As many companies attempt to accelerate growth programs, seize market opportunities or re-organize to align to new strategies, they’ve been hindered by the inherent limitations of PPM solutions. These challenges have resulted in the recent emergence of the Enterprise Program & Portfolio Management (EPPM) market space. EPPM goes beyond the PPM tracking of budget to burn and cost allocation; it attempts to connect business benefit realization to the programs a company executes. While EPPM does share many of the capabilities that IT PPM software exhibits, EPPM is focused more broadly across the enterprise rather than focusing success on the completion of an isolated or small group of related IT projects.
Because EPPM solutions facilitate effective strategy execution and business transformation, the software is often used by enterprise program management offices or business transformation offices.
Many companies are facing challenges when executing effective EPPM strategy, with some not even recognizing its availability and trying to stretch inadequate PPM tools to support their strategy execution. The challenges include:
- Establishing alignment of multiple teams and executives. While objectives are often communicated through the hierarchy of organizations, horizontal silos optimize according to their own understanding, resulting in misalignment.
- Providing agility and adaptability of strategy. Simply planning a strategy is insufficient. Strategy must be flexible to withstand setbacks and to support revised priorities.
- Reaching consistent “understanding”. The simple objective of “communication” is insufficient when it comes to EPPM strategy execution. The true goal should be to ensure that “understanding” is achieved. According to a March 2015 article in the Harvard Business Review, less than one third of senior management report that they fully understand how their organization’s top priorities align with their strategy.
- Assigning credit where it is due. Recognizing the people who enable successful business transformation is critical to gaining team commitment to results.
- Enabling executive input on day-to-day details. While escalating every decision to top management is inefficient, key day-to-day decisions require executive input to successfully achieve change.
- Establishing cross functional agreement. The need for cross team communication and agreement is critical to strategic decision making but this can be difficult when disparate organizations are unaware of who is sufficiently connected to facilitate the agreement.
Shibumi provides a customizable EPPM solution that helps you successfully navigate through these challenges. With Shibumi, you can generate a clear dashboard of business metrics that all members of an organization can access. This comprehensive dashboard aligns projects and portfolios, creating discipline around how connected parts come together. The ability to track these business metrics in a collaborative environment enables long term, strategic initiatives and goals to be monitored and executed more effectively.
For more information about Shibumi, please contact [email protected].