Project Portfolio Management Software
If you work with several projects in parallel, you should be aware of the difficulty of project portfolio management, as well as the difference that having a good tool makes. Most large companies know this, which is why many invest in good portfolio and multi-project management software. In this section we show you a selection of project management programs that allow you to manage the project portfolio, allowing you to optimize the overall results of the company and the use of resources.
Best project portfolio management tools
Below we show you different online project portfolio management programs so that you can see their benefits and select the one that best suits your needs.
Why is it important to have a program to manage the project portfolio?
The most common situation today is that companies work simultaneously with several projects, which is known as a multi-project environment. This situation generates several problems with the allocation of resources, the integration of the cash flows of the different projects, or the resolution of conflicts.
For this reason, many companies wonder how to manage several projects at the same time.
It is precisely to respond to these new challenges and difficulties that many project management tools include the possibility of managing project portfolios, or at least considering the situation of part-time resources in planning.
In the portfolio management software that we show you on this page, these functions already exist, and they have been specifically developed to manage portfolios in multi-project environments. We recommend that you check that your current tool has this functionality.
Benefits of having a Project Portfolio Management Software
The first thing we must indicate is that all the programs to manage the project portfolio are based on tools that allow projects to be managed individually. Therefore, the first benefits that we will achieve when implementing software to manage project portfolios are those of project management:
- Better control and reduction of deadlines
- Easier to maintain communication with the team, management, customers and suppliers
- Better control of costs and income, and consequently improvement in the financial result.
To these benefits we can add those that arise from solving the problems presented by the fact of working with several projects at the same time:
Conflict resolution and prioritization between projects.
Having several projects running in parallel and sharing resources implies the appearance of conflicts between them.
Having a project portfolio management software allows us to have a global vision of the situation of all the company’s projects, and therefore resolve prioritizing between projects in search of the best solution.
Integrated resource planning.
Having resources working simultaneously on several projects, often managed by different people, makes planning and management very complicated.
Through a portfolio management program it is possible to allocate resources considering their participation in different projects, avoiding both overload and inefficient use.
Integration of cash flows.
A common problem is cash flow management, which determines the need for project financing. This gets complicated when we are talking about several projects running at the same time; but at the same time it represents an opportunity if we can combine the different cash flows in such a way that one projects finances another.
Optimizing the integration of the cash flows of the different projects in the portfolio can significantly reduce the external financing needs or avoid very high and expensive financing needs.
This in general can already by itself compensate the investment in a program to manage the portfolio of projects.
Integrated results
When we are in charge of the operations of a company that works with several projects, we need to be able to see the integrated results, as well as to be able to see aggregated data that allow us to answer questions such as: Who is our best client ? do we buy more? What is the average margin of the projects? etc.
Having a tool for portfolio management allows you to integrate the information from the different projects and present the portfolio status on a quickly and simply way. In addition, since most of the tools can be integrated with the most common enterprise programs, these reports can be updated in real time and with almost no effort.