At any given time, government organizations must balance delivery across a multitude of evolving service and systems development projects – while ensuring transparency, compliance, and mission requirements are continuously maintained. In addition to the management challenges that come with the complexity and scale of federal projects, organizations also face increased demand and constraint surrounding critical business factors. This dynamic has put improving cost efficiency, elevating service delivery, maintaining basic and legacy services in more competitive markets, minimizing risk, and improving overall organizational process efficiency as a top priority for every leader.
With so many competing factors, it can be difficult for government organizations to make critical business decisions in a data-driven way. There is an increasing amount of scrutiny on how EAs, PMs, PMOs, and CTO/CIOs spend their project dollars and plan for the future. Larger organizations face the challenge of understanding and integrating many portfolios with different PPM tools, databases, processes, compliance requirements, and financial spend. Some government offices still manage hundreds of millions of dollars with little more than a spreadsheet. What’s more, strategic plans and enterprise architectures are often ignored and have little impact on project and spending decisions. This creates a situation where senior and accountable decision-makers do not know how their budgets are being spent and used at the project level, and have no tools to ensure compliance and transparency. These challenges tend to deepen as the organization continues to grow, unless more sophisticated and scalable solutions are put into place.
Project Portfolio Management provides senior decision-makers and line managers with a deeper understanding of their authoritative data — both vertically and horizontally. This understanding helps the organization in many ways, including: avoiding duplicated capabilities and projects, better leveraging capabilities, assessing existing systems prior to new capabilities being acquired, getting ahead of project and program overruns, identifying project budget inequities, running strategic plan and EA gap analysis, tracking of personnel and their skill sets, and more. Analyzing duplicated processes also offers ways to identify opportunities for potential shared resources that may exist, leading to cost savings.
