The next-generation project portfolio management tool

Tracking budgets and making the most of resources is central to the CIO's job. It is the combination to follow continuously in order to steer your activities. AirSaas pulls in the time and budget consumed through its connectors with your finance and project management tools. There is also a declaration module, so your information stays up to date, consolidated and exportable.

Your teams complain that the business is not engaged in the projects it asked for. And on the business side, the frustration shows in the delays and in requests that go unheard. ‍ AirSaas offers a common structure to follow when setting a project up. The dashboard view gives a shared understanding of the development constraints and lets the governance body decide collectively. The tool puts collaboration first and makes it possible to surface the problems encountered, the wins along the way, to share meeting minutes, and so on — bringing teams together around a common interest.

A poorly defined project is often the first source of frustration for IT teams, and always one of the main reasons a project is delivered late. In AirSaas, users are guided to ask themselves the right questions and fill in the information that good framing needs (expected benefits, success criteria, effort required, etc.). And bear in mind that filling it in can be done collaboratively and asynchronously, right up to the point where the project can move to “ready for approval” and be presented to the steering committee.

Measuring how confident the teams are in the project's success, on a regular basis, is essential. That way you can correct course before an announced failure becomes too costly for the company. In AirSaas you can send out a survey at regular intervals, and improve team engagement by listening to their concerns and smoothing out collaboration between the business and IT.

The content of your communication plan should let business leads and your leadership understand overall progress, the blockers and the risk of slippage. It should also celebrate the wins, to motivate the teams and encourage the reluctant to join the movement of projects that succeed. Reporting is often seen as time-consuming. AirSaas helps you through it by letting you generate your flash reports automatically and send them in one click.

A project management tool sets out to ensure one particular project is steered optimally. Often through a dashboard, it simplifies a number of tasks:

• Tracking the achievement of the project's objectives
• Monitoring the deadlines of the tasks assigned to the project team members
• Organizing and optimizing the delivery of each phase of the project
• Keeping visibility on how the project is going, in every respect
• The involvement and engagement of everyone working on the project

The first project portfolio steering tools were created some forty years ago, and yet new software keeps appearing regularly. ‍ Today all of these tools cover project portfolio management needs, but that has not always been the case. Some of them were originally built for project management.

The problem each one targeted when it was created

Looking at this chart, you can see that more than half of the project portfolio management tools were in fact originally designed to answer project management needs. Only later were they extended to cover both problems at once: project management and project portfolio management.

It is worth noting that some of these tools were developed to answer both needs (Sciforma, Ganttic) and that Planview was focused on project portfolio management from the very start. ‍ Today it is very rare to come across a tool that does not cover both aspects at once. That said, the differences between these products in the capabilities they offer come partly from the problem they targeted when they were first built — and partly from the view of project steering they support.

The role of the IT department has changed considerably over the past few decades. Once a function focused mainly on the technical side, it is now far more involved in solving business needs. On top of having to keep the information systems and the company's site running, the IT department is now expected to create value for its organization. ‍ As the nature of their projects changed, so did what CIOs expect from project portfolio management: they still need a tool to manage the technical work, but they also need software that simplifies their collaboration with the business, and the delivery of the projects they share.

The arrival of digital lets IT departments support their company differently, not least by weighing more heavily on the delivery of business objectives. An IT department that digitalizes business workflows now brings them a great deal, by simplifying their day-to-day work and making them more efficient. IT can even help a company change its business model, by supporting it in launching new online services. There is also the example Pierre Raschi (CEO of Référence DSI) tells: a butcher's shop was able to renew its ageing customer base thanks to a part-time CIO.

The rise of digital has therefore structurally led the IT department to be entrusted with more work, sometimes very far removed from simply keeping information systems running. With those new responsibilities, what IT departments expect from portfolio steering tools has inevitably changed.

Some project portfolio management tools, such as ERPs, try to answer every need an IT department might have. They are often effective, but it has to be said that they lack flexibility once they are in place.

Conversely, other tools (SaaS ones in particular) offer fewer features but can integrate with the tools already installed. Choosing that kind of solution avoids duplication, and above all reduces the cost of changing tool: upgrading a full ERP is a complex, time-consuming and expensive project. ‍ Each of these kinds of tool matches a view of the role the IT department should play in its company. If it goes for lighter, less complete tools, it is because it considers that its mission is no longer necessarily to answer every need its company has and will have at once, but rather to be able to adapt as the company evolves. Because those tools were easy to put in place and to change, the IT department stays able to answer a specific problem effectively, according to what its company expects.

Where a CIO wants to establish deeper collaboration with the business functions of their company, a tool that includes a collaborative space can be very interesting. That space structures the exchanges and centralizes the important information far more effectively than software like Slack or Teams. So this kind of tool can be a real lever for involving the business, and for making IT's support of them work better.

Jira By integrating with Jira, AirSaas automatically brings project progress data onto the platform. That gives you an overall view of every project and how far along it is, effortlessly.

Microsoft Teams ‍ AirSaas is integrated with Microsoft Teams. The most important information about projects in flight is sent automatically to your dedicated Teams channels. With this integration, you can share project progress with the whole company easily. If you use other solutions, do tell us.