Understanding Microsoft PPM

What Is Microsoft PPM? Managing Projects &  Portfolios with Microsoft

Selecting the “right” projects at the “right” time is mission critical for any organization. After all, that is what Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is all about.

Decision makers require an objective overview of their project investment to easily evaluate, prioritize and approve project proposals and business cases based on their strategic value. Centralized management of all project requests helps the organization better evaluate individual projects, while a robust portfolio analysis process helps analyze the return on investment and strategic goals of a portfolio of projects.

Microsoft Project Online enables your organization to proactively manage its project portfolio by giving visibility to all project work and addressing the needs of the entire organization — empowering decision makers to make objective, successful decisions and enabling everyone involved to execute on organizational goals.

Today, organizations run this same portfolio discipline on Microsoft’s modern PPM stack — OnePlan, Microsoft Planner Premium and Project Server SE — the platforms Integent implements as Project Online approaches retirement.

Portfolio Selection & Resource Management

Selecting the optimal project portfolio requires careful consideration. Decision makers need to prioritize proposals based on alignment with organizational goals, and modeling different portfolio scenarios helps identify the right projects by balancing budget and resource constraints against the work a limited workforce can deliver.

Microsoft PPM helps decision makers easily model different portfolio scenarios to determine the best strategic path — weighing project proposals against strategic business drivers and considering cost and resource constraints. “What if” scenarios can be created to compare execution strategies, giving decision makers the visibility to manage all constraints and make the right portfolio decisions consistently.

Managing the Full Project Lifecycle

Project managers plan, execute, and complete projects with input from many parties — team members, functional resource managers, customers, and other stakeholders. Microsoft PPM lets your organization manage the entire project and portfolio lifecycle in a single solution for everyone involved.

It arms project and resource managers with the tools to build a sophisticated schedule, plan resources, create and share documents and artifacts, and identify risks and issues before they impact delivery. Cloud-based tools let teams submit progress, share deliverables, and track issues regardless of location.

Microsoft PPM streamlines planning, controlling, and closure by prompting managers and teams for information at the right points, locking information as necessary, and routing approval requests to the appropriate decision makers.