PPM Solutions: Project Management for Universities
Project management for universities involves a set of unique challenges. Their projects are diverse, ranging from business and IT, to construction and maintenance. They also have responsibilities to stakeholders. In addition, they have extensive approval and compliance processes. As a result, project portfolio managers can experience poor visibility and control when monitoring performance.
Federation University, based in Ballarat, Victoria, is no exception. The university sought out a PPM solution and selected pmo365 to manage a large and complex portfolio. After implementation, it has experienced smooth and coherent project management, with real-time data and a single ‘source of truth’, more efficient project scheduling, and better alignment of its portfolio to the university’s strategic goals.
A Single, Cohesive ‘Source of Truth’
The issue of poor ‘visibility’ seems to plague project management for universities. In order to track the demand on resources, universities often use an ERP solution like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft Dynamics, which store financial and accounting information.
Yet, these platforms are often disconnected from the project management program. That means that there is an enormous administrative burden on project portfolio management to gather the relevant data for reporting. Data is often twice: first into the project management application, and then into the financial and accounting software.
Instead, pmo365 integrates existing applications seamlessly. Data is routed directly to the Power Platform from almost any Microsoft or non-Microsoft app. Real-time updates across the platform eliminates lag and lets you synthesise reports and dashboards from a single source of truth.
Pipeline Project Management for Universities
Federation University’s pmo365 solution was deployed over just four months in 2019. The first project portfolio report was generated a few months later. According to its PMO, Project Managers liked having “consistent reporting across all the I.T. and business projects… and started to see new opportunities around concepts.”
In particular, the University benefited from using pmo365‘s project pipeline management tools to capture concepts and nuture initiatives. Before pmo365, projects could be started without having been approved by senior management or finance teams. But, by using the pipeline capability of pmo365, project approvals not only began to work more cohesively, but the projects with the most value to the organisation were being prioritised.
Meeting New Project Portfolio Management Challenges
By the end of 2020, Federation University had expanded their use of pmo365. They now have two portfolios of activity: one dedicated to I.T. and business projects, and another for construction and facility management. Federation University asked pmo365 to develop their solution to support an investment conceptualisation process across all projects. This more closely aligned the management of projects with the university’s programs and, in turn, to its key strategic objectives.
This iteration went live in June 2021, and was an immediate success, resulting in significantly better visibility and control. It was so seamless that the vice-chancellor’s team did not notice that their reports were now being delivered by a different system.
Importantly, it allowed project portfolio managers to view concepts and their approval status on a single dashboard. The concepts page offers an overview of the organisation’s allocation of resources. It also presents a table capturing ideas, benefits, time-frame, expected expenditures, and approval status.
Each concept includes essential information like the level of funding and capital required, operational cost, and additional software purchases which are aggregated into totals.
As a result, Federation University’s project management team are well across all their potential projects and the resources they will require. This helps them to make more informed decisions about when to start a project.
Customised Project Management for Universities
pmo365‘s customised project dashboard was a game changer for Federation University. The landing page lists all current projects, and details project type, system code, current phase, description, portfolio, program, sponsor, owner, and dates of completion. From there, project managers access all the relevant information and tools relating to individual projects in one place.
Project managers have particularly enjoyed the easy, user-oriented interface. For example, every project is assigned a traffic light colour to indicate project health, which changes as new status updates are submitted. There are also tools to directly update project dependencies, RAID Logs, stakeholders, change requests, benefits, lessons learned, and endorsements or approvals.
With an integrated project management system across all its portfolios, it has gained:
- Daily financial updates, so actuals are updated with frequency.
- Reportable task types, so project managers only have to update on required tasks.
- Stakeholder management, which identifies their type, impact on the project, and preferred communication methods.
- ‘A single source of truth’, so data only needs to be entered once. Concept-stage budgets and risks, for example, are automatically carried over to the project initiation and delivery stages.
- Resource management, so resources can be requested and approved directly within the system.
- Efficient processes with projects, concepts, funding, and stakeholders all linked into the one program management system.
- Integrated software, with all data from every department and device linked to a central data management service.
Make it Your Own
pmo365 is deployed to the university’s own Microsoft Power Platform, which has over 900 connectors to other applications that serve project management for universities. Rapid development of solutions like these are available for any organisation engaged in large project management portfolios. Continuous and customised development is now possible with just one monthly subscription payment. There are no up-front fees, no development from scratch, and everything is owned by you on your Microsoft 365 cloud tenancy.
To see how pmo365 can benefit your organisation, book a free demo today.
IIR: Introduce, Integrate, Replace
Step 01
Introduce
You cannot run a portfolio on Excel and PowerPoint alone.
Project portfolio management is the discipline of seeing every project in one place, prioritising the work that matters, allocating people against demand, and governing delivery with real numbers. It is not optional at any serious scale. The moment you have more projects than one person can hold in their head, you need a single, current view of status, schedule, cost, resource and risk.
Excel and PowerPoint feel free because there is no licence conversation. The real cost is elsewhere. It is the hours spent maintaining workbooks, the version confusion, and the numbers that go stale the moment they are pasted.
A spreadsheet cannot tell you, on demand, which projects are at risk, where your people are over-committed next quarter, or how much of the portfolio budget is actually spent.
Introducing a proper PPM platform is the first step. Not to add another tool for its own sake, but to give the portfolio one place where the data lives together and stays live.
Step 02
Integrate
The instinct after buying a PPM platform is to make everyone move into it. That is the fastest way to fail. Project managers already have tools they trust, and finance already has systems of record. Force a migration on day one and you get resistance, shadow spreadsheets, and a dataset nobody believes.
Integrate first. Meet the data where it already is. Two directions matter.
Direction 01
Enterprise systems
Connect to the finance or ERP layer so actuals, commitments and budgets flow in automatically. Reporting stops being a monthly reconciliation and becomes a live view. Nobody rekeys a spend figure again.
Direction 02
The tools PMs already use
The direction most platforms neglect, and arguably the more important. The portfolio should read from the PM's own tools, not force people to abandon them.
The reason this matters is simple. That data is already there, and it is kept current by the person closest to it. When the portfolio reads directly from these sources, the status report updates itself. No chasing, no copy and paste, no reporting lag. The PM keeps working the way they always have, and the board gets a live picture as a side effect.
Step 03
Replace
Integration buys you two things: trust, and live data. Once both are in place, you look at what can go.
Every organisation carries tools and spreadsheets that either do not do the job well or carry a heavy maintenance overhead. The classic example is the resource spreadsheet. It is a workbook someone maintains by hand to track who is on what. It is always slightly out of date, owned by one person, and impossible to reconcile against real demand.
Replace it with the equivalent function in your PPM.
A proper demand management capability does what the spreadsheet was reaching for, with none of the overhead. It models demand against capacity across the whole portfolio, updates as projects shift, and needs no manual upkeep.
Replace deliberately, one function at a time, and only after the platform has earned it. The test is simple: if a spreadsheet is high overhead or low quality, and the platform does the same job natively, retire the spreadsheet.
The payoff
You stop producing reports and start reading them
Follow IIR and the nature of reporting changes. The status view is current because it is fed by the tools people already use and the systems that already hold the money. The overhead that used to consume the last week of every month disappears, because there is nothing to assemble.
That is the whole point of real-time reporting. Not a prettier deck, but a portfolio you can look at any day of the month and trust, at a fraction of the effort it takes today.
Built on Microsoft 365. Native ground for IIR.
pmo365 integrates with the tools your teams already run in, so the path from Introduce to Integrate to Replace is a natural progression rather than a rip and replace.