Tag Archives: portfolio management team

FREE ProModel Webinar: Predictive vs. Prescriptive Analytics

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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!

https://www150.livemeeting.com/lrs/8002083257/Registration.aspx?pageName=k09m7ldp55z3t048&FromPublicUrl=1

 

 

Busy Season at ProModel

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Keith Vadas

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.

REAL PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER!

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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.

  • Projects close to the margin must be dropped
  • Resource constraints must be part of the project selection process

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:

http://portfoliostud.io/#

Project/Portfolio Risk Evaluation:

http://www.promodel.com/pdf/ML-ProjectReview-PipelineRiskEvaluation.pdf

Portfolio Scheduler To Be Introduced at Microsoft Project Conference 2014

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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.

MS Conf 2014 Blog Post Ellen - pic

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):

http://www.msprojectconference.com/

Nurturing an Empowered Decision Making Culture with Portfolio Management

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Orange Cathy

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.

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There are five conditions required for portfolio management:

  1. There must be a list or set of alternatives to choose from.
  2. There must be a prioritized list of selection criteria.
  3. There must be specified metrics to measure the quantities of alternatives matching the selection criteria.
  4. There must be a set of predetermined portfolio thresholds that constrain the portfolio and cause limitations. In a constraint free environment, you’d select everything, and there would be no need for decisions.
  5. Insight into resource availability or needs. Unless you have the power to make your decisions real, your portfolio decisions are in vain.

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.

  • Determining what problem statements produce a balanced set of business opportunities, with the greatest reward potential, to the market and to the stakeholders, is a portfolio decision.
  • Identifying a set of product features in a roadmap that stay within business constraints is a portfolio management problem.
  • Determining what requirements should be placed in a product launch, to provide the greatest value to the market, within current resource availability, is a portfolio problem.

These are all examples of how portfolio management empowers the innovation team to make command level decisions.

Shell game scam

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

Strengthening the Innovation Value Chain

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Orange Cathy

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.