How To Optimize Your Project Management Portfolio

Read The Transcript:

We’re trying out transcribing our podcasts using a software program. Please forgive any typos as the bot isn’t correct 100% of the time.

Galen Low: You wake up in a cold sweat. Did you remember to update the resourcing plan to reflect the staff you need? Did you add the right date to the status report before it went to the exec team? And what did Suze mean when she said that she had sold through a deal that's gonna add 8 new projects to the pipeline next month?

Managing a project is one thing. But the orchestration of multiple projects to avoid negatively impacting the rest of the business — is a whole other thing. 

If manual administration, opaque departmental silos, and the inability to see the bigger picture has got you losing sleep... keep listening. 

We're gonna be diving into the delicate art of project portfolio management and how the right tools can reduce overhead, give visibility, and build trust across your organization.

Hey folks, thanks for tuning in. My name is Galen Low with The Digital Project Manager. We are a community of digital professionals on a mission to help each other get skilled, get confident, and get connected so that we can amplify the value of project management in a digital world. If you wanna hear more about that, head on over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com.

All right. Today, we are talking about a very juicy topic... project portfolio management. And specifically, how to get executive buy-in for investing in a tool that helps your projects and your business run better. So with me today is a leader in this area, Michelle Watkins—Founder and Managing Partner of project consulting firm Global PMO Partners.

Hello Michelle! 

Michelle Watkins: Hi Galen. How are you? 

Galen Low: I'm doing good. How are you doing? 

Michelle Watkins: I'm doing well. Thank you for having me today. 

Galen Low: Great to have you on the show. Great to have you on the show, and it's also been great to get to know you as we've been prepping for this. So Michelle and I have been nerding out on project portfolio management for several weeks, bouncing back and forth some ideas.

I'm excited to dig in. But first, I thought I wanted to just give our listeners a chance to get to know you a little bit. I know you've got deep expertise and really extensive experience working with executives to transform and optimize project-based businesses. I'm just wondering, could you tell us a bit about why you started Global PMO Partners and also a little bit about the impact that you drive for your clients?

Michelle Watkins: Absolutely. So, for me, I've been in the program and project management space for large companies for quite some time. I always found myself doing my day job as a project manager or later as a PMO leader in that, over time the types of tools and technology that we use were absolutely key in how we streamlined our processes at every level, right?

To ensure data integrity and real-time visibility. We're coupled with those, the key success factors there. We've all been there, right? We've used those traditional project management tools at one point, our project management journey, Microsoft Project Excel, Google Sheets, Microsoft Access. We probably have tried it all.

I think I probably have seen somebody try to manage a project in Word or Quip or something like that too. But, you know, I think the problem that we all faced as project managers and PMO leaders is like we're accustomed to project plans and what that looks like in something like Microsoft Project. 

But one of the things that we've really struggle with over time is how do we then bring that together into a one-stop-shop? How do we then bring visuals together for our clients and for our business leaders in such a way that they've got one tool, that has project plans, RAID logs, change requests, contact lists, and then really the power of reports and dashboards, and really make that a seamless experience.

So, you know, read it, we've all been there, right? Whether you're a professional services organization or an IT organization, you're in clients in your leadership, they don't wanna see your project plan details. So brains don't think like a PM. They want pictures driven by real data, aggregated views that tell a story.

So 13 years ago, I found a platform called Smartsheet, which is a lot of the foundation of what we do at Global PMO Partners every day. We use that as a tool. We are a platinum partner of Smartsheet. And with Smartsheet, what I've been able to do in various organizations that I have been a part of internally, is that we could achieve all that was needed that I mentioned above in a one-stop shop project data-driven information data that I could aggregate for the first time and make those pictures and tell that story with an end-to-end project management process.

And so finally we had that solution that was truly scalable and repeatable, transparent, real-time, collaborative, integrated and automated. And something I can feel proud to put in front of my clients and my executives that I felt was meaningful. 

Galen Low: I love that evolution. And I'm someone who, guilty is charged managing projects using an Excel sheet, managing projects in MS project, not even like the enterprise version. And it was kind of my own domain, right?

It's like the world of project management for me and not really suited to share that data, not really suited to be something that has business function, apart from being my way of looking at my project. But I also love that progression of how project management software has evolved, arguably becoming more collaboration software, right?

Everybody's in there doing work, updating tasks, and then this other level, right, of visualizing some important business information and business intelligence about how a project is running. Two folks who aren't even necessarily, in the project team. And in your case, right, building a customized dashboard so that, the executive layer leadership teams, people who are running the business from a pretty high level can look in and make some sense of that without that moment, right? 

Where, I've done it in my career where I'm like, "Look at this Gantt chart". And everyone's like, no, we don't wanna look at your Gantt chart. Sorry. Just tell us how it's going, please."

Michelle Watkins: Yes, exactly. Exactly. So, one of the things that I love about the Smartsheet journey too, right? Because I've rolled it out internally at companies, been that PMO leader and then established Global PMO Partners to build the solution for our clients every single day is the trend and the stories time after time of just rolling it out. Even just at the project management level, right? Take away the project portfolio level is with something like Smartsheet, being the integrated solution, a project manager is consistently reported a 40% to 50% time savings of not having to do admin work.

Like, bringing everybody's status together into your version of something like that self-serve capability and the ability to know what changed and when. And that's huge, right? That means, you actually get to go do your job as a project manager or reduce, your hours so you're not working 60, 80 hour work weeks.

I think that's a huge attribute as well. 

Galen Low: Absolutely. That's a huge win. And I mean, I know a lot of the project managers I talk to, at any level of their career, they're like, I wanna be more strategic. I don't wanna be doing all this sort of like admin. And is a tool the solution to everything?

No. But can it help? Absolutely. Like just time saving, being more efficient. And it's also a really good, we'll get into this, but it's also a really good case for why a tool might be something that is beneficial for the business. 

Michelle Watkins: Yes, exactly. 

Galen Low: Cool. Let's take two half steps back and I thought maybe we could just set the stage for our listeners. Cuz we're talking about project portfolio management and I thought maybe we could just define that.

What do we mean by project portfolio management and also why is that important to businesses? 

Michelle Watkins: Well, if you think about it, most of us that have sat in the project management space, we get involved at the point somebody's made a decision about a project. Either we want it or, cause it's a professional services organization, and a PM needs to get assigned to go take it from there. 

Or it's an IT project and somebody has looked at the projects and approved it and the project manager's been assigned. So we're used to taking it from the point we've been assigned forward and, delivering on that with the teams and the resources and the project plans and all those fun things.

And that's great at a project management level. You need to take it up a level to actually, what's the whole portfolio of a project? What makes a project, 'a project'? So, you know, what we typically see, if it's a professional services organization, somebody's been on the sales end, pounding the pavement and trying to deliver a deal.

It's sitting in probably a CRM, such as Salesforce, and then that data needs to come in to a project pipeline, right, and that the leadership's looking at. It's important for the leadership to look at it of, when's that project wanna go live? Or, do they have an idea? Do we have people that are gonna be available, to make that project happen during that particular time? 

The financials around, any given project and where it hits in the particular quarter is huge, especially if it's a publicly traded company. And so really bringing that data up a level to what makes a project, 'a project', having that pipeline attributes around that pipeline, such as the financials or the leaders or, what type of category particular project might be in, and being able to do KPIs and dashboards on that data is helpful.

Then once a project has been assigned to a project manager, that seamless capability of something like Smartsheet to be able to take that suite of templates that you've defined in your process and spin them up over and over again at scale and ensure data integrity of how those things roll up. And then on the flip side of that, right, we've already made a project-to-project in your project intake, your project pipeline.

The project's now living and breathing with a lot of great data that needs to resurface back up to that leadership level or that client level or that region level. And so that then goes into the rest of the project portfolio, which is all of your different roll up views. So you've got all this data coming together in something like Smartsheet that's reportable, that you can write any kind of pivots and charts and graphs, and you can do it at every level, right?

The region level, the executive level, the client level, the user level, and power of being that one single source of truth to drive all of that data. It just gives you a much higher level of confidence of data integrity, you know, that which says that going on with this whole pipeline of projects is really true.

Galen Low: I really love that. And I think some of the things that I'm really relating to is just a notion of, yeah, I mean, project management, you touched on it earlier, right? Where as a project manager, we might be just looking at one or a couple of projects. But when we're looking at a portfolio of projects, we're looking at the relationships between projects, in terms of staffing, in terms of other resources, in terms of the sales pipeline. 

I love that tie in. In terms of operations, right? And how it all plugs together in terms of the people involved and, hitting milestones, hitting strategic goals. And then I think the big clincher there is just like, wow, if you're kind of looking at the business as a, portfolio of projects or portfolios of projects alongside operations, or maybe you're in a business that is very project heavy.

I mean, I was just talking to a group and they were like, yeah, we've got 2000 active projects right now. They were a very massive organization. But still, wow. Okay. And then what do we look at? I love that angle of, okay, well, how do you want to cut this data? Like, do you wanna see regionally what's going on with these projects?

Do you wanna see by customer category? Do you want to see by team and giving this business intelligence that it's, it's much more than just how are our projects doing. It's a lot more about orchestration and sort of impact to strategy and bringing all that data together.

Michelle Watkins: Absolutely. Well, and I think the thing I love about this too is, we've all spent those days and those hours and those weeks trying to pull all of our projects together into some sort of slide deck or, we rebuilt data so that it can be visual on some sort of calendar. 

But then the data didn't sync up and so this integrated solution allows you to really kind of get rid of the slide decks because you can rebuild that with the real live data, to give that visual and real time information at every single level. And then just even the calendar views when you're thinking about the whole portfolio of projects and how things stack up by quarter or by month or whatever.

Especially for IT organizations, it helps you make more educated decisions of where do we need to push out, that we can't do something in Q3, it's gonna have to wait till Q4 because, whatever that story is.

Galen Low: You know, I'm picturing in my head that some of our listeners are like yeah, I know.

This is how we run our businesses. And on the other side of the spectrum, maybe some people listening are going, wow, my mind is getting blown here. Because I always thought of a tool, especially a tool like Smartsheet, right? As just, you an incremental evolution from what I was doing before in Microsoft Project.

I know that's kind of how I saw it as well. But to try and get from that headspace and that mindset into what you're talking about, right? Where it's like a dashboard of project portfolios and the kind of data that it's servicing. I mean, without giving away your secrets and maybe at a high level, like what is the process for making that leap, right?

From like, okay, we've got some projects that are running concurrently, but you know, that's just how we've been doing business to, okay, how can we get this like, 50k, 100k foot view on our portfolio of projects and like different types of data. And also to your point, right, like how that impacts our strategy, not just, you know, how a project is getting delivered. What does the process looks like? What are the steps? 

Michelle Watkins: Well, I always tell my clients, let's take the approach of crawl, walk, and run. Right? First start with, the most fundamental, what's easy to transform into Smartsheet. It's gonna be your project content.

Take it out of Microsoft Project or Excel or whatever, and build out what that template solution is and use the more basic capabilities of Smartsheet to bring that together because it's still very powerful. You've got your ability to create a template, save 'em as new, and got your repeatable processes as you've got reports at the project level, and you can still do something, if you need to aggregate very easily. And really kind of stabilize that process and get that change implemented within your organization usually at that project management level. 

Been there. I've been within an organization where I rolled it out and people started adopting it, and when they start saving 40% to 50% of their PM time, it was great for the consultants on our team. They were like, oh my gosh, I don't have to write up a status report and email and send it to every PM that I'm doing work for.

I can actually just update something like Smartsheet. It's realtime and it pulls together. So start there. Start with that foundation of project management. Then you're gonna start to see the light bulbs are gonna go on at the leaders when they go, wait, you're now have all that data, real time at your fingertips, at a project level.

How can I bring that to get up at that starting point of what makes 'a project' so we can get some attributes and start planning more effectively of when these projects are coming in, and do we have enough people to get them done? And how does that hit the financial? So that's kind of that second building block to get you from crawl to walk.

And then third, becomes that end-to-end project portfolio management. Like we've got project intake and now we've got projects living and breathing in Smartsheet rolling up and now let's start aggregating that to all the meaningful information to all the various leaders, from executives to clients, to regions to et cetera.

I, I tell people my most I guess, I knew the solution was successful for me during my 3 years running the HR PMO at Salesforce when I built out a solution for one of our 15 COEs within HR. And that executive was on the train, on BART coming back from getting into the office and he could look at his dashboards, look at it real time.

Click into the data to look at the underlying data and would call and ask meaning questions because he had the data, his fingertips. Not just the pictures, but if he wanted to click in, he could. And that's successful because now the leaders and the executives feel like they've got something that's not stagnant, that's not on a slide deck, that they can touch and breathe every day. Especially with something that's a particular project that may be happening every single minute of the day across the globe. 

Galen Low: That's an incredible use case. And I know that, like a lot of businesses, right, they're architected around these cycles, right? Reporting cycles. From monthly reporting, quarterly reporting, annual reporting, annual planning, right? 

Like this kind of just crushes that and takes it apart a little bit. It's like, well, why? When you can look at the data, like we probably structure our businesses that way cuz it takes time to pull some of that data together. Also, sometimes they're just logical performance measurement points, but just that notion of like, actually, you know what? I'm just gonna check in on this project while I'm on the train on my mobile device in real time. 

I don't have to be like, Hey, can so and so update this report so I can have a look at it this afternoon? It's actually like, you know, it's happening there and it's something I can proactively look at.

Do you find that is sometimes terrifying though for the project manager who would normally want to like button that report up a little bit before someone goes and like, looks at the raw data? 

Michelle Watkins: Yeah, that was part of the challenge for me is getting the project managers to be okay that not only their leaders and their executives all the way up the chain, we're gonna look at their data.

But it was a mentoring opportunity for them to always keep their projects up to date. Right? Make it real time. And they became very comfortable that, it was okay to be that transparent on a more frequent basis with their leaders. And it really kind of tore down just your traditional walls and silos and really created a lot of trust and transparency, which I think is, been one of the just nice benefactors of that altogether.

The other thing I was gonna hit on, Galen, too is that with this solution, I have seen just running some of my own IT projects or running a HR payroll system implementation for, a city here in the US is the internal and external audits. Because of Smartsheet's capability to have activity logs and sell, records of what changed and date and timestamps around that. And being able to aggregate that and push that back out to the auditors was, has been hugely important as well.

Galen Low: I love that. I mean, sometimes in our community we talk, okay, maybe just me. I talk, I use the term responsible project management in a digital world. And what I mean by that is, just avoiding that urge to fly by the seat of your pants. Because actually just cuz we're working in digital projects and just because it's software and one to zeros, doesn't mean that what we do, it doesn't have a direct correlation to the way a business runs. 

And what we do is, it doesn't mean that we are not subject to some of the like compliance and, things that could be audited. Especially when we're working in like heavily regulated industries, public sector for example, and we can have this data available to us.

It's also a way to hold ourselves accountable, I guess, for... exactly what you said, like keeping things up to date. Not just because they don't wanna run a tight ship, I guess, but also because people are depending on us to, create this paper trail and have this sort of data set that can help us run our businesses and our next projects better and better every time.

And there's a responsibility there that's kind of broader than just deliver this one project on time and on budget. And then to your point, how does one do that? Yeah a great tool helps. Because otherwise that is a lot of, time and administration to like manually pull this all together for something like an audit. 

Michelle Watkins: Right. It's called the rhythm of the business. 

Galen Low: There you go. Rhythm of the business. I like it. Well, one thing that comes up a lot when we're talking about project portfolio management is like the tools behind it. But also like what does that tool selection process look like? So I guess when it comes to like purchasing a new piece of software to drive project management, but also to drive project portfolio management like a PPM tool. 

Like where does this decision usually get made? Like do you find that it's the exec teams that are asking for this because they want to see a dashboard on a train? Or does this kind of sit more in the realm of like PMOs or like operations? Where does that sort of thought start in terms of the procurement and selection side? 

Michelle Watkins: Yeah, so that's been the interesting thing about something like Smartsheet is, over 13 years of just using it myself and growing into it to turn into something like Global PMO Partners, the PMs are usually the first ones to find Smartsheet, and it becomes more of a grassroots tool.

And become so embedded in the way that they're, the project managers are doing business and they get adoption from other project managers or other team members. And they get approvals from their, maybe their next manager level up. And then all of a sudden it takes off like wildfire and the PMO leaders start to look at it, and then they start to see the other capabilities of what to bring into it.

I would say the executives usually don't know what they don't know. Right? As far as what's capable with something like Smartsheet, most executives or PMO leaders are gonna go with those out of the box, pretty expensive PPMO tools out of the gate, and then abandon them a few years later. I've seen that happen over and over again.

So usually it's the PMs and the grassroots, and then they make it to another company. They're now on the PMO team. And when they're doing vendor evaluation and selection for a PPM tool, it's that blend of, I used to be a project manager. I started using Smartsheet, now I'm in a PMO at another company and it becomes, a top contender.

I mean, we just won two or three deals this week, or helped Smartsheet land the deals and we're, doing the delivering on the consulting services and pretty big large organizations. Both global, and it could be small and it could be large. 

Galen Low: I like that it's actually a reflection of that crawl, walk, run model, right? Where actually, yes, the, the crawl is just manage a project well, might start at the PM level. But then that sort of walk is actually sometimes that individual advancing in their career to the point where they are running a PMO and making a, a walk level decision in this case, in this model. And then maybe eventually making that run decision, right?

When they're in the C-Suites or they are, part of the leadership team and they're like, okay, well I know what we need. We don't necessarily need some of these other like BI dashboards. What we might need is actually this tool, which is also the tool where the work gets done rather than trying to, bubble all this data up into different tools.

It's very interesting. The thing that also I find can be a struggle then is sometimes getting that executive buy-in. Because even if some of these decisions are starting at a PM level or at a PMO level, or at an operations level, still sometimes, you know that CFO needs to sign it off, or leadership team needs to kind of rubber stamp it.

But if there's anyone out there who's kind of like struggling to get buy-in on a tool to help manage their projects, but also to help manage project portfolios, like what arguments do you advise them to use when they're sort of pitching it to the folks who can approve that decision? 

Michelle Watkins: I would take the approach of like putting together a business case or, putting together something that you're trying to track.

What's the value, as an organization, that we're going to get out of having something like a integrated project portfolio management solution? As soon as you start talking about streamlined, something being streamlined, efficient, cost savings, the executives like to hear about cost savings, and then really start to paint that picture for them around how scalable, repeatable, some, a solution like this, and the fact that it's real time and transparent.

All the time, it gets their attention. So it's about painting the picture and telling the story to the people you're trying to get buy-in to start spending. One of the things I would do in the business case is outline the crawl, walk, run. Right? Let's crawl, it's gonna be this level investment.

We'll take this group of project managers and these beta projects and we'll prove out the process and do X, Y, and Z. And then we'll do phase two and phase three and put some dollars around it and just plan for the evolution of the cost of the spend on the software such as Smartsheet as well in that.

And that usually by telling that picture and being meaningful and reporting back, the successes or where you need to make some adjustments along the way, I think goes a long way with the leadership. 

Galen Low: I love that. I like the sort of staging of the ROI as well. Whereas maybe our knee-jerk reaction is like, okay, we click by and then suddenly we're saving 80% of all of our, whatever cost, time, effort, energy. 

And realistically, that's not how it works. But it can be a very lucrative investment over time in that crawl, walk, run model. And sort of getting buy-in on that, I think is a pretty clever idea because it's not just a, I can save admin time and it's not just a, I can save admin time and we can sort of look at some of this data together as a PMO.

It gets like, this can get to become a sort of business wide data visualization tool to see how we're performing on our delivery. I really think that's cool. 

Michelle Watkins: Right. And if I would say if you've got any companies or out there too that also, like I know my team at Salesforce in the PMO, I had a lot of black belt business process managers.

You know, if you've got something one of those in the organization and can kind of shadow some of this along the way and where's the waste, where are we cutting off the waste and adding that additional layer of visibility into the value of this... that could be hugely helpful. Not everybody has that, that luxury of having business process managers to evaluate that. But if you do, that would be a great use case to take advantage of those being available within your company.

Galen Low: And I even just at a broader level, like champions, guess, right? So other influential people who can, help evangelize, I guess, the benefits of making this sort of change in the business. 

Michelle Watkins: Yes. And I would say, one of the things when I rolled this out at Ultimate Software was, I had to be okay that there were gonna be early adopters, mid adopters, and late adopters.

And meet people where they are, listen to their concerns. I've got too many tools, like et cetera. And it actually turns into a fun evolution over a three year period to get to see everybody go through those stages. You were expecting them to go through those stages and it just took a flat wildfire.

And the people who were the late adopters were like, oh my goodness, I wish I had jumped on board early on cuz it would've saved me a lot of, traditional headaches. So, you have to be ready for that. 

Galen Low: I love that you described it as fun. Something that most people would describe as terrifying, right? Are these adopters at various stages actually going to, eventually get on site? 

Michelle Watkins: Exactly. Exactly. Oh, that's funny. 

Galen Low: Well, why don't we look at the other side of the coin, and I might be being extreme here, but you know, in some cases there are businesses and, it's actually the executive teams or the owners who are, yearning for this dashboard where they can get visibility, right?

And that transparency of information and the real time information. But to your point, right? Sometimes folks on the ground are like, we don't need another tool. Like, we're already drowning in tools, or we really like our tool. It's just fine. We don't really need to change. Like what kind of arguments might an exec team have to try and get their employees on side with starting to use a different tool that has sort of PPM capabilities?

Michelle Watkins: I think the first thing that executive teams should do in that particular scenario is identify who is open to evaluating the right processes and tools and what we're doing today versus what we could be doing if we moved over to another tool or streamlined, how many tools we were actually using and find those two, you mentioned it earlier, the champions, right? Who are gonna be those champions, the voice, they're gonna be the go-to people, throughout their region or their organization.

And involve them early. Let them influence the decision and the discussions around that. Where you're guiding it as an executive, but yet they're getting to do it. To do, the heavy lifting. There's great pride and I guess intrinsic value for them to be able to get to influence the transition of the business into something like that.

Galen Low: That's true. Actually, I like that. Impacted business. 

Michelle Watkins: Yes, exactly. Right? And then they're the ones that are putting it into place. They're getting buy-in from the people in the field doing the job every single day. And then it makes it an easier process to start rolling it out which is good. 

Galen Low: I really like that. Actually, the other thing that I'm really liking about this is that kinda what we're talking about is actually like building this empathy and this understanding of different perspectives across a business, right? Whether you are an executive or an owner and you're like, I really need this information.

And rather than being on an island kind of communicating some of that down to the folks who are doing the work to be like, this is why it's important for us to be able to know how this region is performing, or for this classification of projects is performing. This is why we need the data. And sort of building that understanding, and letting that filter down so that everybody is kind of on the same page about how the businesses run. 

Rather than just like, no, my job is to deliver a project and don't make me think about, ROI. Don't make me think about headcount, don't make me think about the strategic plan. But actually kind of weaving this all together. And then the reverse, right?

Which is like, okay, we're delivering projects that requires staff, it requires other resources. We need a clean pipeline. We can't have sales, you know, as much as we want sales to sell so many deals, right, and make so much money. We can't execute all those projects at the same time. We need to be thoughtful about it.

Otherwise, that's gonna have impact to the broader business, our reputation, our ability to, deliver on our promises. And it really just kind of creates just this more harmony cuz we're having these conversations about, this is what I need and this is what I'd like to see because this is how our roles work.

And it almost is this conversation of, how are we actually working together? Like forget all these abstraction layers of like hierarchy. That's important too in some places, but also, we're all trying to work together to achieve a goal. 

Michelle Watkins: Right. I think the integrated solution answers all of that, right? 

Galen Low: I really like that. 

I am gonna go play the devil's advocate a little bit with this sort of integrated tool. One of the things I find happens a lot is that, yes, there's integrated tools, but there's also other data that lives elsewhere, specifically in like HR systems and finance systems. Maybe in other spreadsheets.

And arguably, I think there is the approach where one might say, okay, well don't know if I need an integrated tool. Maybe I can just like bundle a bunch of solutions together through integrations rather than buy something, a whole new tool that's expensive that I have to go through this whole change management process around.

Like why wouldn't I just try to assemble all the data into a BI tool instead of trying to find an integrated project portfolio management solution? What do you say to that? 

Michelle Watkins: Well, I definitely have seen clients try to make their CRM a project management solution and try to do something to make it as a project portfolio.

I've seen just about every kind of gamut to try to do exactly that, just pull what we have together through integrations. If you think about, just like even Microsoft Project, and just using Smartsheet for Microsoft Project and reports and dashboards for that. There's still pieces of information that need to flow, like from your CRM, with Salesforce, or some clients use different things for resource capacity planning, and you need that data to go back and forth. 

Or to your point, we've got a lot of clients that pull data out of Workday. Not only, for people and what roles are they in, but also they're doing time tracking against a project, right? That the project budget, financials need to come into that. And we're integrating all of that in our PPM solution and Smartsheet every day so that you can pull it together in a more meaningful way from project data and not just, a concocted series of things, using a BI tool. 

Galen Low: I like that. It's like, fit for purpose in a way, like and I can empathize with that completely, where, we're trying to string a whole bunch of solutions together. But just because they have an API doesn't mean it's gonna give you the experience and the cleanliness of data that you're looking for. 

And to your point, right, integrated project portfolio management tool. In some ways could stand freely, but also is integrate to bull as well, right? You're feeding data from Workday in, it doesn't have to stand on an island, but it is a sort of purpose built solution to help you navigate your business. 

And mean, you know, one of the things that has kept coming up in our conversations is this notion of like the project economy. And was talking earlier about this other company that has thousands of projects running and it used to be, I guess that like projects were kind of the like exception, it's like operations and then they, we've got a couple of projects running to get something done in our business.

Or to your point, it's a professional services organization and we're running projects for clients. But I think the reality is that, there's a lot of organizations running a lot of projects right now, and that is actually part of their operation, right? To be able to move quickly, to be able to bring cross-functional teams together, to get something done a little bit faster. And actually, a project portfolio management tool that strikes me is actually just a business intelligence tool, right?

It's just like your organization might be running lots of projects that might be kind of the crux of your operation. And this isn't just about projects anymore. This is actually about, how a business is operating. 

All right, last question. This all sounds good, right? On paper, I think everyone's really excited about this, but would you say that every organization is ready for a PPM tool?

Like what are some of the like prerequisites that you'd need to have in place so you can actually really benefit from this tool or from the data? And also like what do you tell organizations who just aren't ready?

Michelle Watkins: Right. Well, the good thing is by the time they get to us as a Global PMO Partners, they've already been using traditional tools.

They've already transitioned to Smartsheet to do that first crawl, which is, I'm gonna just use it to, create my project level information. And then by the time they get to us, they're ready for somebody to bring together an integrated solution for them in about, 13 to 18 weeks. So when say, is every organization ready for PPM tool?

I think they're ready for the building blocks... the crawl, walk, run. So in fact, I've got a call right after this with the global company that we're working with. And so the first thing we came with is what's their pipeline of projects? We got their attributes. We're building all the things around it, including if in their case, it's IT organization, so they need project charters and scopes and approval processes.

We're building that as a standalone and integrated for them to go live with. They've already been working on their suite of templates of, what do I need to run a project? What do I need to roll up to the portfolio level? And what do I need to then tie into the programs that are in that portfolio? So we're building those 3 blocks within the project area that then feeds into all the different rollup views from that data in ways that you just couldn't accomplish in the same way as if you were just solely using a BI tool.

So I think people are ready for a PPM tool at different levels and different building blocks, and then that can continue to evolve.

Galen Low: I love that. And actually, bonus question to put you on the spot. Do you find that it's shifting a little bit from why do I need a PPM tool to, of course, I need a PPM tool, can you help me set it up? 

Michelle Watkins: Yes, it is. It's like, we've got our day jobs, we still need to go run projects, or we need to run the PMO. You're the expert on bringing the Smartsheet PPM solution together, and you can knock it out in 13 to 15 weeks for in 100, 130, 150 hour engagement. Go make it happen.

And so, what we try to do is make sure that we're running it in an agile approach, right? We know the building blocks, what's unique is the client's data in that particular process. So we try to meet with them twice a week. We, and then my team goes and builds out the solution in between and then we come back and show them, you know, so I call it like an I-test. 

You want A or B? You've got choices. And then we just continue to kind of integrate that information and they get to go, still do their day job, but benefit along the way, with what we've filled out for them. 

Galen Low: I love that. What a collaborative approach. Very cool.

Michelle, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really appreciate your insights and I think our listeners got a lot from that. If they wanted to learn more about you and Global PMO Partners, where should they go? 

Michelle Watkins: Well, you can go to our website on globalpmopartners.com. There's a Contact Us on there.

We're also out on LinkedIn, but you could follow us and our, we're usually posting some great things about, you know, tidbits about Smartsheet and some other tools that, you know, may be of interest, so check us out. 

Galen Low: Awesome. I'll include some of those links in the show notes. 

All right folks, there you have it. As always, if you'd like to join the conversation with over a thousand like-minded project management champions, come and join our collective. 

Head over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com/membership to learn more. And if you like what you heard today, please subscribe and stay in touch on thedigitalprojectmanager.com.

Until next time, thanks for listening.