Essential Features for Successful Project Portfolio Management Configuration

For many individuals the term SaaS equals a lack of configuration, which is not always the case. SaaS Project Portfolio Management software is known for providing quick implementations and easy to use functionality to instantly improve overall project management efficiency. With this type of solution, you can reduce your time manually tracking projects and allocate more time executing those projects. Those benefits are expected of any project portfolio management solution, but what about configurability?

Configurability allows companies to dynamically configure and customize their project processes to fit their unique business needs. When looking for a project portfolio management system, configurability must be a priority for optimal efficiency and user adoption.

So when you are researching vendors, consider this checklist of functionality, to ensure you evaluate truely a configurable project management solution:

• Create unlimited custom fields – Not only should you be able to create common formats such as text, numeric, keyword lists, but in many scenarios you also need the flexibility to create more complex calculated fields, measures, and SQL lookups.
• Create configurable dashboards – Personally create your own analytics dashboards and widgets to ensure all project stakeholders have real time information critical to their role in project delivery.
• Fully multi-currency enabled – Track costs and expenditures in multiple currencies quickly and easily with a single click.
• Multi-Lingual with pre-configured languages – Having a multi-lingual solution is important for global growth of any company, so multi-lingual capabilities straight “out-of-the-box” ready to use is key.
• Configure your own project lifecycle – Easily configurable project lifecycles allow users to follow a pre-defined path, when initiating, planning, executing, and managing projects.
• Configure and track your own KPIs – Create your own measures and executive dashboards to ensure visibility of KPIs is in real time.
• Easily form action views – Action views allow users to track opportunities, feature requests or helpdesk tickets and can be configured for new functionality.
• Build out your individual business processes – Create unique individual business processes by simply defining the data, steps and approval stages.

If a solution doesn’t include this checklist of configuration, it won’t be specifically designed to fit your unique business needs without additional cost. Why wait to improve project management when a configured project portfolio management software can positively impact project completion and profitability by eliminating unnecessary resource and project processes.

Start managing your project portfolios with configurability, and see the difference configuration can have on your organization.

Back to Evaluating, Selecting and Implementing PPM.