Your company's transformation deserves a PPM tool that helps you overcome the most common project portfolio management problems. With AirSaas, you can speed up your decision-making, maintain total transparency on your project priorities, and say goodbye to micro-management of tasks.
Thomas Sagnimorte
DSI at Millet Mountain Group
Great tool that allows us to streamline the management of our project portfolio. I recommend!
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.
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!
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!
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. 👍
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...) to provide you with the information you need to manage your project activities at a macro level.
The company's strategy is clear, the project governance body is in place, and you now need to provide relevant and 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 at the right time. AirSaas gives you access to a dashboard of your project portfolio. You can use the filters to find the projects on which you should focus your efforts.
We all know how important good reporting is. The more company executives and management are kept up to date on the progress of various projects, the more the frustrations disappear. However, the process of gathering the information needed for this reporting is a time-consuming task for your employees.
That's why we offer you the automatic flash report. Generate a presentation (.ppt, .pdf, URL) with one click, with all the updated data formatted in slides in your company colors.
Each view of the project portfolio provides you with different insights. The Timeline gives an overview of the projects with their associated milestones. At a glance, you can see overruns, dependencies, and projects that are carried out in parallel.
Consider different scenarios by moving projects in time and choose the strategy that brings the greatest benefit. The tool will display recommendations based on different factors (availability of resources, importance of the project, delay on important milestones, etc.).
Budget monitoring and resource optimization are key tasks for the CIO. To manage activities, this combination must be continuously monitored.
AirSaas uses its connectors to retrieve the time and budget consumed with your financial and project management tools. In addition, a reporting module is available to provide up-to-date, consolidated and exportable information.
Start now with an effective project flash report solution
Your teams complain about the lack of commitment of the business units to the requested projects. As for business units, they are frustrated by delays and the failure to take their requests into account.
AirSaas offers a common structure to follow for the implementation of a project. The dashboard view allows for a shared understanding of development constraints and collegial decision-making by the governance body.
The tool prioritizes collaboration and allows users to report problems encountered, successes along the way, share meeting minutes, etc. to involve teams around a common interest.
A poorly defined project is often the primary source of frustration for IT teams, and always one of the main reasons for project delivery delays.
On AirSaas, users are guided in asking themselves the right questions and filling in the key information to get a good scope (expected gains, success criteria, efforts to be made, etc.). Next, you can fill it in collaboratively and asynchronously until the project is ready to be validated and presented to the steering committee.
It is essential to regularly measure the degree of confidence in the success of the project among the teams. This will enable you to make adjustments before the predicted failure becomes too costly for the company. On AirSaas, you can send a survey at regular intervals, and thus improve team engagement by listening to their concerns and streamlining collaboration between business units and IT.
The content of your communication plan should enable business managers and top management to understand the overall progress, the blocking points and the risks of slippage. It should also highlight successes to motivate teams and encourage reluctant parties to join the movement towards successful projects. Reporting is often considered a time-consuming activity. AirSaas helps you in this process by allowing you to automatically generate your flash reports to be sent with a single click.
Start now with an effective project flash report solution
Many people confuse project management tools with project portfolio management tools. However, these two types of tools do not serve the same purposes.
So what is the difference between these two types of software?
The project management tool aims to ensure optimal management of a particular project. Often thanks to 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 it develops, a company is led to carry out more and more projects at the same time. While good communication and a structured organization may be sufficient to manage a few projects jointly, there inevitably comes a time when the implementation of a project portfolio management tool becomes an essential ally in maintaining operational efficiency.
To summarize, what is the purpose of a project portfolio management tool?
It allows 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 tools 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 software does not all offer the same features is that it depends on how they were designed historically. But it is also a consequence of the vision of project management that they advocate.
But why are there different visions of project management in IT departments?
The role of the IT department has changed significantly in recent decades. From a department focused mainly on technology, it is now much more involved in meeting business needs. Besides 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 the organization.
As the nature of their projects has evolved, the expectations of CIOs in terms of project portfolio management have also gradually evolved: they still need a tool to manage technical tasks, but also software that simplifies their collaboration with business units and the execution of projects they have in common.
Digital technology has given CIOs the opportunity to support their companies in a different way, particularly by having a greater impact on the achievement of business goals. A CIO who digitizes business workflows can make a huge difference by simplifying their daily lives and optimizing their efficiency. The IT department can even help a company change its business model by supporting it in the implementation of new online services.
The rise of digital technology has therefore structurally led to the IT Department being entrusted with more tasks, some of which are sometimes very different from the simple maintenance of information systems. With new responsibilities, the IT Department's expectations in terms of project portfolio management tools have therefore inevitably changed.
The transformations described above inevitably lead to a change in the way the IT department will interact with the employees of its company. In fact, an IT department focused mainly on technical tasks will tend to try to keep the behavior of the various users of the information systems under control. Whereas an IT department that wants to add value to its employees' 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 in detail.
Thus, depending on the mission it sets itself, the IT Department will not need the same type of project portfolio management tool.
To contrast these two styles of IT, they could be represented by Maslow's pyramids:
Once you understand that not all project portfolio management tools offer the same features, you have to ask yourself: what type of tool will enable me to achieve my IT department's goals?
Of course, there are project portfolio management tools that are more or less comprehensive, offering various features such as:
But rather than just listing the features, project portfolio management tools can be grouped into different categories.
Some project portfolio management tools such as ERPs try to meet all the needs that IT departments may have. While they are often effective, they lack flexibility once implemented.
Conversely, other tools (particularly those in SaaS mode) offer fewer features but have the ability to integrate with tools that are already installed. Choosing this kind of solution avoids duplication and, above all, reduces the cost of changing tools: upgrading to a full ERP is a complex, time-consuming and costly project.
Each of these types of tools reflects the perspective on the role that the IT department should play in the company. If it chooses to implement lighter and less comprehensive tools, it is because it considers that its mission is no longer necessarily to have to respond to all the needs that its company has and will have simultaneously, but rather to be able to adapt to the company's evolution. These tools are therefore easy to set up and change, and the IT Department can continue to respond effectively to specific issues according to the expectations of the company.
If the CIO wants to establish closer collaboration with his company's business units, it may be very worthwhile for him to set up a tool that includes a collaborative space. Such a space will make it possible to structure exchanges and centralize important information much more efficiently than with tools such as Slack or Teams. This kind of tool can therefore be a real driver for involving the business lines and optimizing their support by the IT teams.
Project portfolio management software that has been developed to provide a high-quality user experience has two major assets for an IT department.
First off, getting business departments on board is much easier when they are offered a tool with an intuitive interface: it is difficult to expect strong commitment from business units when IT teams simply invite them to work on tools that were not designed with business profiles in mind. Project portfolio management tools with a good UX are therefore generally one of the options to be favored for a CIO wishing to bring IT and business teams to collaborate together effectively.
The other major benefit is the rate of adoption of the project portfolio software: UX-focused tools are quick to get to grips with and do not require much training for business users. This is a strong point that should be taken into account by any IT manager who wants to involve their company's business units more in IT projects.
All tools contain a methodology. One of the tips for optimizing the adoption rate of new software in a company is to choose a tool with an intrinsic methodology similar to that of the company: whether in terms of the goals being pursued, the working practices already established, or the IT department's vision of project portfolio management.
It is therefore essential to question existing practices, in order to choose your project portfolio management tool accordingly.
Of course, we recommend choosing a tool that uses a methodology fairly similar to the processes already in place in your company. However, it should also be noted that a project portfolio tool can also help to implement new working methods and gradually change the corporate culture. The culture of a company is the result of the behavior it adopts in a particular environment. So if you change the environment, particularly by changing the software used, you change the culture!
While the choice of a new tool can be a catalyst for a change in practices, you still have to make sure that this transformation of the teams is also accompanied by decisions and guidelines: offering a new tool is not enough to shake up the habits ingrained in the daily life of a company.
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 fairly lightweight project portfolio management tool that does not aim to be an all-in-one software package, but which includes most of the key features that an IT department needs to ensure the execution of its projects.
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: To successfully involve business units, the IT department needs a PPM tool that they will be able to use quickly and without friction. We believe that forcing business units to work with complex software is not the way for companies to break down silo mentality and structure close collaboration between business units and IT departments.
We have taken the collaborative approach to the max: AirSaas offers a search engine for (external/internal) solutions accessible to business managers. When a department has a need, it already looks for solutions on its own without necessarily informing the IT department, which may even end up facing shadow IT.
The idea here is to provide the IT Department with a solution to manage these practices and structure their efforts to find solutions, while helping them understand the technical constraints of the IS.
AirSaas is a lightweight PPM solution that integrates with existing tools and uses a strong collaborative methodology to involve the various professions.
Choose an effective project portfolio management tool now.
