Transforming your business deserves a PPM tool that helps you overcome the most common project portfolio management issues. Thanks to AirSaaS, speed up your decision-making, maintain total transparency on the priorities of your projects, and say goodbye to micro-managing tasks.
Thomas Sagnimorte
DSI at Millet Mountain Group
Great tool that allows us to streamline the management of our project portfolio. I recommend!
Oct 7, 2023
David Leaurant
Director of Organization, Information Systems and Innovation
A shared vision of projects within the team, more reactive arbitrations, a support for presenting the Project Roadmap... all with formalized rituals and common milestones but adapted to the perimeters.
Jul 13, 2023
Marie-Odile Lhomme
Chief Digital & Information Officer-Member FrenchWomencio-Administrator CRIP-VP @Arce Future Women-ESSEC Alumni Chief Digital & Information Officer-Member FrenchWomencio-Administrator CRIP-VP @Arce Future Women-ESSEC Alumni
A great project and a real dynamic of a transversal IT and Business team at the service of the management of the project portfolio Audencia Marion Jaffré Mélinda SCHLEDER Maryline Breton Thomas Kerbiriou. A great AirSaas and Business team dynamic at the service of managing the project portfolio Audencia Marion Jaffré Mélinda SCHLEDER Maryline Breton Thomas Kerbiriou .A great AirSaas partnership Bertran Ruiz! Happy to see the progress day by day... and the first results! We continue!
Jun 30, 2023
Clement Royer
DSI - ICT MANAGER at Chiesi France
With the AirSaas tool we were able to ritualize our project review meetings by eliminating PowerPoints and inefficient meetings. This allows us to have the entire IT department aligned and informed about all projects on a daily basis. A really TOP tool!
Oct 26, 2023
Jérôme PIROT
Business Applications Manager
A tool is nothing without the support that goes with it. I appreciate Bertran's approach and its practical side. A great experience and a great tool (AirSaas). Thanks Bertran. 👍
Jul 21, 2023
Thibault Baheux
Project management & PMO
Awareness is beginning to take place in the CODIRs. What they lack, on the other hand, is to have a concrete vision of the organization's project portfolio, and that's where AirAaas comes in.
Oct 4, 2023
There are many project portfolio management tools on the market: how does AirSaas stand out from the crowd?
The world's easiest project portfolio. AirSaas is designed to be used by IT teams and business managers alike, and requires no training whatsoever. Invite your colleagues to experience AirSaas' ergonomic interface and sleek design.
Give your project governance the best decision-making tool. AirSaas's project portfolio provides a synthetic view of indicators you need to make value-driven decisions.
Your project portfolio doesn't have to force you to abandon your favorite project management tools. AirSaas connects to the most popular tools on the market (Jira, Azure devOps, Asana, etc.) to provide you with the information you need to manage your project activities at a macro level.
Your company's strategy is clear, your project governance is established, and now you need to provide relevant, up-to-date indicators to prioritize projects according to urgency, potential gains, accessible resources, etc.
The performance of your steering committee depends on your ability to make the right decisions in the right timeframe. AirSaas provides you with a dashboard of your project portfolio. You can use the filters to find the projects on which you need to concentrate your energy.
The importance of good reporting is beyond dispute. The more management is aware of the progress of its various projects, the more frustrations are avoided. The trouble is, the process of gathering the information needed for this reporting is a time-consuming task for your colleagues.
That's why we offer you automated flash reporting. Generate a presentation (.ppt, .pdf, url) at the click of a button, with all updated data presented in slides in your corporate colors.
Each view of the project portfolio provides different insights. The timeline gives you an overview of projects and their associated milestones. At a glance, you can see overruns, dependencies and parallel projects.
Consider different scenarios by moving projects through time, and choose the strategy that brings the greatest benefit. The project portfolio management tool will display recommendations based on various criteria (resource availability, importance of the project, delays on important milestones, etc.).
Tracking budgets and optimizing resources is key to a CIO's job. It's the combination you have to monitor at all times to keep your activities on track.
AirSaas recovers time and budget consumption through its interface with your financial and project management tools. In addition, a reporting module is available for up-to-date, consolidated and exportable information.
Start now with an effective project flash report solution
Your teams complain about the lack of commitment from the business units on the projects. And on the business units' side, frustration is felt in the delays and failure to take their requests into account.
AirSaas offers a common structure to follow when setting up a project. The dashboard view helps to ensure a shared understanding of development constraints and collegial decision-making by the governance board.
Your project portfolio management tool puts collaboration first, enabling you to share issues, success stories, meeting reports... to get your teams engaged around a common interest.
Poor project definition is often the first source of frustration for IT teams, and always one of the main reasons for project delivery delays.
With AirSaas, users are encouraged to ask the right questions and fill in the key information required for a good project scoping (expected gains, success criteria, effort required, etc.). After that, it's important to bear in mind that the information can be filled in collaboratively and asynchronously, right up to the moment when the project is ready to be validated and presented to the steering committee.
Regularly measuring the degree of confidence in the success of the project among your teams is essential. In this way, you can correct the situation before the predicted failure becomes too costly for your company. With AirSaas, you can send out a survey on a regular basis, improving team commitment by listening to their concerns and smoothing collaboration between business units and IT.
Your communication plan must enable business managers and management to understand the general state of progress, the obstacles and the risks of project failure. It must also highlight successes to motivate teams and encourage naysayers to join the movement. Reporting is often seen as a time-consuming activity. AirSaas helps you with this process by enabling you to automatically generate flash reports that can be sent out at the click of a button.
Start now with an effective project flash report solution
Many believe that project management tools are the same as project portfolio management tools. Yet these two types of tools don't serve the same purpose.
What's the difference between these two software categories?
The purpose of a project management tool is to ensure optimal management of a particular project. Often using a dashboard, it will simplify various tasks:
Unlike a project management tool, a project portfolio management tool optimizes the execution of several projects simultaneously.
As a company grows, it needs to run more and more projects at the same time. While good communication and structured organization may be enough to manage a few projects jointly, there comes a time when the implementation of a project portfolio management tool becomes an essential ally in maintaining operational efficiency.
What's the purpose of a project portfolio management tool?
It enables you to :
Although the first project portfolio management tools were created some forty years ago, it's worth noting that new software continues to appear regularly.
Today, all these tools cover project portfolio management needs, but this wasn't always the case! Indeed, some of them were initially created to enable project management.
Target issue at the creation date
Looking at this graph, we can see that more than half of project portfolio management tools were in fact initially designed to meet project management needs. Only later were they extended to cover both issues at the same time: project management and project portfolio management.
It's worth noting, however, that some of these tools had been developed to meet both these needs (Sciforma, Ganttic), and that Planview was even focused on project portfolio management from the outset.
Today, it's very rare to come across a tool that doesn't cover both aspects simultaneously. However, if these software products differ in the functionalities they offer, this is partly due to the problems they were targeting when they were first developed - but it also has to do with the vision of project management they support.
Start now with an effective project flash report solution
One of the reasons why project portfolio management tools don't all offer the same functionalities is that it depends on how they were historically conceived, but it's also a consequence of the vision of project management they advocate.
But why are there different visions of project management in IT departments?
The role of the IT department has evolved considerably over the last few decades. Today, it is much more involved in meeting business needs. In addition to the obligation to ensure the operational functioning of the company's information systems and website, the IT department is now expected to create value for its organization.
As the nature of the projects they manage has evolved, so too have the expectations of CIOs in terms of project portfolio management: they still need a tool to ensure the management of technical missions, but also software that simplifies their collaboration with the business units, and the execution of the projects they have in common.
The rise of digital technology offers CIOs the opportunity to support their companies in new ways, and in particular to play a greater role in the execution of business goals. A CIO who digitizes the workflows of the business units now brings them enormous benefits in terms of simplifying their day-to-day operations and optimizing their efficiency. The IT department can even help a company to change its business model by assisting in the introduction of new online services. As Pierre Raschi (General Manager of Référence DSI) recounts, a butcher's shop was able to renew its aging clientele thanks to the intervention of a part-time IT Director.
The rise of digital technology has structurally led to the IT Department being entrusted with more missions, sometimes far removed from the simple maintenance of information systems. With new responsibilities being assigned to them, the IT Department's expectations in terms of project portfolio management tools have inevitably changed.
The transformations described above inevitably lead to a change in the way the IT department interacts with its employees. Indeed, an IT department focused primarily on technical missions will be more inclined to try to keep the behavior of the various users of information systems under control. On the other hand, an IT department wishing to add value to its collaborators' core business will need to develop a closer relationship with them: if it wants to be able to support them in implementing new ways of working, it needs to be able to understand their needs precisely.
So, depending on the mission the IT department has chosen for itself, it will not need the same type of project portfolio management tool.
To contrast these two CIO styles, they could be represented by Maslow's pyramids:
Once you've understood that not all project portfolio management tools offer the same functionalities, you need to ask yourself: what kind of tool will help you achieve your IT department's goals?
Of course, there are more or less complete project portfolio management tools, offering various functionalities such as :
But more than just a list of features, project portfolio management tools can be grouped into different categories.
Some project portfolio management tools, such as ERPs, attempt to meet all the needs of IT Departments. While they are often effective, it has to be said that they lack flexibility once implemented.
On the other hand, other tools (particularly those in SaaS mode) offer fewer features, but have the ability to integrate with existing tools. Opting for this type of solution avoids duplication, and above all reduces the cost of changing your tool: indeed, upgrading a complete ERP is a complex, time-consuming and costly project.
Each of these types of tool corresponds to your point of view on the role the IT department should play in your company. If it chooses to implement lighter, less comprehensive tools, it's because it considers that its mission is no longer necessarily to have to meet all the needs that its company has and will have at once, but rather to be able to adapt to the company's evolutions. As a result, these tools are easy to implement and change, and the IT Department can continue to provide an effective response to a specific problem, in line with the company's expectations.
If the CIO wishes to develop closer collaboration with his or her company's business units, it can be very interesting to choose a tool that includes a collaborative space. Indeed, this space will help structure communications and centralize important information much more efficiently than apps such as Slack or Teams. This kind of tool can therefore be a real driver for getting business units involved, and optimizing their support by IT teams.
Project portfolio management software that has been developed to deliver a high-quality user experience has two major benefits for an IT department.
First of all, it's much easier to get business units involved when you offer them a tool with an intuitive interface. It's hard to expect strong commitment from them when IT teams are satisfied with inviting them to work on tools that haven't been designed with business profiles in mind. Project portfolio management tools with a strong UX are therefore generally one of the preferred options for CIOs wishing to get IT and business teams to collaborate effectively together.
The other major plus lies in the adoption rate of project portfolio tools. UX-based tools make it easier for business units to get to grips with the software quickly and without too much friction. This is a strong point that should be taken into account by all CIOs wishing to involve their company's business units more closely in IT projects.
All tools carry a methodology within them. So, one of the tips for maximizing the adoption rate of new software in your company is to choose a tool with an intrinsic methodology close to that of your company - whether in terms of the goals you're targeting, the processes already in place, or the vision you have of project portfolio management by the IT department.
It is therefore essential to question existing practices, in order to choose your project portfolio management tool accordingly.
Naturally, it's best to choose a tool that uses a methodology fairly close to the processes already in place in your company. But it's also worth noting that a project portfolio tool can also facilitate the implementation of new processes, as well as the gradual change of corporate culture - since a company's culture is the result of the behavior it adopts when faced with a particular environment. So if you change the environment, in particular by changing the software used, you change the culture!
While the choice of a new tool can be a powerful lever for supporting a change in practices, you must be careful to ensure that this transformation of working teams is also accompanied by decisions and directives. Offering a new tool is not enough to shake up habits that are ingrained in a company's daily routine.
To sum things up: choose a tool whose core methodology is not too far removed from your company's reality, or, if not, from the one you want to install.
AirSaas is a rather lightweight project portfolio management tool that doesn't aim to be an all-in-one software package, but includes most of the key functionalities an IT department needs to ensure project execution.
Jira
By integrating with Jira, Airsaas enables you to automatically retrieve project progress data from the platform. This gives you an effortless overview of all projects and their status.
Microsoft Teams
AirSaas is integrated with Microsoft Teams. The most important information on current projects will be sent automatically to your dedicated Teams communication channels. With this integration, you can easily share project progress with the whole company. If you use other solutions, please let us know!
Our challenge: in order to involve the business units, the IT department needs a PPM tool that they can quickly master, without friction. We believe that it's not by forcing businesses to work on complex software that companies will succeed in breaking down silos and structuring close business/IT collaboration.
We've taken this collaborative approach to its logical conclusion: AirSaas offers a search engine for solutions (external/internal) accessible to business managers. When a business has a need, it's already looking for solutions on its own, without necessarily notifying the IT department, which can even end up dealing with Shadow IT.
Our idea here is to give the IT department a solution for framing these practices and structuring their efforts to find solutions, while making them understand the technical constraints of the information system.
AirSaas is a lightweight PPM solution that can be integrated into existing systems, and which applies a strong collaborative methodology to involve the business units.
Choose an effective project portfolio management tool now.
