Information Economics and other newly-developed theories. Unsurprisingly, project managers worldwide have welcomed such an opportunity and now online project management tools, featuring ever expanding functionality, are widespread and considered indispensible.
In fact, project portfolio management is a process where questions of resource allocation are solved using techniques and concepts usually applied in financial investment operations, linking the project portfolio analysis and subsequent progress and management to a certain financial objective like increasing bottom line or overall efficiency improvement. Modern project management systems provide invaluable tools to measure and track the progress of projects on an ongoing basis, in addition to statistical data analysis tools, which in turn allows project managers to react quickly to changes in any of the variables set within a portfolio of projects.
Finally, one would bear in mind that online project portfolio management still has room to develop further, thus more complex and rich in functionality software tools are emerging all the time, introducing even more intriguing approaches to project management as a whole.
by: Primms
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