A CIO Perspective on PPM

Interview with the CIO of a major brand - discussing the role of IT; why PPM; why Innotas; who uses PPM and why; results; and lessons learned. Unfortunately the PR department of the company this CIO works for does not allow their employees to be featured in interviews so I had to omit all direct references to them. Other than that, the content of the interview has not been changed.

What is your mission for IT at your company, and what role does PPM play in carrying out that mission?
IT’s mission is very straightforward: to execute business initiatives that produce profitability and revenue growth. You can see from this statement that our partnership with the business is a key to fulfilling our mission and this is where project portfolio management (PPM) comes in. With PPM we are able to manage our human capital, prioritize our project portfolio, and build partnership with the business. This gives us accountability, visibility, and credibility. And our business partners are fully engaged in prioritizing what we do.

Why have you selected Innotas for PPM?
I am focused on results and don’t have time for applications that take forever to implement and become a huge overhead. We looked for a solution that: a) gave us best of class capabilities while keeping thinks simple; b) business users would want to use, c)  was readily available and rapidly implemented; and d) was inexpensive. Innotas met all these requirements.

What are the key categories of users for PPM in your organization and what is their focus in using it?
We have three main categories of users: executives, managers and team members.
-     Executives: they track how projects and portfolios relevant to their business area are doing, and they look at trade-offs when making prioritization decisions.
-     Managers: they track how their direct reports are executing on projects – the focus is on the projects they own, detailed tasks, and open issues.
-      Team members: they track and execute tasks, milestones, requests, issues.

What are the results that you and your team have seen from PPM?
In terms of value, we have a better handle on delivering on-time and on-budget – these are the table-stakes of PPM. On a more intangible yet very strategic side, by having clear visibility over where time is spent and how it compares to our estimates, we are getting better at project and resource planning. This is huge because all the planning in the world is useless if the estimates are off. Visibility also gave us a realistic picture of how much we are spending on break-fix and maintenance, which helps us better plan on our resource capacity and commitments.

So, what lessons have you learned that you want to pass on to your peers who are embarking on the PPM voyage?
A huge factor in our success is that from day one we engaged our business partners in the program management office (PMO) process and in the selection of the PPM application. I cannot stress enough how important this is! And it has paid great dividends: having shared the decisions, everybody is vested in succeeding. With the data we now have available, priority decisions and trade-offs are so much easier to make.

Another big factor was making sure that we could get value with minimal data entry to start with, and knowing that if we want to, we can always add more and start tracking at a more granular level. For example, it’s helpful to be able to start tracking at the milestone level and later go to the task level. Some systems force you to be granular from the beginning.

How does this compare to your experiences with PPM?

--Alex Lobba