If there’s a booming business, there will be projects that will come and go. While the businesses prefer a project portfolio management, the biggest challenge they face is in planning and maintaining an optimized portfolio for all the projects that keep going over a long period of time, while the newer ones keep coming. It is the key aspect of project portfolio management to finish the successful projects as soon as possible and kill the unsuccessful ones.
Maintaining an optimized project portfolio means to work on those particular projects over a long period of time, that keep delivering the best result to a business, generating the maximum financial returns. Having a tool for such an optimized result is the first step that all the businesses might indulge in as they prioritize each of these projects which add value to the company.
According to Jay Blackmore, the President of Park Capital Management who has been providing service for decades together, informs, optimizing the portfolio against any financial or resource constraint helps the business to make the most of their investments in the same. But to many, the reasons of optimizing the portfolios are not clear. For them a detailed discussion is essential to have a clear idea of it.
Let’s for example consider that for a portfolio of 20 projects, there are more than a million of sub sets of projects to choose from. And quite interestingly, the numbers of sub sets just multiply when the number of projects doubles up to 40. So by judging such a scenario, it is quite clear that selecting one of the processes from a spreadsheet for the best effective result is not possible at all. And the process gets complex when one tries to manage multiple resource type allocations across hundreds of projects.
So, at this point of time, one needs to have a project portfolio management tool that will prioritize the value of the project without exceeding the financial and resource constraints over a fixed period of time. What should be your expectation from the optimizer?
It must have the capability to handle the specialized resources and skill sets, so that they can be managed as an individual constraint for the project.
It must also be able to optimize the portfolio on a specific time gap, like quarterly, annually, half yearly etc.
It must track down which project is dependent on another and how they can be put in one single line benefiting the both.
And finally, it must even be able to force in and force out the individual projects from the portfolio.
These capabilities when work together, allow the manager to optimize the portfolio and get to know the urgency of particular projects. There needs to be some assumption made which are not tough to carry on a real time frame and one single mistake will lead to huge uncertainties. Before starting with such complex line of work, it makes sense to take suggestions from expert Jay Blackmore who has spent decades in the similar industry. His experience and dedication will definitely count for the businesses to have an effective project portfolio management.