Accelerate Project Delivery and Improve Profitability with Oracle PPM Cloud

This article is intended to provide a foundation for understanding Oracle Project & Portfolio Management Cloud. It includes perspectives based on my experience as a PPM professional, my experience deploying PPM Cloud for Inspirage’s production use, and my experience working with the Oracle team. I hope this provides a useful first introductory article as my team will build on this by publishing more detailed articles.

In today’s world, the increased demands of customers and stakeholders require project-driven organizations to demonstrate proficiency in the project and financial management of their project portfolios. Classic project management was characterized by relatively immature project management methods, ad-hoc projects managed via standalone project management applications, and little integration with other corporate systems (financial, procurement, etc.). Today’s environment requires applications that meet the demands of modern project management in which:

• Organizations require holistic solutions that are simple, intuitive, and promote collaboration
• Projects occur globally across multiple locations and must be coordinated appropriately
• Stakeholders require insight via real-time analytics and performance reporting
• A connected workforce desires mobility and social interaction on projects and portfolios
• Integration with financial, procurement, and other corporate systems is paramount to aligning projects with strategy and executing them effectively

Oracle PPM Cloud is a complete and integrated solution for project and financial management that dramatically improves the way project-driven organizations work, enabling efficient and effective project management while ensuring smarter business decisions based on a single source of project truth.

What is Project Portfolio Management?

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is defined as the coordinated and centralized management of the methods, processes, and tools used by project managers and stakeholders to collectively plan, execute, manage, control, and analyze current and proposed projects in alignment with the organization’s strategic objectives.

Effective PPM provides organizations with the most effective way to implement strategic objectives as it bridges the gap between strategy and execution. Projects, programs, and operations that are properly aligned with strategic objectives allow stakeholders to ensure they are doing the right work with the appropriate resources to deliver the anticipated value to the organization.

To enable organizations to implement project portfolio management in accordance with this definition, Oracle PPM Cloud is based on six core components, each of which is paramount in any project undertaken within the organization. These six core components include:

• Project costing
• Project contracts and billing
• Performance reporting
• Project and task management
• Resource management
• Collaborative planning and communication

In addition, to truly implement project portfolio management that aligns projects with strategy, the PPM tools must fit into the flow of the organization’s customer, procurement, and financial management processes and applications. Oracle PPM Cloud does just that to provide a seamless, end-to-end solution for successfully accelerating project delivery and improving profitability.

Benefits of Oracle PPM Cloud for Project-Driven Organizations

Oracle PPM Cloud is an integrated, yet modular project portfolio management suite designed to streamline, coordinate, and manage project and financial management processes throughout the project lifecycle without burdening organizations with the overhead cost and effort associated with maintaining and managing hardware and software. Oracle PPM Cloud includes the functionality essential to modern project portfolio management environments by providing a complete and comprehensive PPM solution that allows organizations to accelerate project delivery and improve profitability.

Nine modules for project financial management and project execution make up the Oracle PPM Cloud solution. These include:

• Project Costing – capture and account for project costs and commitments
• Project Control – manage project financial planning, budgeting, progressing and forecasting
• Project Contracts – common framework for contract administration, management, and control
• Project Billing – ensure contract compliance when billing and recognizing revenue
• Project Management – collaborative project planning & scheduling for project teams
• Task Management – task info, details, collaboration, and social project management
• Resource Management – analyze and optimize resource allocation and utilization
• Project Performance Reporting – multi-dimensional reporting for project/financial analysis and action
• Oracle PPM Mobile – simple, intuitive, anywhere access to what you’re working on, statusing/updating tasks, and adding new work via iOS device

As a complete PPM solution, Oracle PPM Cloud benefits organizations in providing functionality for the end-to-end PPM processes that make up the project lifecycle including best-in-class project financials which are typically missing from classic project management applications. A truly holistic, cloud-based PPM solution, Oracle PPM Cloud not only provides significant savings to organizations in time, effort, and costs but is the first PPM solution to tie project management together with customer management, procurement and supply chain management, and financial management as part of the integrated Oracle Fusion Cloud. With social collaboration, transactional intelligence, mobile, and analytics embedded, Oracle PPM Cloud as a complete PPM solution provides the following key benefits:

• A single, real-time source of project truth
• Quicker and more accurate visibility into project financial details
• Improved project decision making and what-if capabilities
• Comprehensive project performance reporting and analytics
• Enable social project management and mobility to empower project participants
• Facilitate coordinated and controlled project management via standard processes and templates

In addition to the key benefits outlined above, organizations significantly benefit from Oracle PPM Cloud’s ability to enable them to accelerate the delivery of projects and increase profitability.

Project delivery is accelerated through simpler and more intuitive planning & scheduling that provides all project team members timely insight and tools to address project challenges and delays. Resource management functionality promotes resource analysis to identify and resolve resource overallocation and resource conflicts thus enabling project managers to implement action plans to complete project tasks on-time and/or potentially early. Enabling project team members to identify their work, update their tasks, and assign effort to additional activities via Oracle PPM Mobile streamlines and shortens project management processes that result in less time completing project management tasks and more readily resolves project issues and prevents project risks that classically result in project delays.

Oracle PPM Cloud helps organizations improve profitability not only by reducing the likelihood and impact of project delays as specified above but by improving the efficiency of project teams. Simple and intuitive modules that seamlessly tie the end-to-end PPM processes within an organization provide greater efficiency at lower costs for resource-intensive tasks such as gathering and integrating project financial information, obtaining details on the progress of project tasks, and preparing and distributing project performance reports. As a comprehensive, cloud-based solution for Project Portfolio Management, Oracle PPM Cloud is the preferred solution for modern PPM requirements.

Summary

As Project Portfolio Management solutions have evolved to meet the demands of today’s project stakeholders, PPM applications must address requirements for the core components of PPM including project costs, budgeting, contracts, financials, project and task management, resource management, performance reporting, analytics, and collaboration. Oracle PPM Cloud includes functionality to meet all of these requirements while bringing together the critical integrations with other corporate systems needed to provide a seamless, end-to-end, and global project portfolio management environment for all stakeholders within project-driven organizations.

Inspirage’s Project and Portfolio Management (Inspirage PPM) practice specializes in industry-leading solutions for PPM including Oracle PPM Cloud. Our comprehensive project and portfolio management offering focuses on cultivating the people, processes, and tools that form an effective project and portfolio management environment for our clients. Please be on the lookout for additional thought leadership on these topics and feel free to contact us in the meantime with any requests. For more information on these subjects, you may also see www.inspirage.com/ppm.

Charlie Morton