Enquire Project Portfolio Management (PPM) delivers program management capability though an online system that recognises the differences between program management and project management.
Program management encompasses a range of projects and activities aligned to achieve an overarching goal or strategy that is beyond the capability of a single project. Programs of work are often delivered over long periods of time, and involve numerous projects that contribute outputs, that when aggregated, contribute to overall strategic targets or goals.
Tactiv’s Enquire Project Portfolio Management (PPM) provides the ability to interact with data across a variety of perspectives program managers can manage and report in a manner that cannot be achieved through individual projects or project status reports.
Managing cross project dependencies, varied contributions and impacts, and competing resources, program management is concerned with measuring, monitoring and understanding benefits delivered across projects and project outputs.
Enquire is used extensively in the natural resources, health, international aid program management and government funded program delivery sectors to allow organisations to manage their portfolios of programs and projects.
Through a focus on understanding the data needed for management and reporting, Enquire uniquely provides project teams and program managers the tools to administer, manage and report on every aspect of a program.
How Enquire supports Program Management
Enquire offers a range of features that are designed to support program management needs beyond what a typical project management software system can deliver.
These include ability to support a portfolio/program/project hierarchy, align project outputs to program outcomes, manage performance, support multiple investors and extend system access across internal divisions and to external delivery agents.
Portfolio/Program/Project Hierarchy
Program management software needs to support the hierarchy of a portfolio/program/project structure. Large organisations, like governments may have a variety of programs of work under a financial portfolio. Each program can often feature a wide range of projects. Projects may deliver outputs to a single program or possibly multiple programs within a portfolio.
In Enquire program managers can set up multiple projects and identify how those projects contribute to a program. This means program managers can report on overall program status and the status of multiple projects, maintain an overview of resources and budgets across projects and project delivery agents, analyse performance and manage overall issues of compliance, governance and accountability.
Project managers meanwhile can manage all aspects of their project lifecycle in Enquire, ensuring all data is maintained in a single system so program information needs are supported without relying on other systems.
Aligning Strategies to Program Outcomes
Program managers need to understand and report on how a program supports an organisation’s strategic goals. This means a program management system needs to capture the data, issues, and impacts of each project, roll up important information to one or many programs of work, and potentially, aggregate other information, like finances, to a portfolio level.
With Enquire program managers can align project activity and outputs to a program so that contributions are connected to key strategies and goals. With tools to create, configure and standardise data management Enquire provides a basis to ensure data is structured and available in a single system.
This allows program managers to interrogate, collate and aggregate data at any time so they can accurately monitor, manage and report on the contributions of projects, and overall programs to important strategies or goals.
Performance Management and Reporting
Every project managed in Enquire can include key performance indicators (KPIs) that serve to track its performance. Frequently projects can also deliver contributions to more than one program, Enquire can be configured to capture these contributions and reflects them appropriately at a program level and against multiple programs.
Program managers can use Enquire to monitor and manage performance data, and report contributions across multiple projects so they can inform key stakeholders and decision-makers at a strategic level, rather than drowning them in detail.
Program management reporting processes are further enhanced through Enquire’s flexible reporting configurations. Program managers can configure standard reports based on an investor’s requirements, or deliver on-demand reporting, drawing on any data in the system covering current or past project outputs. This can include important information on project contributions linked to goals, high level issues and risks, finances, contractual obligations, compliance and historical data.
Supporting Multiple Investors
Programs are often funded by multiple investors, including different business areas within an organisation, differing levels of government or a combination of private donors and governments.
Individual projects may also be funded by one or more investors creating a more complex investor profile for a program. At a program or project level investors are focused on what is achieved for their investment, which can differ from one investor to another.
Aggregating and collating data to manage and report to a variety of stakeholders with differing reporting requirements is complex and time intensive. Using Enquire program managers can flexibly configure, monitor and compile project data to deliver information that suits each investor’s unique requirements.
Reporting can be templated, and automated, or delivered on-demand to meet special needs. With all project data in a single system, interrogating the system to create program views on behalf of an investor’s requirements is a matter of defining the data desired and reporting as needed.
Managing Contacts and Engagements
Enquire supports system access and use across business areas and entire organisations, including users in the field or in other locations. Additionally secure role based access can be extended to external parties such as project delivery agents, suppliers or contractors so they can interact with the system and program managers.
This is valuable in maintaining a single consolidated record of all interactions and engagements, and is critical to ensuring accurate and up-to-date data for program management.
Enquire’s contact and relationship management modules allows program managers to create and administer rich profiles for all internal and external contacts, including their engagements, tasks, involvements, communications and activities. Contacts can have a many to many relationship, providing flexibility to capturing how their engagements may differ from one project to another.
The needs of an online program management software system are different in scope and nature than a project management system. Understanding the difference between project management and program management is critical to ensuring an organisation can successfully support program management needs.
With Enquire organisations can manage all aspects of a program of work including connecting unlimited number of projects, aligning their outputs and contributions to a program or multiple programs, and aggregating data across any number of contributing projects to deliver useful decision-making information that is accurate, up-to-date and comparable over time.
To learn more about how Enquire Project Portfolio Management (PPM) can support effective program management for your organisation contact us.
