#139 | Navigating Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Selection: Insights from Client Advocates

Ever wondered how to seamlessly align client needs with the offerings of tech providers? Join us on this episode of Agile Ideas as we uncover the secrets of effective Project Portfolio Management (PPM) solutions. Recorded live on May 23rd as a Meetup, we delve into bridging the gap between business requirements and technological capabilities through the vital role of a client advocate. 

Discover essential PPM tool features, key solution areas, and top tips to confidently navigate the PPM landscape. We provide practical steps for implementing PPM tools within your organisation, discussing governance structures, user access, and management responsibilities. Learn how PPM tools can enhance portfolio prioritization, optimize resource allocation, align projects with strategic goals, reduce risks, and track performance metrics.

Our episode also features real-world case studies, showcasing organisations that have successfully adopted PPM tools. Gain insights from their experiences to avoid common pitfalls and embrace best practices. Whether you're researching or ready to implement, this episode offers valuable advice on conducting needs assessments, understanding product roadmaps, evaluating features, and involving stakeholders in your selection journey.

Tune in to empower yourself with the knowledge needed to select and implement the right PPM solution for your organisation.

In this episode we cover: 

- Navigating Project Portfolio Management Solutions

- Implementing PPM Tools

- Critical Factors in PPM Implementation

- Selecting and Implementing PPM Solutions

- Evaluating and Selecting PPM Solutions

- Case Studies in PPM Implementation

and more

This podcast is sponsored by Agile Management Office (www.agilemanagementoffice.com) providing high-impact delivery execution in an agile era for scaling businesses. 

Join future Meetups here - https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/agile-ideas/ 

Watch the video of this event on YouTube.

Thank you for listening to this podcast. We welcome any feedback. www.agilemanagementoffice.com/contact  

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Chapters

• 0:00 Navigating Project Portfolio Management Solutions
• 14:04 Implementing PPM Tools
• 23:06 Critical Factors in PPM Implementation
• 31:07 Selecting and Implementing PPM Solutions
• 36:09 Evaluating and Selecting PPM Solutions
• 45:26 Case Studies in PPM Implementation

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

You're listening to Agile Ideas, the podcast hosted by Fatima Rabuchi. For anyone listening out there not having a good day, please know there is help out there. Today's going to be really a deep dive, informative session on all things project portfolio management, and the reason we decided to do this type of meetup today specifically was because we're getting a lot of different questions from a lot of different clients who are often already really clear on what they need in terms of a PPM solution, but what they don't understand is how to align what the tech providers are actually putting out there. A lot of the times, the PPM providers are really just, you know, really good at technology and they don't really understand the business side. So effectively being that kind of conduit between the two is really the reason why we decided to do this meetup today. We're going to cover off the key question of what's a client advocate? Just to make that really clear Understanding PPM tools and key capabilities. What we won't do today and it's really important to call this out is we're not going to tell you which PPM is the best or not the best. There is dozens and dozens of them on the market and they all do different things. Some of them have amazing AI built in, others are really old-fashioned, some are based on agile, others are based on traditional project. There's so many variations. So what we will do is we'll help you understand the tools in general and the key capabilities to be looking for or to be deep diving into and what's actually out there in terms of capabilities, based on our experience with clients. But we won't go into specific tech, not in this meetup at the moment. We'll also go into PPM solution focus areas.

Speaker 1: 1:41

So what this is about is what are the kind of key five categories to think about when identifying a solution for your business or your team, and this also may be relevant if you already are in a company that already has a PPM. One client recently reached out and found out that their PPM solution in this government department is being sunsetted, so it's not going to be supported anymore in about 18 months, so they've got no choice but to actually change their PPM provider. So they're setting up a bit of a project to go through that as well. We'll also go through some of the key challenges that we've experienced to make you aware how to navigate the selection process, some top tips, and then also take you through a little bit of an industry insight, case study and some Q&A. So please ask questions at any time throughout the presentation in the chat, and we will cover them off, and we really want to make sure that you get the most out of today.

Speaker 1: 2:33

So, on that note, let's start by asking the question of why you actually are here now. So thinking about the reason that you might be here is probably going to be one of these reasons. So I'm kind of keen to see I'm just going to quickly ask in a poll where are you right now? Are you looking at a new PPM solution? Do you have one in place and you're looking to upgrade or being forced to upgrade? Are you researching the benefits of a PPM and so you're looking to upgrade or being forced to upgrade? Are you researching the benefits of a PPM and so you're unsure about whether or not you have the right requirements defined? Have you picked a PPM solution and now you just need to implement? So you're looking for, like, an implementation path, implementation strategy. Or perhaps you're one of those people that have heard a lot about PPMs but actually don't really know where you are at the moment? You just want to cover off a lot of questions that you might have. So I'll just give that 30 more seconds. Yeah, really keen, so we can tailor the conversation today around where you are. Okay, so a lot of people so far talking about being unsure and having a lot of questions, some just doing some research. Okay, awesome, that's a good start. Thank you for that.

Speaker 1: 3:49

Okay, so first, what is a client advocate? So just to reiterate, as I said at the beginning, technology vendors demonstrate capability against requirements you often will provide them and they will respond to requests for information and requests for proposals. These usually implementations are really expensive. I've never seen a PPM implementation or even the base cost for a PPM solution being anything less than $50,000 as a starting point and then the prices go up from there, from implementation, and that's just based on lots of different examples as experience.

Speaker 1: 4:23

So your client, as a client, you and your team will understand what you need. You'll often develop something called functional and technical requirements. So we want it to do reporting like this, or we want it to track financials and link to our finance system, or we want it to be able to be split across different regions or teams all those sorts of questions and comments and things that you will identify. You'll often give that to the technology vendor or in some instances, if your company is not very mature, the technology vendor will actually provide that to you and then you've got to kind of align to them. So a client advocate effectively sits in the middle and helps to coordinate and go through that process with you. So before you go down the path of PPM, lucy is just going to quickly take us through whether or not you're ready.

Speaker 2: 5:10

Thank you.

Speaker 2: 5:10

So yeah, look when we're working with our clients and we're having those initial conversations around do you need a PPM? Are you actually ready for a PPM? There's a few questions that we ask, and these are three that we thought um were worthy of just sharing with you guys today. So, firstly, are your processes sufficiently mature? Um, so let me use an example like, for instance, if you're investing in a ppm tool, let's say, you've got a bit of budget, you're, you're um, I've got to go ahead to get like a great tool. Maybe this tool's got an amazing risk and issue module. So you're kind of like brilliant, you sat in um your pmo function, thinking this is going to be amazing. However, if your organization then doesn't have, for instance, like a great risk and issue framework, a really good understanding around measurement, as PPM practitioners we can only go so far. So the tool will certainly give us that capability for uplifting, like the oversight on risk and issues et cetera, but it's not a fix all, it's not going to create you a framework, it's not going to uplift your culture around risk and issue management. So we always make sure that our PMO practitioners kind of understand what they can influence and what they can't in terms of, like, the implementation and expectation of what the PPM tool can actually do.

Speaker 2: 6:49

Secondly, just like any project that your organization might run, is this project actually supported? So PPM tool, like the selection process, the implementation, it's like any other technical implementation. So we check is there sponsorship? Is this project actually prioritized and strategically aligned within your organization? Those things, just like any projects, must exist for a PPM tool. Implementation, implementation also.

Speaker 2: 7:22

And thirdly, another really um good thing to understand is have we got really clear outcomes in mind and are those outcomes realistic? So, in terms of um, the ppm like, if we're looking um, just an example here, and there's many examples that we uncover with our clients but, for instance, if you're wanting to improve your resource management, there's some things that the PPM tool can help with. So certainly it can help with booking resources and forward planning and having that oversight and understanding where those conflicts are. It can really bring that to life. Can it help with resource retention? Look, to some extent. However, there's probably lots of other things going on within the organization that may need to be activated at the same time. So we really encourage our clients to kind of think about the ultimate objective, how far the PPM tool can take you and what's the gap and what's being done about that so that a really holistic view can be built and a proper kind of strategic plan to get you to the end stage.

Speaker 1: 8:40

Thank you, lucy. If anyone has any questions about that, feel free to put it into the chat. Thank you, lucy. If anyone has any questions about that, feel free to put it into the chat. So I'm just going to take you through the five key PPM solution focus areas before we deep dive into a little bit more of the key capabilities and some of the challenges. So when we think about the PPM solution, regardless of where you are starting and regardless of whether you have an existing PPM capability in-house or you're starting from scratch, or perhaps you're working in an organization and you can see that they are doing things really manually and it's very broken up across different silos across the organization, perhaps you're trying to think about ways to bring together and centralize views around projects within the organization. Either way, there is five key areas that, beneath the surface, are the focus areas. So when we're doing some planning and you're thinking about what it is that you need, I highly recommend that you take these five focus areas and look. Sometimes you might run them as individual workshops, sometimes you might run them as a little bit of a deep dive internally and then with a vendor, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1: 9:45

So the first one, obviously strategically as you just touched on that around investment management and portfolio management. Now you're bringing in a PPM solution, which means you need to have some form of portfolio oversight that exists today to understand what projects are going to go into the solution to begin with. So, thinking about how that strategically will integrate, and this includes how information in the system will be entered and how that information then gets reported as well, which then links into process. So if you think about one of the most common parts of a PPM solution outside of pipeline identification, project identification it's usually finance related finance and resourcing. So with the finance and resourcing piece, in order to activate and use that part of the PPM solution, you need to think about how that solution is going to integrate with your existing processes. A very common example is the organization's month-end financial process. Now if you don't have a PPM solution in place and you understand your month end cycle working with finance and whatnot for projects and then you implement a PPM solution, you need to make sure that the processes for month end because your corporate finance team are not going to change the processes to suit the technology have to be aligned. So the technology now needs to adapt to the cycles and the processes that relate to finance, and that's just one small example.

Speaker 1: 11:06

The third part of it is tools and technology. So one of the things that a lot of clients tend to not do is they don't actually take a stock take of what tools and technologies they have in place before they go and bring in a PPM. There's two challenges here. First of all, almost all PPM solutions now are cloud-based, and they have a number of different security requirements that underpin these solutions, some better than others. There's a lot of different requirements depending on what region or country you might be in. In banking, for example, there's some very, very heavy regulations, and so any data going into a PPM solution resource data, customer data, finance data, et cetera has to be really well thought through, and so, with tools and technologies, you might need to think about how your PPM that you bring into your organization, or the one that you upgrade to, may link in with things like your active directory, which is, you know, all the employees in the business, so that you can have like a single sign-on experience.

Speaker 1: 12:07

There's other considerations as well, and the other consideration is, if I'm bringing in a new PPM, I would want to be taking the time and the initiative to look at what existing tools and tech am I replacing. So, for example, a company that we worked with recently. They had strict strategy software, they had a different software for tracking timelines for projects, they had a different software for finance and resource tracking and a number of others as well, and they were all separately managed. So bringing in a PPM solution that addressed their requirements meant that we were able to actually reduce not only the use of those tools but, in some instances, completely remove them. So you save cost, you save time. But if you don't take the time to plan that as part of your pre-work for your implementation, you may actually end up with a lot more rework and a lot more duplication.

Speaker 1: 12:58

And then this brings me to information flows. So this information flow is key because, as I mentioned before, you've got to put the data in in order to get data out, and rubbish in means rubbish out. You don't want to bring in a PPM tool, and I've seen this happen. So in a local council recently, they were planning and deciding how they're going to bring it in at a PMO level. So they were thinking about it from wearing my PMO governance hat. This is the tool, this is how it's going to work and this is what I want the PMs to do. What ended up happening is nobody used it, so none of the project managers actually used the tool, because it wasn't implemented correctly. They didn't define the information flows accurately at the beginning, and then the PMs actually felt themselves having to duplicate data in manual reporting and the PPM platform, having to duplicate data in manual reporting and the PPM platform. So what they did as a workaround is the PMO team and the analysts in the PMO manually would take the reports the PMs would do and actually go and enter into the system themselves. It is just such a waste of time and it was because they didn't integrate the requirements of people that are going to use it, which is predominantly your project team, and then, finally, governance.

Speaker 1: 14:04

So when you bring in any new technology, first of all you have to have the fundamental who's going to be the users and what user access matrix am I going to have around it?

Speaker 1: 14:15

Who is going to manage the tool? Is it going to sit in IT? Now, naturally, there's an assumption that it always sits in IT, but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's brought in by finance, and sometimes it's brought in by finance with no actual conversation with IT. So there's a lot of thinking around what's the governance associated with the tool? How's it going to be managed? How's the data going to be maintained? Is it going to be PMO led or is it going to be led by the CFO's office? Is it going to be led by a portfolio manager in IT, and so forth and so forth. So setting up and defining those governance structures early before you start implementing a tool will really go a long way in helping you to make sure you're successful. Is there any questions at this point on that? Keeping an eye on the chat, if there is, feel free to put them in. I'm going to move over to understanding PPM tools and key capabilities and I'll hand back to lucy for this right.

Speaker 2: 15:07

Thank you um all right. So just in case there's any um anyone's unsure about what ppm is, we've just included a nice little definition there. So, um, I'll let you read that. As a PMO practitioner, I kind of very simply think of the PPM tool as being my portal into the project world and I think that that's quite a good kind of you know visual to keep in mind. So when we look at the key capabilities of a ppm, we're looking at actually understanding all of the um, the project activity that's going on within the organization, and this is a place that you go to look at that. So anything that um is actually like transforming or changing within your organization in terms of a discipline, it should be listed in here, it should be prioritized and there should be like proper decision making and selection criteria around anything that's getting green lighted to go ahead. Also, if I want to look at my resources and any kind of hot spots from a portfolio perspective, this is where I would be able to go and look at that. And perhaps I'm wanting to work with operational managers to look at particular stress points in terms of workload and change management. Again, this is where your PPM tool would really help evidence those kind of conversations, all of my reporting all standardized, all in here, everybody using the same measurement systems. So then we've got really good kind of like heat maps of where the risk exposure is within the organization and rage management. Obviously everything, um all standardized. So our risks, our assumptions, our issues, our dependencies, proper, um, you know, kind of structure and approaches and mitigation strategies and, ideally, workflow around this to keep everything moving and being resolved. Financial management we're keeping all of our finances in here. We've usually got an integration with our finance system that helps keep the manual effort down. And, yeah, aspects of our project management lifecycle ideally would be represented within the tool. So if you think kind of like stage gating and investment milestones, all of that administration and effort should be present within your PPM tool. That's really helpful for prepping for audits and making sure that there's due process around any cash release.

Speaker 2: 17:53

So what drives the need for a PPM? Lots of things, typically within the clients that we've worked with. This is probably our kind of hit list and the reasons, the drivers that we see the most. So, firstly, the need to improve portfolio prioritization and selection. So this is around like actually having evidence to make proper strategic decisions, of strategic decisions and also really simply getting an understanding of the projects that are going on within the organization. It's amazing how many times we go into organizations and we're able to go right back to basics around, like what even is a project? What should we be tracking in here? What should we have an oversight of? What's business as usual? That kind of really basic discussion is often really foundational for PPM implementation.

Speaker 2: 18:54

The need to optimize resources I don't think we've been into an organization where this isn't relevant. We often come across kind of single person points of failure. There's often people within organizations that are called to be an SME on literally every single project and so, again, your PPM tools are a really good way of kind of like flushing that out and understanding where perhaps there are capability gaps within the organization. Strategic alignment Again, this is like what projects are happening and do they actually align with strategic outcomes. So if an organization is spending money, you want to make sure that you're spending it on the right things.

Speaker 2: 19:40

Reducing risk I think that one's pretty obvious. Reducing risk I think that one's pretty obvious. And then also driving and tracking performance, and again, a lot of tools are becoming quite preemptive in terms of forecasting future trends, particularly around risks and issues. So, yeah, this performance tracking and forward view can really help with your risk mitigation strategies. Any questions around that? Or anybody got any kind of alternative drivers within their organization that are pushing them down, you know, trying to understand whether a PPM tool is appropriate for their organization?

Speaker 1: 20:32

Or any surprises. Feel free to put it in the chat as well. Um, we'll keep that going okay, thank you.

Speaker 2: 20:40

Okay, no problem. So, um, we've we've just kind of drawn out here um. So you can imagine when you're implementing ppm, there's, there's almost like there's a. There's a lot of phases in the process, but we thought that we're going to talk about the process that we go through shortly, but we thought it might be useful, just just whilst we um prepare for that discussion, just to talk about some of the challenges in the actual selection process and then some of the challenges in the implementation process, because they're quite different. So, look, we've got 10 um that we've come up with here.

Speaker 2: 21:20

So perhaps, if I just share um some of the ones that I think um could be really relevant to this group here. So, firstly, um vendor evaluation. So what I think is really important in the, the kind of like pre-selection stage, is do you understand, um, what the requirements are? So what are your like absolute non-negotiables and then what are your nice to haves and what do you think you might need in the future? So that kind of like really good, solid understanding of your requirements is so important, because it's that that you should be evaluating against. And the reason that I think that that is really important is when vendors come in and do demonstrations. It's very easy to get taken in with a really great demo, lots of great materials, it's all very exciting, but it's really really fundamentally important that you hold on to what is it that you actually need as an organization and where are you going. So we've seen quite a few clients get embroiled in that kind of demonstration phase and get a little bit kind of um, you know, bought into the demos and impressed by those and then kind of lose themselves within that process. So I guess that that's where um a lot of the work that we do comes into supporting ppm selection that we've seen that there's so many times and so many vendor demonstrations that it's really good to um to keep your your head about you when you're um, when you're in that process.

Speaker 2: 23:06

So the other thing that we um think is really important in the ppm kind of pre-selection is the integration points that you need in your organization, and I think the one that I would really call out is the finance system. So usually a key integration point for any PPM, if you want to avoid any kind of like manual load on your project managers, is an integration with your finance system. It's a really good project control and it kind of forces some good governance around forecasting and reporting on your actuals, et cetera. But again, it's really paramount to make sure that, whatever your finance system is, that when you're looking at your PPM selection, that the appropriate technical people are in the room to make sure that you can assess that capability and not get caught out post selection. Um. And then the other thing is around. The other one that I think I call out is the strategic objectives and really maintaining that long-term focus, that trying to do that balance between what do we need to do right now, what are the gaps that we've got that we're really kind of like desperate to get a solution for, and just making sure that that's balanced against the long-term strategic objectives of the organization. Yeah, so they're the kind of like key ones that I think are worthy to be called out in the pre-selection phase.

Speaker 2: 24:49

All right, so then we come to the actual implementation. This is an area that's probably a lot more um familiar to people, particularly if you're involved in technical implementations. And the ppm implementation is, at its essence, a technical implementation. Yes, there's lots of downstream impacts, yes, there's lots of change, integration, but it's a project like um, you know, just like any other project that the organization would run. So again, we've called out what we have experienced going wrong and hopefully for any of you going down this pathway this might help, just to keep front of mind.

Speaker 2: 25:30

So three call outs from me. One, something that we see a lot and I think it's not just applicable to ppm implementation, it's probably applicable to lots of technology implementations and it's an adequate change management strategy. So the problem is, if you don't really understand the change um roadmap and really adequately involve your users, then of course this is going to lead to um lower adoption or poor utilization. So people not fully understanding um what can actually be done within the ppm, so not getting those um. The impact would be then not getting those organizational benefits that you're hoping for and also just like a lack of training and involvement in those kind of like sun pit environments as you're going through the implementation. It just is not good for your users. So what you don't want to end up with is like three or four people that really know what they're doing and then the rest of the organization's been left behind. Again, this is not specific to just PPM implementations. But look, change is often overlooked and I think in terms of when you're implementing a system that has got lots of downstream impacts and you want lots of energy and enthusiasm behind to get the benefit behind, and then, of course, you really want to make sure that your change management strategy is solid.

Speaker 2: 27:05

The other really big one that we see is over-reliance on a vendor.

Speaker 2: 27:10

So what this means is that the client hasn't set up adequate self-sufficiency in terms of technical know-how and capability, and then what that means is that the organization is not independent enough to drive their own optimization and maturity pathway, and that's really sad if that happens, because it means that for the organization it can get expensive and it can get frustrating, and then the relationship with the vendor can degrade, and that's a really suboptimal outcome and one that you'd want to avoid ideally.

Speaker 2: 27:51

And then the other one that I call out from here is probably the data migration and really underestimating that. So data migration, as we know, is always complex. It's always a lot more time consuming than we would imagine, but depending on the number of systems that you want to integrate with so finance being a significant one in my mind, but also anything that is workflow automated, you just want to look at what that data migration looks like and the strategy around that. And again, make sure that you've got the right people in the room and sufficient kind of resource and budget to make sure that that's optimized and you're not implementing a system and then somebody gets lombard with. You know, a whole load of catch-up around data migration and a whole heap of um reconciliation that can really kind of like detract from day one success. Yeah, so they're the big call outs from our perspective.

Speaker 1: 28:58

There's a comment one comment that's coming Michael is just around some PPMs being designed for waterfall projects only, and it's so interesting because when we looked at all of the PPM products in the market, there's many and some have been around for many, many years. One PPM solution, for example, that I found out about I think about 10 years ago. They were talking about the integration of certain tech that actually understood out about, about think about 10 years ago they were talking about the integration of um, uh, the integration of certain tech that actually understood and took sentiment analysis of reporting that pms were doing in there to actually understand whether they were progressing well or happy with their projects and things like that. So there's some some ppm tools that have now um evolved a lot over the years, with a lot more significant uptake of Agile. Agile's been around for 25 plus years, but when we think about sort of the real drive behind more Agile ways of working, it really has picked up in the last five to eight years. And so what I'm seeing in this space is there are PPM solutions that are already longstanding existing on the market. You'll see them in the Gartner quadrants etc. Et cetera that have gone to great lengths to invest significant amount of money to integrate agile-based versions that align to their existing platforms. There's others that have actually gone down the path of taking what they used to have and making it more agile, so it's just more flexible and adaptable to any type of project, not based on any you know any methods or any project management methods or ways of working. And then there's others that are marketing themselves as agile and waterfall and all of these other types but actually don't like they don't cut it when it comes to actually utilizing them.

Speaker 1: 30:41

And what people find in these businesses who implement these tools is they actually have to bring in all these other bits of parts to support things that are not in there, like missing time sheeting process or the timeline management in there. So then they're using things like you know, smart sheet for timeline management and just really clunky. So there's kind of three different kind of avenues with relation to that, in terms of Amani, your question. So in terms of experience implementing PPM for portfolio portfolios, so this is very possible and the larger the PPM, the more advanced functionality usually that they have. There are a few.

Speaker 1: 31:17

Again, if you look at the Gartner Quadrant, there's some popular ones there, the place that this is usually done is typically in your larger sort of tier one businesses.

Speaker 1: 31:26

In banking, for example, they definitely have implemented different ways of working in particular one bank as an example across the different divisional portfolios, because they all run differently and in some of the banks now a lot of them have gone to the agile ways of working. So even more so they've changed the way that they run across the different portfolios, so you can actually customize some of these tools to suit. But, as we talked about before, it's really understanding and making sure you have the defined ways of working processes, all of that understood first, because what you don't want is one recent example of an automotive company who had a ppm implementation. It was one person who brought it in, they set it up the way that they liked and the company now spends about two hundred thousand dollars a year on licenses and only one person uses the tool. So that's the level that of of you know um ineffectiveness when you just drive it on one person's opinion. Yeah, that's a good point, fatima.

Speaker 2: 32:32

I think the other thing that's probably worthy of us thinking about is the whole kind of premise of the PPM is to bring standardisation to the organisation, and so the way that we often structure these conversations is there's always elements of governance and control that are applicable to every single project, regardless of the delivery methodology that's used to deliver the outcomes of that particular project. So what we find is the PPM tool is used to provide that standardization in terms of way of working, investment slate, funding, the approach to risk and issue management and financials, etc. I think in practical terms, what we do see is that often the planning components are done separately and not within the PPM tool. So the PPM tool literally just tracks some key milestones, and I think that that's a way of kind of responding to the delivery methods that are appropriate for different projects.

Speaker 1: 33:44

It's a really good call and it takes us to our next point, so navigating selection. So I want to preface this by saying you are probably maybe some of you are not the decision makers and maybe don't have the opportunity to influence which tool, or to start a project and actually bringing in a tool or upgrading a tool. I am keen, though, if you could just put in the chat if you believe that you are actually a decision maker or significantly can influence the selection process. Just a yes if you are one of those, and for those that aren't which is fine as well I'll share some tips in how you can try to influence when you may not be in the position of, you know, authority to drive this. So yes if you are, and if you're not, no, it doesn't matter where you sit, because ultimately, this process can actually be beneficial to both sides. So yeah, just yes or no. That would be amazing.

Speaker 1: 34:40

So, at the moment, when we think about navigating the process, this is literally the step-by-step process that we would typically take. Now I will call out that it seems very simple and very cyclical, and the steps taken and you know, just one after the other, but there is a lot of sub-steps that happen underneath the surface of this. So when we think about where you are or your organization is whether it's today or whether it's in an organization down the line, or perhaps you're sort of starting a new role and you're looking at it, or maybe you've got an existing PPM that you see is just not effective. So the first thing is understanding, obviously, the purpose and the why. We've talked about that quite at length. But one of the things that's really important is if you're in a position where you're not introducing a PPMU but you've got one of those problems or challenges that I just outlined earlier around the PPM you have is not working, or maybe it's outdated or maybe it's been sunsetted, etc. Then I think you need to be able to advocate the conversation as to why the current system or tool or process is not working. And I would recommend, if you're not in a position of making the decision yourself but want to sort of influence it, I would look at picking, you know, two or three key features that don't exist in the existing tool, or problems or challenges that you have to then introduce those to you know, know your one-up or your executive or whoever it is that makes the decision, to help them understand the reason why you may need to make that change.

Speaker 1: 36:09

A lot of the time, when you introduce a PPM solution, and if you do it even partially right by linking systems or bringing in data from finance or HR et cetera, it becomes really hard to change. It takes time and money and effort and, as Lucy said before, it's a whole project in itself. And this is really important because there's some really great marketing out there by PPM companies and some of them are really more advanced than others, and there's some good ones and there's some bad ones. It's the same as any tech platform that exists out there. It doesn't matter what industry we're in. So you need to be prepared from the client side to ask the right questions, and so this is where the needs assessment activity comes in. So you need to think about what it is that your current needs in your organization are and the goals, because your ppm should scale with you, particularly if it's a um. It's a ppm that is, you know, been around for a really long time. It's not just something that you know came up yesterday. There's a lot of new ones that are based on agile I've just popped up recently and um, they're sort of iterating them as they go, but maybe they're not going to be um scalable. So you need to think about like one of the questions we would ask in the in the technology um deep dive with the vendors is what is on your product roadmap? What actually have you got coming up down the line that's going to benefit our business or maybe impact our business as well?

Speaker 1: 37:29

Researching the market, so evaluating features, looking at different vendors, doing the pricing there are definitely some really good research out there. I keep talking about Ghana because that's one of the most popular. A lot of companies tend to use that data, but also do some of your own data. Look at existing tools that are actually in the market that are not only based on feedback from others that you may know, but look for ones that have worked well and others that haven't, and understand why. So, as I said, one really big, popular tool that was used recently in automotive failed to do what it was supposed to do, not for lack of technology implementation, but for how it was defined in the needs assessment and requirements that were built by the client themselves.

Speaker 1: 38:13

So do your research, understand the functionality that you need and also look at whether or not. You are looking for specific things that are for your industry. A lot of PPM solutions are industry agnostic, so you don't have to look for one that's specific for banking or retail or whatnot, but there are definitely some that have more features than others. When you are going through the process of actually selecting a PPM solution and you've identified the market, you've looked at your prospective vendors, you've narrowed down your list you should have a selection criteria that you actually work towards. This actually enables you to do scoring and the scoring process should be really clear and agreed up front but also it saves you from having an individual who thinks that they maybe know everything, like the automotive example who actually doesn't.

Speaker 1: 39:05

And then therefore, the decision around the technology solution is skewed towards one person's opinion. So having some scoring will enable you to make a fair assessment of the different suppliers that come to you and provide you that solution. Once you've gone through that first four steps, you then probably will have a narrowed down shortlist. What you don't want to do is have you know 40 vendors that you've done a market scan of and then realize you have to interview 40 vendors and bring them in to do demos, and that's no one has time for that. So what you want to do is, when you get to a shortlist, you probably want a short list. I would say maybe three to six at most. Um, most companies will go for three because procurement forces them to have three, but I don't mind sometimes having a couple of extras in there, because what you might think is the right solution sometimes might not be. And we went through this process with with a company a health and fitness company, um, not that long ago, and what we realized is the two of the three just absolutely did not tick all the requirements when we delve deeper into things like their product roadmap and other things. So by having those additional three suppliers, we were able to then focus our shortlist evaluation on the four, and that's where evaluating the vendors against the selection criteria Now the selection criteria you have in that first four steps will be a much, much higher level of detail when you get to evaluating the vendors after you've shortlisted. That's the next level down. This is where you're really getting to a point where you're ascertaining specifically for your organization what it is that you need and you're actually asking vendors for demonstrations against your specific requirements, whereas in the selection criteria on the right side it's more of a broad show us what you can do, can you do this, can you do that? And then we narrow down to recommendations. So this is where you not only identify and make a recommendation, but you'll also identify risks and issues. Not any supplier out there is going to tick every box 100%. They're just not. And one thing you've got to be careful when making a recommendation, or having a recommendation made to you, if you're the decision maker is that we factored in not only the possible risks and issues with our existing tech and existing solution we may have in place, or if we're bringing in something new, but actually thinking about the possibility of how the implementation could work would work, et cetera. So thinking about recommendation being comprehensive and the information sufficient enough that it enables the decision maker to make an informed decision that then will benefit them and link to those organisational requirements. And that decision stage is where you then go into your negotiation and you should have defined your implementation plan. So there are the eight key steps in the process.

Speaker 1: 41:53

Is there any questions at this point on that? Okay, I'll keep moving, but if there's any questions, please raise them. So I'm going to take you through a couple of industry insights and then a quick case study and then we'll wrap up with some top tips and best practices. So in terms of the industry insights that we can share, so you can see three examples there there's automotive, banking and finance and energy. With the automotive example, I've sort of really probably talked about that.

Speaker 1: 42:31

The only other thing I will add is the vendor evaluation process was too narrow. So what this particular supplier did sorry client did is they just went to a really well-known popular report and they just picked one in the top corner quadrant and said that's what we're going with. That not necessarily always the right decision, because it means that they didn't do any of the pre-work, they just wanted to hurry and get things so they can automate their processes. The problem is they didn't actually have the processes understood. Now, I'm not suggesting you have to have every process defined, but you need to understand what it is you're bringing the tech for, particularly because tech leads to automation and also, as I said, the ongoing costs for this company was in the hundreds of thousands per year in licensing, and the reason no one used it is there was absolutely no change management to implement the tool. No change management. It was non-existent. Considering it's a large automotive business, you would have thought that they would implement that, but because it was a one-person led band, it meant that they failed on the change management side.

Speaker 1: 43:30

In the banking example one of the banks that we've worked with and not in the PPM space, but were there when they were doing it they developed the PPM solution. So in banking they typically do change systems and that does happen more frequently than maybe other companies. But in this organization they decided that they were gonna update their PPM system and they were gonna move to another popular brand named One, and what they did there is they then developed. They had a group, a big project, lots of budget, and they developed the system in complete isolation of anyone in project management office governance roles. Now, considering there's a lot of elements of governance associated with the use of this tool and it's the PMOs in this bank that were driving project managers to actually use the tool, you would have thought that they would have integrated their opinions. Now, what happened was when they went to roll out, they actually ran a number of cohorts and they brought PMO and then in the banks at the time there was probably about anywhere from 100 to 200 PMO managers. So they're brought in the PMOs into several cohorts.

Speaker 1: 44:36

I was in one of those at the time and when they were running through the training, if I can tell you the amount of questions that came up with gaps, opportunities and risks associated with the PPM that they had completely customized, it would absolutely shock you. We were picking things out that were just problems, problems, problems, and because they didn't factor in the right people in that process, it led to to those challenges. Um, they were very, very heavily reliant on sort of your traditional uh methods in terms of delivery and they effectively had to throw away two million dollars that they spent in customizing the ppm solution. They literally gutted the system and they started again. Now in banking, you've probably got the money, but still what a waste of time.

Speaker 1: 45:26

And then finally, in the energy example. So in the energy example, the company lacked project management, maturity and just fundamentals. So they weren't really sure where to start and they had gaps in their processes. So, effectively, all of the processes between HR and finance and risk, et cetera, was all very manual. So what they needed to do is actually evolve their processes to at least what we'd call a level two, meaning repeatable processes. Before they started to automate the processes. They didn't go as far as implementing a system before fixing processes. So that was a really good idea for them. But they started to introduce users across the company to the processes before they then brought in the system and increased the adoption as a result. So the executives were highly engaged. They were, it was led from the top and they were actually part of the first few rounds of training. And then also the processes were understood. First the integration between departments was understood and then they started the selection process for PPM providers, because that can take several months in some instances.

Speaker 1: 46:35

So I'm hoping that some of that resonates. I'm keen to get your thoughts on any of that if you want to throw any comments in the chat. Otherwise, I'm going to take you into just a little bit of a deep dive case study with health and fitness. Um, unless there's anyone, anyone who's got any questions at this point, okay, perfect. If there is, lucy will call it out, but I'm going to take you through a quick case study.

Speaker 1: 46:59

So this company was a health and fitness midsize business and they they're part of a global, global chain and they underwent, over about 18 months, some significant changes. Their business was growing. They had to optimize the way that they were doing resource management. They had a lot of manual processes in how their trainers and staff were managed across different parts of the fitness chain. They didn't have quite clear visibility and they needed to optimize the way that they were spending. So they had a lot of challenges. So the GM of HR and the GM of finance came together and they started to identify what it is exactly that they needed from their perspective. What they ended up doing was we were engaged to actually undertake a detailed assessment of their functional and non-functional requirements. What was really insightful during this process is what HR needed and what finance needed in this particular instance, was similar in some aspects but very different in others, and they were only two of the executives that needed to be engaged, because they instigated this, because it links to their resource systems, it links to finance systems and this is why it started in there and not typically in IT.

Speaker 1: 48:11

So we had to go through and take a market scan. So we ended up doing a market scan and I think at the time it was about 40 plus vendors that we did a high level brief on, and then we defined and further refined the scope to short list and narrow down. But before we did that, we looked at the internal constraints that the company may have been facing with regards to their selection criteria that they were using preliminarily. With regards to their selection criteria that they were using preliminarily, we then narrowed down their solution requirements and also the aspects that needed to integrate with their global head office and where it did or did not need to integrate. And then we narrowed the shortlist down to five prospective vendors and through that we then performed a little bit of a. Again, it was done. It was done. It was like a closed, a closed RFI, rfq, which meant that the supplier wasn't inundated with all these tech vendors who knew that they were about to upgrade. So we did that on their behalf, which meant they were protected from you know, the market, knowing it was them, at least initially, till we narrowed down to five.

Speaker 1: 49:14

When we narrowed down to five, we then we narrowed down to five. We then facilitated collaborative workshop activity over about 90 minutes each and actually had the vendors provide demonstrations based on specific requirements that we had identified for this client and actually had them perform the demonstrations and show us how their system would work in relation to that specific need. It ended up resulting in some very significant gaps identified. As I mentioned earlier, we went from having about six we knocked two out already and then we had five that went down to four. Through that process, we then were able to define the pros and cons. We were able to provide scores that were completely agnostic of a particular one-person opinion. We did find a value-to-cost matrix to visually represent the benefits for the client.

Speaker 1: 50:06

We defined pros and cons of every platform and we also talked about the roadmap to implement and what that would look like. Where an existing solution could integrate really well with things like Active Directory or cloud-based solutions that they had in the business already. It may make the implementation easier versus maybe a solution that wasn't. Things we looked at was where's the support? Is the support Australian based? Is it international? Are they open certain times, et cetera, et cetera. We looked at licensing, operational impact support, et cetera, and ultimately what ended up happening is we were able to get to a point with the client where we were able to narrow down and they were able to make a decision quite quickly after that. So it's just one quick example of health and fitness in a mid-sized business, and the larger the business, the more complicated the process is. I'm just going to take us to some best practices, so I'll just quickly pass to lucy for the best practices, um, and then we'll wrap up with a couple of final points sure.

Speaker 2: 51:03

Thank you, um. Yeah, just some top tips which are kind of our concluding thoughts, really, um. So these are the things that if you keep in mind when you're implementing your ppm, hopefully it will save you some headaches. So the first one that we talked about is please get your end users involved in the selection process. So what you don't want to do is go away and pick a tool and then kind of like subject the users to that. You would want them to be part of that journey and to have their voices kind of heard and their requirements heard in that selection process.

Speaker 2: 51:42

Second top tip is don't let a great selection process be degraded by poor implementation. So, however you kind of structure your PPM purchase and implementation, just make sure that the ppm implementation is actually treated as a project. It's probably properly resourced and there's budget, um, and all the usual things that you would have around an implementation. And the reason that we say that is, um, what you don't want to end up with is just your pmo people trying to kind of do this off the side of a desk, because that's just not appropriate for an implementation of this size. And then the third one is just make sure that you keep your head about you when you're meeting vendors. So be really, really clear on your requirements. Yes, of course, there's going to be great presentations and lots of great collateral, but just be really clear on what you want and make sure that you pick a vendor in a really kind of like rational and structured way. So there are concluding thoughts really from the presentation and the tips that I hope perhaps help you out.

Speaker 1: 53:01

Thanks, lucy. And then just to close this out, today I've just put my email in the chat, so if anyone wants to discuss anything further, wants more information, has any questions, just really quickly. The last piece just to share that I've just highlighted in the top right corner the three key steps as part of the process. If you do feel that you need help, um, that's sort of depending on the size of the organization can be done in like five to ten days um. So like a really low, low effort um initially um, and then the steps that are outside the bucket are usually the ones that involve a lot of internal people to develop, like the change implementation etc. So if you feel that you could benefit from that, of course, please reach out to me. Otherwise, if you've got any feedback at all, please let us know, because without your feedback we don't know whether we are on the right track. Um with different ppm sorry, different meetups, so we've got lots more in the pipeline um. So, yeah, please reach out my email's in the chat um, you can also email us and give us 50 and give us a call um. Or if you'd like to have a 15-minute chat with me about anything further, please do reach out. We'd love to keep the conversation going.

Speaker 1: 54:06

Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. Please share this with someone or rate it if you enjoyed it. Don't forget to follow us on social media and to stay up to date with all things Agile Ideas. Go to our website, wwwagilemanagementofficecom. I hope you've been able to learn, feel or be inspired today. Until next time, what's your Agile Idea?