What is project portfolio management?

Project portfolio management (PPM) centralises the management of multiple projects in an organisation. It’s the process of managing multiple projects, programs, and other initiatives in an organisation. It involves selecting the right projects, prioritising them, and allocating resources in a way that aligns with the organisation's overall strategic goals and objectives. Project portfolio management helps organisations to optimise their resources, improve decision-making, and ensure that projects deliver value to the organisation.

7 top tips for managing project portfolios  

1. Define your strategic objectives

Before selecting projects for your portfolio, it's essential to define your strategic objectives. This will help you to identify the projects that align with your organisation's goals and objectives. Overall, planning before you start any project is essential! A great PPM tool such as Fluid can help you to organise your strategic objectives and project plans, keeping project activity and plans, all in one place for easy reference.  

2. Prioritise your projects

Not all projects are equally important. It's essential to prioritise your projects based on their strategic importance, resource requirements, and potential benefits to the organisation. It’s useful to communicate effectively when you have chosen your priorities, so no-one is disappointed! When using Fluid, you can save project deliverables in the backlog later, and move them over to the forefront when you’re ready to begin working on them. This saves time and helps to keep track of your pipeline of work.  

3. Monitor and control your portfolio

Once you have selected your projects, it's essential to monitor and control your portfolio to ensure that it's delivering the desired results. Regular reviews and status updates can help you identify issues and make necessary adjustments, just remember to engage with stakeholders too. Monitoring doesn’t have to be difficult, by using Fluid PPM software, you can create personalised dashboards to understand your progress at a glance.  

4. Align your resources

Make sure that your resources are allocated efficiently across your portfolio of projects. This will help you to optimise your resources and ensure that your projects are delivered on time and within budget. Using Fluid timesheets and resource organisation, you are able to understand the bandwidth of your resources and their costs to an overall project.  

5. Use data to inform decision-making

Data can help you make informed decisions about your project portfolio. Use data to track progress, identify issues, and make adjustments as needed. Advanced reporting capabilities and real-time data from Fluid empower you with all the insight you need. Drill down as much as you need to, for informed decision making. Automated reporting on Fluid also saves you time.  

6. Manage risks

All projects come with risks. It's essential to identify potential risks and develop strategies that can mitigate them. This helps to minimise the impact of risks on your portfolio of projects. With Fluid, you can report on your risks and benefits, as well as continue to monitor them throughout a project lifecycle with RAG reporting.  

7. Foster communication and collaboration

Encourage effective communication and collaboration among project managers and other stakeholders. This will help you to ensure that projects are aligned with the organisation's strategic goals and objectives. Fluid promotes visibility and transparency for teams which ultimately helps better collaboration.  

Fluid PPM software and project portfolio management (PPM)

Fluid PPM software is a powerful all-in-one tool that can help you manage your portfolio of projects more efficiently, optimise your resources and ultimately deliver value to your organisation. With Fluid, you can centralise your project portfolio management process, keeping all actions, decisions and deliverables of each project grouped together. Prioritise your projects based on their strategic importance and efficiently allocate resources across your portfolio of projects, whilst understanding the bandwidth of your resources.  

Get in touch with us to request a demo of how Fluid can help manage your projects.