Five problems that paralyze PPM strategy

Guest Contributor: Tempo

Staying focused on the most important tasks is an age-old challenge. And keeping an entire team, or a team of teams, on track is even harder. Enter PPM – project portfolio management – finally, the solution to all of those problems.

Except PPM isn’t living up to expectations yet. Remote work and globally distributed teams have added layers of complexity, making it a struggle to stay on the same page. 

According to a 2024 survey on portfolio management from Forrester Consulting, 35% of global decision makers feel their company has poor communication between departments or teams. Despite investing in PPM tools for better alignment, over one third of those leaders say their organizations haven’t seen the ROI from those efforts.

That doesn’t mean portfolio management isn’t a great investment, but it does show that simply adding a PPM tool can’t guarantee the results you want. So how can you make sure the juice is worth the squeeze?

How PPM strategies get stuck

Considering how expensive and time consuming a PPM rollout can be, it’s important to understand what bogs down a PPM implementation. 

1. Cost barriers: Many enterprise-level PPM tools are incredibly expensive, requiring executive buy-in and long sales cycles.
2. Implementation challenges: Without the right alignment, expertise, and training, a PPM solution can be nearly impossible to roll out.
3. Rigidity: Some of the top PPM tools are far too rigid, making teams adapt to workflows instead of allowing flexible ways of working.
4. Complexity: Enterprise-level PPM tools are often complex, slowing down adoption and frustrating users.
5. Integration issues: Some PPM tools suffer from broken, buggy, limited integrations that are a headache to manage.

What to look for before investing in a PPM tool

Two of the most common frustrations uncovered in the Forrester survey: Current portfolio management processes focus on project management over strategy, and A lack of integration with multiple tools and teams fuels business challenges. 

1. Ease of use: Make sure you choose a PPM tool that’s easy to adopt and integrate with other tools in use across the organization.
2. Modularity: Allow teams to implement the tools that adapt to their preferred ways of work, without monolithic solutions that force everyone to conform. 
3. Flexibility: Break down silos by using a PPM tool that can accommodate a variety of methodologies in a unified dashboard.
4. Transparency: Your PPM solution should create a line of sight between teams doing the work on the ground and executives who need real-time insights to steer the business. 

Getting the most out of your PPM toolkit

If your business chooses a monolithic PPM solution and imposes it across the board, you’ll have a hard time getting organic buy-in. The ideal scenario is adoption from the ground up: Choosing a tool that teams already use or want to use.

Follow these guidelines to increase adoption and start achieving the ROI you were probably promised on a sales call:

Integrate processes across the business

A holistic approach that ensures you have a tool your teams want to work in (and doesn’t take them away from how they are already working) will improve your chances of widespread adoption and ROI on your software expenditure. Assess your company culture and bring in departmental leaders to get buy-in.

Broaden stakeholder accessibility to data to improve alignment

By building real-time dashboards and analytics, you can keep stakeholders in the know and your teams aligned with your company-wide priorities.

Prioritize transparency and accessibility

Dozens of features are no use if the tool is too complicated to use or is only useful to one or two teams. Look for tools that have the most intuitive interfaces, are integrable with the most solutions, or are easy to adopt for newcomers.

Ditching silos to achieve scale

Going back to the Forrester survey above: 39% of respondents feel their company is misaligned in their choice of investments due to a lack of visibility into one another’s work. 

That’s why it’s so important to bring in transparency and focus on ease-of-use that promotes organic adoption. That’s why you should be using flexible tools that adapt to how teams already work, and looking for modular solutions that each team can implement from the ground up. 

Tempo’s SPM suite is designed to live up to those requirements.

• Structure PPM turns Jira chaos into order. It tracks all of your organization’s projects in a single, easy-to-read view. Teams can easily collaborate, share resources, and identify bottlenecks before they happen – while surfacing real-time insights at the executive level.
• Strategic Roadmaps eradicates silos by helping you create boardroom-ready roadmaps that you can share with all relevant stakeholders. You can choose from a variety of pre-built and customizable templates, including timeline, swimlane, and table views.
• Timesheets is Jira’s #1 time tracking software, allowing your teams to record the time and effort they are putting into each task and project in your portfolio with just a few clicks. It saves teams hours of manual data input with AI-assisted recommendations.
• Capacity Planner makes sure team members have the capacity and proper skills to complete work in the right time frame.
• Financial Manager gives simple, clear, real-time views of costs and budgets.
• Custom Charts allow powerful reporting and customization that bring insights to the surface for team leads and execs.
• BI Connector for Jira provides a no-code connection between Power BI and Jira for more in-depth analysis.

Each of these tools has its own benefits. Taken together, they bring out the ROI of PPM and make sure your organization’s scale is a multiplier, not a hindrance. 

Try Tempo risk free

Are you ready to maximize your PPM investment and get rid of silos? Tempo and Isos can help you access the tools and guidance necessary to support your business, no matter how big it is.

If you’ve been using a monolithic solution and want to know more about your options, you can read more about it in Isos' blog post or sign up for a personalized demo with one of Tempo’s experts. 

If you want to try a free trial of any of the tools covered in this blog, or some of our other solutions for capacity planning, reporting, and more, you can see the link to the Atlassian Marketplace below.