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Enterprise Project & Portfolio Management (EPPM)

What is Enterprise Project & Portfolio Management (EPPM)?

Enterprise Project & Portfolio Management (EPPM) is the practice of taking a more integrated and top-down approach to managing all project-intensive work and resources across the enterprise. This contrasts with the more common approach of building separate functional and technology silos to manage IT, new product development, process improvement and other enterprise initiatives, programs and project management offices (PMOs).

EPPM software provides a single-system approach to managing enterprise initiatives and programs rather than relying on a combination of manual processes, desktop tools and “best-in-breed” PPM applications for each project portfolio type. The aim of EPPM software is to deliver the benefits of EPPM (described below) while providing a best-in-breed, culturally acceptable solution for all user communities.

Business drivers for Enterprise Project & Portfolio Management

The PPM landscape is evolving rapidly as a result of a growing preference for managing multiple enterprise initiatives and strategic programs in a single system. Consolidating the technology used to manage multiple project portfolio management silos across the enterprise can be viewed as part of a broader IT consolidation trend that has dominated CIO agendas for years. A more centralized approach and resulting “single version of truth” for project and portfolio information promises to address many of the pain points associated with the co-existence of information silos. These include inconsistent and unreliable data, difficulty in reporting, weak executive visibility, a lack of accountability for results, inability to drive and align projects with corporate strategies and programs which cross traditional project portfolio boundaries and a higher total cost of ownership (TCO) for the disparate PPM technology infrastructure.

The key benefits of EPPM can be summarized as follows:

• Reduced TCO by consolidating PPM silos
• Optimized resource deployment across project environments, initiatives and portfolios
• Improved strategy execution by ensuring executive visibility to project activity and project team accountability to business priorities
• Facilitated program execution and risk management by tracking programs which depend on projects that span multiple business units

Project Portfolio Management Consolidation Challenges

Historically, the challenge is that every work environment — such as IT, R&D/product development, supply chain, compliance, etc. — each has their own valid but distinct ways of managing projects and programs. This may include, for example, unique idea and demand management workflows, project management methodologies and roadmaps, and metric and financial models. Thus, while CIOs have been intensely focusing on IT consolidation, a variety of home-grown and "best-of-breed" off-the-shelf applications have proliferated to manage and track the variety of project portfolio types. These incompatible processes and systems ensure that information — such as resource assignment information for shared project and non-project resources — can not be accurately and reliably rolled up to the business and IT executive ranks in the form of actionable and real-time reports and dashboards. As a result, those responsible for business and IT strategy have lost visibility to execution and those responsible for execution are not accountable to the strategy owners.

The EnterpriseTrack Solution for Enterprise Project Portfolio Management

The INSTANTIS EnterpriseTrack project portfolio management system provides a solution to the lack of project portfolio management standardization across the enterprise by providing a single-system solution for managing multiple project portfolio types. The core enabler for this unique capability is what Instantis refers to as extensive “multi-initiative” system configurability which has been built into the system from its inception. This allows EnterpriseTrack to provide a best-in-breed (culturally friendly) experience for all types of users while improving strategy and program execution and alignment, enterprise-wide resource productivity, and supporting technology TCO.

An excellent example of EPPM system in action powered by EnterpriseTrack has been deployed at W.R. Grace to manage new product development, productivity management and merger and integration. You can learn more by viewing this Webinar

 

* Note: Some modules are optional and priced separately.