Why Use Microsoft Project Server
Microsoft uses the term Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) to refer
to a group of components that includes:
- Microsoft Project Professional 2013, Project Server 2013 and Project
Web App 2013. It is also used for
- Microsoft Project Online combined with Project Pro for Office 365.
Typical Microsoft Project Portfolio Management Customers
The Microsoft PPM solution is suited to companies that need centralised
project planning and management across multiple projects. They are likely
to need functions such as centralized resource management, capacity planning,
portfolio management, partially automated approval processes, flexible
and eye-catching reports using dashboards and cockpits, among many others.
Good reasons to use Microsoft Project Server
:
1. Alignment of people and projects with strategic
objectives.
Reaching your long-term business goals in the future means investing in
the right business activities now. With a Microsoft Project Server EPM
Solution, you can identify, prioritise and select projects that support
your strategic objectives and align your resources accordingly. And by
routinely evaluating and adjusting your portfolio of projects, you can
ensure continuous alignment with your objectives for optimal efficiency
and productivity.
2. Faster, more-informed business decisions
Making accurate decisions quickly is critical in today’s fast-paced
business climate. The EPM Solution provides visibility into your work
portfolio for monitoring performance, visualising trends and identifying
investment gaps. With these capabilities, you can make informed decisions
on how to proceed with existing projects, make trade-offs and pursue new
opportunities.
3. Capture investments within a central repository.
Consolidate business and information technology (IT) investments within
an enterprise repository to improve visibility, insight, and control.
The Office EPM Solution enables you to implement repeatable processes
as templates to standardize and streamline data collection across the
organization. Centralized data facilitates cross project analysis of finances,
resources, schedules as well as other data trends and status for informative
reports.
4. Effectively manage resources.
Without understanding long-term workloads and capacity, companies can
experience inefficient hire-fire cycles, resulting in higher overhead,
lost knowledge, and poor employee morale. By providing visibility into
overall work commitments, actual timesheets, and resource capabilities,
the Office EPM Solution helps you create resource plans to align your
strategic recruiting and outsourcing with your long-term business objectives.
5. Collaborate and coordinate easily.
Helping to ensure that teams share common goals and work together effectively
becomes more vital as organizations become more geographically and culturally
diverse. Web-based access to timely, business-critical project information
stored by the Office EPM Solution means teams can share knowledge, collaborate
smoothly to complete tasks and deliverables, and adjust activities quickly
to accommodate project changes and updates.
6. Standardise and automate the governance processes.
Define multiple workflows to subject each project to the appropriate governance
controls throughout its life cycle — from proposal to post-implementation
— resulting in lowered costs, faster cycle times, and increased
quality.
7. Align the selected portfolios with the business
strategy.
Run optimization what-if scenarios to identify tradeoffs and select the
optimal portfolio under varying budgetary and business constraints that
best align with your organization’s business strategy. Take advantage
of advanced portfolio analytical techniques to identify and break the
constraints prohibiting the portfolio from reaching the Efficient Frontier.
8. Strategic hiring
Without understanding your long-term and short-term workloads and capacity,
companies can experience inefficient hire-fire cycles, resulting in very
high overheads and lost knowledge (to mention just a few). By providing
visibility into overall work commitments and resource capabilities, the
Project Server Solution helps you achieve the right balance of strategic
recruiting and outsourcing to achieve long-term business objectives.
9. Get more from existing technology investments.
The Office EPM Solution is built on Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft
SQL Server, and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services so you can get the
most out of your organization’s skills in these Microsoft technologies.
The Office EPM Solution also includes pre-built integration with the Microsoft
Office system, ERP applications, and the Microsoft collaboration platform.
This enables users to contribute data to the Office EPM Solution while
working in familiar applications such as Outlook or SharePoint.
10. Quickly realize a return on investment.
The Office EPM Solution provides organizations with an end-to-end project
portfolio management solution. By enabling increased employee productivity,
faster cycle times, reduced costs, and improved time management, the Office
EPM Solution provides a positive and sustainable return on your investment.
In IT portfolio management, software can cut costs 2-5 percent, improve
productivity 20-25 percent, and shift 10-15 percent of budgets to more
strategic projects. In developing and bringing new products to market,
the best performers — those who have applied rigorous process and
technology to their research and development and go-to-market activities
— can reduce time to market by more than 30 percent.
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