Project Request, Prioritization and Scenario Modelling Software that Drives Positive Business Outcomes

Whilst many PPM solutions help organizations to do projects in the right way, KeyedIn also helps those organizations to ensure that they are doing the right projects. KeyedIn’s Portfolio Analysis capability enables ranking, scoring and prioritization of new initiatives and projects, in a what-if, scenario driven environment. Leveraging templates, organizations can quickly spin-up new candidate projects, based on their best-practices and lessons learned. These can be added into what-if portfolio views where both the new pipeline initiatives and the committed portfolio of work can be ranked and prioritized against configurable measures, metrics, and attributes. Weighted scoring models may be employed, and strategic alignment analyzed, with the impact on resource capacity, funding and benefits being visualized with powerful analytics dashboards and reports. Multiple scenarios being modelled and compared to ensure that the organization’s time, money, and resources are focused on the optimum portfolio mix.

At KeyedIn we are often asked to solve project intake a couple of ways. The first way is to have a Project Type of Idea which the user creates and fills in the detail on what the idea is and what the broad costs and benefits are expected to be. The PMO then validates the details and passes that on to the Stakeholder for Approval. Once approved the Project Type is updated but the history of the idea and approval reamins as part of the overal project record. The other way is to accept Projects from external sources such as SalesForce that send through the details at a certain stage in the project lifecycle for approval. In this example, the created project can be used for estimation and to pass back updates to the opportunity in SalesForce. When the Opportunity is completed the Project can be set to live to carry forward.

KeyedIn's approach to prioritization means that we can very easily support our customers at any level of maturity and actually enhance their journey up through the levels of maturity. Where maturity levels are low or PPM concepts are new to the organization, it may be appropriate to use very simple ranking and scoring or even simple "tagging" to indicate a project's priority in order to facilitate open discussions and collaborative decision making. At higher levels of maturity, an organisation may introduce a more structured approach with questions and priority calculations etc.

Yes. KeyedIn Enterprise can integrate with almost any system. For example, we've had clients create ideas forms in Sharepoint which, when submitted, generates an idea in KeyedIn for PMO approval via an integration.

Focus on the value of the portfolio and the efficiency/economic gains the business can expect from the overall strategy and the contribution of each project or program. No longer acceptable to view each project as a single item but must show how it fits into the overall strategy and contribute to the whole. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

The PMO needs to move from an operational cost center to a strategic business unit. Once work itself is under proper system management, there lies business data real-time that is critical to different Stakeholders. It needs to be queried and surfaced for the business in diferent ways to enable an agile and nimble business, during times of rapid change and increased competition in their markets.

During periods of rapid change and uncertainty there is a greater emphasis on PMO Leaders to justify their spend. We found that project prioritization software was a great tool to help them defend their decisions to not carry on with some current projects. Having objective, data driven decision making criteria backed up by powerful analytical dashboards give PMO's a real advantage in uncertain times.

Perhaps the most common approach is for a central function, typically the PMO office, to be responsible for the creation of new projects, on behalf of the project owners/managers. This approach has the advantage of centrally governing which projects are created, enabling early stage validation and avoiding the creation of duplicate projects. An alternative approach is to allow the project teams themselves to create new projects. This is useful where a central PMO function is not available to manage project intake. Disadvantages of this approach include a potential free-for-all around the creation of new project initiatives. There is no right or wrong way and KeyedIn Enterprise has the flexibility to support either approach or even a combination of both. Ultimately, it’s a process decision for the organization and one that KeyedIn are also happy to provide best-practice guidance and advice on.

From an end user perspective, its all about process and who is generating the ideas. Generally there has to be a 'sanity check' process even before the idea has been formed and a funnel process as part of that ideation. Having KeyedIn supporting this process, allows for consistency at the very outset. Despite the variety of topics a new idea may cover, you can still apply a small number of parameters, relevant to the organization, to be able to measure against. This give the decision holders comfort and confidence when discussing and making progression or prioritization calls.

The consequences are significant. The inability to measure and compare work efforts related to costing, business priorities, and strategic initiatives lends organizations to bank on the wrong efforts unknowingly. Inefficiencies remain, with their costs to the business unmeasured. People are deployed where they are perhaps less effective. All the above lend to a lack of productivity.