In this 3 minute overview of Portfolio Scheduler, one of the many capabilities within Enterprise Portfolio Simulator (EPS), Dave Higgins demonstrates how this innovative function allows you to recognize resource supply/demand constraints and reveal alternative portfolio delivery options. Check it out!
To learn more about Portfolio Scheduler contact Dave Higgins at:
dhiggins@promodel.com
717 – 884 – 8002
Join ProModel’s CTO, Dan Hickman, and Product Manager, Kevin Jacobson (KJ), on Wednesday November 5, 2014 – 2:00 PM EST for an informative webinar on predictive vs. prescriptive analytics.
With over 15 years in the industry, Dan has an uncanny understanding of how important both types of analyses are to the success of your business. KJ, with ProModel for over 11 years, manages the Project and Portfolio Simulation product development group. He works closely with our clients on the development of advanced PPM (Project Portfolio Management) predictive and prescriptive analytic tools. He has the hands-on experience to best illustrate how the tool works and how it can help you with your predictive and prescriptive analytic needs.
Together they will show you how ProModel’s Enterprise Portfolio Simulator with Portfolio Scheduler provides the benefits prescriptive analysis can bring to resource capacity planning and project selection. Gain an understanding of the difference between applying predictive and prescriptive analytics to your PPM data, with specific examples focusing on scenario experimentation and portfolio optimization. KJ will demo some of the newer features of EPS that provide logical recipes for modeling and show how these tools can help you represent your unique PPM business rules. The new business rules capabilities of EPS provide portfolio simulation like never before.
CLICK BELOW TO REGISTER FOR THIS WEBINAR NOW!
Keith Vadas – ProModel President & CEO
I am pleased to report ProModel’s second quarter was very positive. Like many businesses in the US we find ourselves on a serious upswing this Summer of 2014. Our consultants are working on several projects in a variety of industries, including ship building, power management, retail, manufacturing, food processing, and government contracting. In all of these projects our experienced team of consultants is working to improve efficiency, save money, and make better decisions for their clients.
ProModel’s DOD projects continue to thrive. It is hard to believe it has been eight years since we started working with FORSCOM (US Army Forces Command) on AST (ARFORGEN SYNCHRONIZATION TOOL). LMI-DST (Lead Materiel Integrator – Decision Support Tool) with the LOGSA Team (US Army Logistics Support Activity) is also going strong. Our agile team of software developers keeps improving the development process within ProModel and it shows. Just recently the NST Airframe Inventory Management Module was Granted Full Accreditation by the Commander, Naval Air Systems Command.
The time is also ripe for opportunities in Healthcare. Our patient flow optimization capabilities are perfect for helping hospitals and outpatient clinics improve efficiencies. Now that the Affordable Care Act has been around for a couple of years, its impact is being felt by healthcare organizations around the country. The expanded insured-base, and the need for improved processes and different care models is making it absolutely necessary to consider the value of modeling and simulation. ProModel continues to work with several facilities including Presbyterian Homes and Services, and Array Architects who enhance the flow in Healthcare Facilities design by using MedModel simulation in their design processes.
To better support our base of existing customers, we just released ProModel/MedModel 2014 in July and PCS Pro 2014 at the end of Q1. EPS 2014 (Enterprise Portfolio Simulator) was released in Q2 and includes a new easy to use, web-based rapid scenario planning tool – Portfolio Scheduler. You can check this tool out online at – http://portfoliostud.io/#.
There continue to be lots of exciting things happening at ProModel. We have an outstanding team of consultants and software developers-designers just looking for an opportunity to PARTNER with you to help you meet the next business challenge, or solve the next unexpected problem.
One study of the performance of mega projects over the past decade in the oil and gas industry reveals a 78 percent rate of failure. Large projects in the process industries have much poorer outcomes. More megaprojects than ever are being developed and each one brings its own complexity.
The disadvantages to these very large projects are huge, but of course, so are the rewards. Therefore these projects must be scrutinized and evaluated very carefully. Need to make an accurate risk/reward determination for each “mega project” in your portfolio? Learn how one petroleum pipeline organization did it with Portfolio Simulation.
Check out Portfolio Scheduler:
Project/Portfolio Risk Evaluation:
http://www.promodel.com/pdf/ML-ProjectReview-PipelineRiskEvaluation.pdf
Portfolio Scheduler is a new and exciting Enterprise Portfolio Simulator (EPS) feature that helps organizations make better decisions by facilitating rapid what-if scenario development. ProModel is proud to introduce this new feature at Microsoft Project Conference 2014 #ProjConf. After you simulate a Portfolio in EPS, you can simply visualize the portfolio in a single view. See the impact of projects schedules on your constrained resources. More work than your resources can handle? Click and drag to change project schedules.
Please view this short video demonstrating Portfolio Scheduler
EPS Product Summary:
Click to access EPS%20Product%20explanation.pdf
Microsoft Project Conference 2014 (February 2-5):
Cathy Liggett – Sales Director, PPM Solutions
I’ve had hundreds of conversations with Innovation Teams across the US, and this is the relationship that seems to be the least understood. Yes, we woman love to talk about relationships, and men seem to turn us off even before we get started, but this is one relationship we can’t afford to ignore. More portfolio management initiatives fail because of this relationship, than for any other reason as far as I’m concerned. I’ve seen it, and watched others live through it―failed empowerment can be devastating.
In the book titled, The Three Keys to Empowerment, the authors state that “involving employees in an empowered culture allows them to use their knowledge, experience, and internal motivation to accomplish tasks for the organization.” Most leaders believe this. The difficulty everyone experiences is that talking about empowerment is lots easier than creating a culture where the empowered decision making processes can prosper. Yes, empowerment is meaningless, unless it’s used in context of decision making… Ops, another relationship, like I said, it’s hard for us gals.
Portfolio Management is a decision making tool that can be used up and down the Innovation Value Chain. It’s a tool that nurtures the culture where “the empowered decision making processes can prosper.” Recently, I was at the Gartner PPM Summit 2013, and most of the people I spoke with stated that they enjoyed the Summit, but the most common critique was “Yes, we know what needs to be done, but how?” Let me share with you how portfolio management nurtures the decision making process.
There are five conditions required for portfolio management:
Each of these conditions helps empower the decision maker, and nurtures the innovation culture.
Decisions about the market evidence portfolio and balancing the sources of evidence are portfolio management activities within the Innovation Value Chain.
These are all examples of how portfolio management empowers the innovation team to make command level decisions.
With choice, comes the ability to experience the consequences of our choices. If after the innovation team makes a choice, some “other agency” nullifies their decisions, did the team really have a choice? I think not. But how, how can that “other agency” trust the innovation team to make the decisions they would?
In portfolio management, formally stated selection criteria and thresholds are used to represent that “other agency”, and provide a method of delegating values and motives to the decision makers. They form a set of guidelines that empower the decision makers to make decisions which represent the values and motives of that “other agency.” It’s a mechanism used to transfer authority. I should now identify that “other agency,” as the stakeholders of the innovation initiative.
If the stakeholders of the innovation initiative desire an empowered culture that uses their knowledge, experience, and internal motivation to accomplish new innovative solutions which satisfy market needs then, they need to provide the selection criteria and performance thresholds required in portfolio management decision making. Too many times this isn’t provided, and portfolio management practices are abandoned.
If the stakeholders have a tool like ProModel’s EPS, and use it to establish meaningful selection criteria, profitable performance thresholds, and efficient resource utilization plans, the empowerment of the Innovation Team is simple. Portfolio management can truly nurture the innovation culture, and become the powerful decision making tool it should be, from strategy development, opportunity selection, roadmapping, and all the way down to the day-to-day decision points throughout the Innovation Value Chain.
For more from Cathy: thesalesgal.com
Cathy Liggett – Sales Director, PPM Solutions
Our Customers can connect strategic planning with market and business opportunity definitions.
When Innovation Teams fail to deliver on their promises, the most frequent explanation is that the strategy was wrong. But the strategy by itself is not often the cause. Strategies most often fail because they aren’t executed well. Either the team isn’t capable of making them happen, or the leaders of the organization misjudge the challenges their teams face in the market place, or both.
The right portfolio and capacity planning tool will allow strategic planners to examine multiple scenarios and predict the probability of success within a set of given budgets, constraints and thresholds. Typically, strategic planners throw these guidelines over the fence to those responsible for identifying and defining market and business opportunities within their portfolio. If the strategic planning team shares the executable model developed while creating the strategy with the portfolio management team, the strategic vision can become “our” vision instead of “their” vision.
The benefits of empowerment are realized as Portfolio Managers redistribute and balance the opportunity portfolio. Opportunities can be selected based on the budgets, thresholds, and constraints of the strategic model. Ways for opportunities to compensate for one another can be identified while maintaining strategic alignment. The unified team (Strategic Planners and Portfolio Managers)―with its synergy of effort―offers greater knowledge than if the Portfolio Managers of opportunity definition and the Capacity Planners of strategic planning work separately. The shared, executable model is key to a common vision, and required to truly join capacity planning and portfolio management.
ProModel customers build executable models driven by a discrete event simulator to determine potentials, define competency requirements, and establish portfolio budgets. They use this same model for portfolio management to balance opportunities, and minimize risk. This connection helps establish a common language between strategy and opportunity planning.
Our Customers can align product roadmaps to these market opportunities.
Power is the rate at which work is accomplished. Roadmaps control that rate. We like to think of it as the throttle of execution. This is where the day-to-day activities of the project meet strategy. Yes, it’s true that the roadmap should be seen as a portfolio. The Roadmapping Team must balance opportunity with capability while maintaining strategic alignment.
A shared, executable model helps our customers bridge the gap between the potential and realized returns of the enterprise roadmap, while optimizing the execution rates of the individual projects on that roadmap. Of course risk and reward are balanced, but perhaps the greatest advantage the executable model brings to roadmapping is change impact analysis. For this task, automated reports just can’t address the bursty nature of enterprise change. The averages and estimates of traditional Gantt charts, and strategic plans don’t address the issues of resource availability or future capability needed for roadmapping.
Our Customer’s day-to-day decisions required in Market Sensing, Problem, Feature, Requirement, and Launch definition receive direction and focus from these roadmaps.
A common executable model, used for strategic planning, capacity planning, portfolio management, and roadmapping helps build a common language, focus, and almost frictionless execution. The model helps everyone on the Innovation Team understand where the constraints came from. The final result is empowerment to the front lines, where decisions are being made. The model, which is connected to the roadmap, opportunities, and strategy can now be used for “What if” analysis.
The day-to-day decisions of members on the Innovation Team can be strengthened by the executable model. This executable model is used to gain insight into trends and forces that impact our decisions. By studying the behavior of the model, good decisions can be made without formal analysis. The goal is to empower their Innovation Team with reliable instincts, formulated with facts and modeled experiences, so that when the time comes, good decisions can be made in a timely manner.
Members of the Innovation Team gathering market evidence, analyzing the evidence to define problem statements, constructing innovative feature definitions, specifying market requirements, or planning the launch, use the executable model to conduct what if analyses, and change impact analysis to be sure the maximum competitive advantage is delivered within the current business constraints.
This three-tier coordination between Strategy, Opportunities, Roadmaps, day-to-day market sensing, problem, feature, requirement, and launch definition can be accomplished through the right type of capacity planning and portfolio management capabilities.
Big data and analytics are definitely hot topics in the Tech world these days. University and college masters programs are springing up all over the place. These programs are hoping to gear up business analytics, machine learning and other data analysis programs to train today’s undergrads.
Looking to fill the analytics talent gap by pursuing a degree in this field, or are you currently in a program? Here is your chance to win a free ProModel Deluxe Student Package. ProModel is a premier modeling and simulation tool with 25 years of success behind it. This tool will help you familiarize yourself with simulation and modeling analytics.
To enter for your chance to win, simply subscribe to this ProModel Blog, and fill out the registration form linked below. You can also enter by following us on Twitter and Facebook, or join us on LinkedIn and follow our groups: Predictive Simulation Solutions – ProModel , Predictive Simulation Solutions for Healthcare – ProModel, or PPM Solutions – ProModel EPS
Dr. Charles Harrell
ProModel Director and Founder,
Professor of Engineering and Technology – BYU
Project Portfolio Management (PPM) has emerged to become one of the most crucial ways of achieving strategic advantage in a business organization. In order to be competitive, business leaders recognize that they must be able to effectively plan and manage their project or product portfolio in a way that best achieves the financial goals of the organization. The question I would ask is: How well are university MBA programs responding to industry needs and preparing graduates who can effectively do PPM?
In the U.S. alone there are currently 214 graduate business or MBA programs offering either courses or emphases in PPM. But this number doesn’t necessarily reflect how many MBA programs do an adequate job of teaching PPM. Many programs treat PPM as just an extension of project management (PM), or they are content to treat it at a high, conceptual level rather than at an actual working level.
PPM is Not Just PM on Steroids
Traditionally, MBA programs have tended to focus on the management of projects, not the management of project portfolios. However, as universities have increasingly become aware of the fact that most organizations manage multiple projects rather than individual projects, PM courses have expanded to ostensibly address the issues associated with multiple projects. Unfortunately, in many of these instances the real issues associated with managing multiple projects are trivialized as though they are little different from those connected with managing a single project. One MBA program advertises that they provide an entire series of four courses on PM, yet only in the last course is the subtopic of “multiple projects” even raised. The mindset seems to be: if you can plan and manage one project, you can plan and manage multiple projects.
This practice of tacking PPM onto PM, as though it is simply a matter of planning and managing a bunch of individual projects, grossly underestimates the complexity of the decisions associated with competing projects vying for the limited resources of an organization, not to mention the strategic level of thinking that is required to make such decisions.
PPM is more than learning how to manage multiple projects. It is learning how to look at the entire portfolio of projects holistically with the goal of maximizing overall ROI. PPM blends strategy and decision making to allocate resources across competing opportunities for maximum value creation. These decisions are based on risk assessment and financial management and therefore go beyond the simple scheduling and cost estimating activities associated with PM. What this all means is that a good project manager isn’t necessarily a good portfolio manager.
PPM, a Learn-by-Doing Skill
Once an MBA program gets over the habit of treating PPM as simply an advanced exercise in PM, the next challenge is to treat PPM as a skill rather than simply a topic of discussion. Unfortunately, in many MBA programs PPM is addressed as simply one of many topics covered in a business strategy course where students are barely given enough exposure to it to know what it is.
Even where an entire course is dedicated to the topic of PPM, it is often treated at a high level with little attention given to the actual nuts and bolts of how it is done. It goes without saying that one can learn a great deal about PPM without really learning how to do PPM. I recently read one PPM course description in an MBA program that stated: “This course provides the basic concepts of portfolio management and differentiates portfolio management from project management, program management and the PMO. The course content defines the steps necessary to develop a project portfolio, including selecting portfolio components and applying financial and resource constraints. Portfolios have different risks than individual projects and programs, therefore an explanation of portfolio risk management is included.”
Such a course, if taught as advertised, could hardly give students a working knowledge of how to do PPM. While perhaps useful to someone interested in obtaining only a cursory knowledge of PPM, it is of little practical use to someone anticipating filling any kind of leadership role in PPM.
To develop a real working knowledge of PPM, students need to develop a sense of how project selection, prioritization and timing affect financial performance. They also need to get a good grasp of the way resource allocation over time and across multiple projects affects both cost and revenues. Gaining insight into the impact of uncertainty and risk on timing and financial performance is also vital. Especially useful is the ability to generate accurate statistical estimates of performance based on uncertainty. Such capabilities are best developed through actual experience in working with project portfolios.
EPS for MBA Programs
ProModel has developed a PPM simulation exercise using its powerful Enterprise Project Portfolio (EPS) product that is designed to take students through a realistic project portfolio planning scenario. It gives students an experience of what it is actually like to make portfolio planning decisions and helps improve their strategic thinking skills. Since this EPS module is hosted in the cloud, no software needs to be downloaded and students can work through the exercise at their own pace, usually only taking a couple hours to complete.
The EPS module provides both training and assessment so that students receive immediate feedback on the consequence of their decisions and are allowed to iteratively improve their decision making skills. Students come away with confidence in their ability to effectively plan a project portfolio.
ProModel is excited to be working with several MBA programs to pilot this EPS module. Preliminary results are promising, and it is definitely proving to be a bold move for professors to stretch beyond their comfort zone of classroom lecturing. Giving students this hands-on experience in PPM is sure to make them better business leaders. It is more than a simulation game; it is a game changer.
Please Visit the ProModel Academic Page:
http://www.promodel.com/academic/
Keith Vadas – ProModel President & CEO
The ProModel family would like to wish everyone a very joyous holiday season and a prosperous 2013! We thank you for all your support and business in 2012. As always, our goal is to help you meet or exceed your performance goals. We hope that our people and solutions were able to assist you in that endeavor this past year.
2013 marks the 25th Anniversary of ProModel Corporation. That’s a quarter century of providing solutions that improve performance for companies and organizations all around the world! It’s hard to believe how time flies, but it’s easy to see how ProModel has grown from a small company based on a single innovative simulation software product to an organization with a global presence and diverse solutions servicing virtually every industry from Government and Manufacturing to Healthcare and Academia. It’s all due to the talented and dedicated professionals, both in the ProModel family and especially within our loyal customer base – so Thank You.
ProModel opened its doors in Orem Utah in 1988 thanks to Dr. Charles Harrell’s vision to provide an easy to use and affordable simulation toolset for non-programmers that could run on standard PC’s. It has grown for 25 years because of strong customer support and feedback as well as innovative predictive analytic solutions.
We now provide an array of Rich Internet Application solutions like the ARFORGEN Synchronization Tool (AST) that helps the Army do all force planning for missions around the world, Decision Support Tool (DST) that helps Army Materiel Command source equipment for the troops ensuring their readiness for the missions, The Navy Synchronization Tools (NST) help the Navy optimize F18 fleets and Enterprise Portfolio Simulator (EPS) which helps organizations optimize project portfolios with limited resources.
We also continue to improve upon our flagship ProModel, MedModel and ServiceModel suites as well as Process Simulator, our Visio Plug-In, based primarily on your feedback.
In 2013 and beyond we look to continue developing innovative collaborative predictive analytic solutions to help our customers make better decisions faster. One example of this is Patient Flow Analysis, an application specific healthcare solution designed to make it easier and faster to solve hospital wide patient flow issues. Keep an eye of for this solution in early 2013.
Here at ProModel we have plenty of good memories and valuable experiences to look back upon over the last 25 years, but we’d also like to hear about your experiences with ProModel. What were some of the key decisions you were able to confidently make because of a ProModel solution? Tell us about some of the most memorable and successful projects you’ve worked on with ProModel.
Thanks again, Happy Holidays, and we’ll see you next year!
Keith Vadas
President & CEO
ProModel Corporation
ProModel 