Project Portfolio Management Implementation Report - PROJ6005 Analysis

This report provides an in-depth evaluation of a project implementation process for a digital platform in the healthcare sector, specifically focusing on Apollo Hospital's 'Ask Apollo' project. It examines the strategic value of project portfolio management (PPM) in a multi-faceted organization, add...Read More

Implementation Report
Implementation report
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Implementation Report
Table of Contents
Introduction...........................................................................................................................................2
Case.......................................................................................................................................................2
Evaluation..............................................................................................................................................3
Portfolio Management..........................................................................................................................5
Maturity Levels......................................................................................................................................6
Culture in corporate..............................................................................................................................7
Conclusion.............................................................................................................................................8
References:............................................................................................................................................9
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Implementation Report
Introduction
This report is based on the evaluation of a project implementation process that has been
already introduced in the previous assessment paper. The report is about launching a digital
platform for remote healthcare service, proposed by a renowned healthcare organization in
India, known as Apollo Hospital. The previous research has effectively planned a project
portfolio management function for optimizing optimum return on investment when the
resource is limited. After the success of the planning process, the organization is facing the
change resistance during the time of implementation, from the people who are directly
affected by the day-to-day operations. Digital healthcare service is a new healthcare
discipline in India; it creates complexity in the day-to-day operations and also staffs are
inexperienced. Even a conflict arises among some of the management executives who do not
find sustainability in this project management and project portfolio management. This report
is going to convince the executives and the people who are not ready to accept the changes in
the benefit of this project portfolio management. The purpose of the report is to make them
realize how important project portfolio management is when the company has lots of
diversifications in business and projects. In this effort of evaluation of project portfolio
management, the report highlights the skills, methodologies, tools, and techniques, needed for
project selection and managing the project portfolio.
Case
The project manager will help the chosen organization to understand the long term
investment goals. The short term nature of project management often creates an antithetical
situation with the long term sustainability orientation. The current project "Ask Apollo" is
chosen within the strategic context of the organization. This project is committed to carry out
the strategic goals of Apollo such as, to ‘impact on billion lives’ and create a global standard
of healthcare within the reach of common people (Vision & Mission - Apollo Hospitals,
2019).
A poor capacity planning can adversely impact on the project's costs, timeline, and agility.
Project portfolio management enables the firm to adopt a capacity centric approach; it saves
the project from the risk of avoiding the changes which ligers the project time, effort,
resources. As the project aims to bring the digital transformation of the healthcare service
delivery with the help of interactive media, the project will need necessary changes with the
evolution of technology in a very shorter timeframe. Being a larger organization, Apollo
hospital must address its capacity optimization as the IT products will be updated and the
price of the IT products will be increased (Brown, Julien, Richards & Burger, 2018). Apollo
hospital has appointed a project management officer or PMO who can assess the capacity and
the demand to prioritize the urgent task with an assessment of a comprehensive view.
The Project management officer or PMO is using the following tools to get a 360-degree
view of the project pipeline while assessing whether all the projects can be viewed and
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aligned to a particular strategy. The PMO will focus on all the aligned projects to create
balance in the portfolio management of Apollo, instead of prioritizing a single project. The
organization will execute the implementation by conducting continual planning which
generates measurable results and affirms the greater value achievement from the investment
of money and resources in the portfolio.
Change absorption will be difficult for the employees based on the degree of change. When
the employees struggle to adapt to the changes, it adversely affects the company morale. The
PMO communicates with the group of employees about every individual change and the
magnitude of change. Avoiding the risk-taking of absorbing change will lead the organization
to miss the opportunities for innovation and better customer value. To make all the necessary
changes the organization has to bear a huge technical debt because of the growing IT budget
and it slows down the project (Corfield & Paton, 2016). The PMO should prioritize the
essential changes to reduce technical debt and invest.
To realize the promised benefits the organization should make a customer journey roadmap.
The PMO of 'Ask Apollo' project aligns the digital transformation roadmap with the strategic
road map and customer journey roadmap (Zwikael & Smyrk, 2019); he also integrates the
dynamic components like a product roadmap, technology roadmap and the capabilities
roadmap for assessing the plan and timing to the employees and the customer base.
Evaluation
To evaluate the overall project portfolio, the organization is using the tool of value
engineering or VE to assess the sustainability of the project; it evaluates the costs and
functions of the IT products and services (Desai, Prajapati, & Patel, 2016)). Value
engineering or VE harness its power by applying a team-based and process-driven
methodology and also evaluate the cost and performance of the product without considering
its quality. The performance or functionality is divided by cost to optimize the value as drawn
below:
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Figure 1: Analysis of Value engineering
Source: (Kerzner, 2018)
The justification of using VE is achieved through its wide acceptance in the construction
industry for aiming to enhance the value of the innovative solution and idea for the civil
infrastructure projects. In the design and implementation phase of the civil infrastructure
project, the performance and construction alternatives are analyzed for obtaining a lower
budget (Mishra, 2019). These procedures also can be applied to cultural and social aspects to
enhance the sustainability of the project. The sustainability of the portfolio is optimized
through cost reduction; VE offers Bench marking, cost modelling, Design optimization and
implementation.
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Figure 2: value engineering model
Source: created by the author
With the change of social context, the organization might face the socio-political forces. It
can change the company's strategic landscape fundamentally. For instance, the digital
transformation might impact the billions of lives of the India population which may not
impact the lives of Ghana. The fundamental strategic landscape alteration may occur valuable
market opportunities by identifying the unmet needs of customers in different socio-political
landscape.
The evaluation tool for value engineering analyses the cost of production, design,
maintenance, and replacements. It includes the benefits management lifecycle as it improves
the products’ value in terms of sustainability by reducing the costs which are the main focus
in the benefits management lifecycle (Breese, Jenner, Serra & Thorp, 2015).
The PMO must ensure the benefits realization of day-to-day management which falls under
the concept of benefits management. Benefit management helps in satisfying the deliverable
goals effectively by identifying, measuring, monitoring and planning the benefits from the
beginning of the project to the completion, until the benefit is realized.
Portfolio Management
Project portfolio management is applied in a multi-project environment of an organization.
Project portfolio management carries out several projects under the monitoring of a PMO to
meet a similar strategic objective (Kaiser, El Arbi & Ahlemann, 2015). Portfolio management
helps to align the multiple projects with its strategic objectives by balancing the conflicting
needs within a resource stock and aims to achieve the optimum outcome.
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Cost
reduction
cost
analysis
Design
optimizat
ion
Impleme
ntation
Bench
marking

Implementation Report
Apollo hospital has adopted a project management office. It helps the Project management
officer in tracking the processes, changes, conflicts, risks, and assists in decision making in
multi-project management. Project Management Office may fail to deliver the promised
potential because of several reasons: lack of authority of the organizational buying; delivering
limited value which does not assist to the newcomer project manager; reducing the
supporting functions and converting into self-serving organizations; No defined ending; lack
of clarity in focus area; failing in streamline the process (Kerzner, 2018). If it does not work,
the alternative approach can be followed by integrating the impact analysis of the long term
resource allocation and scheduling for project portfolio management.
The organization is using a mathematically optimized tool to rank the projects by the ratio of
project value to project costs. This tool helps the Project managers to use qualitative analysis
to get a preferred portfolio of invested projects (Danesh, Ryan & Abbasi, 2015). The
organization is currently using the tornedo diagram for quantitative analysis of uncertainties
or risk probabilities. This probability coding assists a project manager to quantify the risks by
subjective assessment.
Maturity Levels
The organization is at in risk spreading stage as per the maturity level of project portfolio
management. As the Apollo hospital has a diversified portfolio, it indirectly reduces the risks
and costs which can be increased in single project management (Levin & Ward, 2016). The
sustainability issues bring various risks to different projects. When the organization is
choosing a cheap waged manufacturer, the government's passing of various labor laws creates
risks to digital transformation projects.
Figure 3: Maturity level of portfolio management
Source: (Kerzner, 2018)
OPM3 can be the best practice to measure the maturity of project management and project
portfolio management. OPM3 is formed of Knowledge, assessment, and improvement. It
addresses the way of progresses analyzing the current maturity stage to achieve higher
maturity by improved decision making, data-driven execution, alignment of personnel with
the policies of organizing, improved productivity, etc (Bento, Gomes & Romão, 2019).
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The project management officer must communicate with the program managers and the
project managers about the sustainability of OPM3 compared to their previous model
PMMM. He must address that the PMMM is effective for its feature of defining all the
maturity stages the project will meet but the sustainability will be reached when a model
defines what the enterprise will do for the progress (Silva, Duarte, Barros & Fernandes,
2019). OPM3 offers the best practices an organization should adopt; it not only helps in
improving the project management but also helps in improving overall portfolio management.
Culture in corporate
The stakeholders are the individuals whose involvement in the project can negatively or
positively affect project performance and completion. In this 'Ask Apollo' project, the
stakeholders are the internal stakeholders HR director, Technology manager, Facilities
manager and Accountant (Bourne, 2016). Technology manager will impact on the selection
of IT goods in the project in terms of its sustainability; HR manager will influence the project
in terms of recruitment of workforce and allocation of people in separate teams; accountant
will see the financial profit of the project in terms of investment.
As the origination ethically accepts the involvement of different stakeholders in decision
making, their perspectives on process improvement and benefits realization will be granted.
The project management officer of the Ask Apollo project should be very flexible in
understanding a different points of view and allow change management where it is required.
The company culture of Apollo hospital promotes collective activity instead of a standalone
decision making (Mok, Shen & Yang, 2015). The organization will redesign their project
after informing the decisions to all of the stakeholders.
The corporate culture's vision, mission, goals, and values should support the project portfolio
management and its sustainability criteria. When the project portfolio management is
culturally aligned with the company, it will be accepted by the stakeholders easily. The
corporate culture adopted by Apollo hospital will follow the global standard. It adopts the
approach of Geert Hofstede’s behavioural expectations in corporate meeting based on five
dimensions, such as power distance, uncertainty avoidance; individualism, Masculinity
versus feminity and Long term or short term orientation (Degens
et al. 2017). Apart from the
behavioral analysis, the company culture should be adopted in the work design; it will be
defined in the working hours and scheduling of the project managers and programmers; break
hours; flexibility of working with personnel.
The challenge of sustainability is reflected in the lifestyle of a project manager; In order to
complete a project within a given time, their personal life is affected by their professional
commitment. Their job satisfaction is affected and the long term involvement in the same
project hampers the project managers' career development. As the project managers are the
internal stakeholders of the company, they are also the external stakeholders of the society
people. In terms of sustainability, the company also bears the suffering of cost raised by
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society and its large impacts. To maximize the value of the shareholders, the company affects
the value of stakeholders like the project managers (Tharp, 2012).
Conclusion
The report highlights the tools and techniques used in evaluating the project portfolio
management in terms of the organization’s strategic objective. Apart from that, the report
highlights the performance improvement in the evaluation of project portfolio management as
the performance improvement is considered as the key determinant of achieving
organizational goal. The report identifies the impact of change management and the response
of the project manager during the implementation process. The response from the end of the
project manager and the impact of change resistance among the employee, led the researcher
to highlight the importance of company culture; in case of any adverse impact, this cultural
analysis will help the company to create the strategy.
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References:
Bento, I., Gomes, J., & Romão, M. (2019). The relationship between OPM3 and Project
Performance: A multiple case study. The Journal of Modern Project Management, 6(3)
Bourne, L. (2016). Stakeholder relationship management: a maturity model for
organizational implementation. Routledge.
Breese, R., Jenner, S., Serra, C. E. M., & Thorp, J. (2015). Benefits management: Lost or
found in translation. International Journal of Project Management, 33(7), 1438-1451
Brown, D. P., Julien, T., Richards, A., & Burger, L. (2018). U.S. Patent No. 10,042,674.
Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
Corfield, A., & Paton, R. (2016). Investigating knowledge management: can KM really
change organisational culture?. Journal of Knowledge Management, 20(1), 88-103
Danesh, D., Ryan, M. J., & Abbasi, A. (2015). Using analytic hierarchy process as a
decision-making tool in project portfolio management. WASET International Journal of
Economics and Management Engineering, 9(12), 4194-4204.
Degens, N., Endrass, B., Hofstede, G. J., Beulens, A., & André, E. (2017). ‘What I see is not
what you get’: why culture-specific behaviours for virtual characters should be user-tested
across cultures. AI & society, 32(1), 37-49.
Desai, T. N., Prajapati, S. R., & Patel, H. R. (2016). Application of value engineering to
rework reduction in ship building project. In Matec Web of conferences (Vol. 40, p. 02008).
EDP Sciences.
Kaiser, M. G., El Arbi, F., & Ahlemann, F. (2015). Successful project portfolio management
beyond project selection techniques: Understanding the role of structural
alignment. International Journal of Project Management, 33(1), 126-139
Kerzner, H. (2018). Project management best practices: Achieving global excellence. John
Wiley & Sons.
Levin, G., & Ward, J. L. (2016). Maturity models in project management. In Gower
Handbook of Project Management (pp. 101-114). Routledge.
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Mishra, A. K. (2019). Implementation status of value management in project management
practice in Nepal. International Journal of Management Studies, 6(1), 1.
Mok, K. Y., Shen, G. Q., & Yang, J. (2015). Stakeholder management studies in mega
construction projects: A review and future directions. International Journal of Project
Management, 33(2), 446-457.
Silva, R., Duarte, N., Barros, T., & Fernandes, G. (2019, June). Project Management
Maturity: Case study analysis using OPM3® model in manufacturing industry. In 2019 IEEE
International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Innovation (ICE/ITMC) (pp. 1-8).
IEEE.
Tharp, J. (2012). Project management and global sustainability. Project Management
Institute.
Vision & Mission - Apollo Hospitals. (2019). Retrieved 1 October 2019, from
https://bangalore.apollohospitals.com/bannerghattaroad/about-us/company-overview/vision-
mission/
Zwikael, O., & Smyrk, J. R. (2019). Project Management: A Benefit Realisation Approach.
Springer.
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