What Is Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM)?

The larger your organization becomes, the greater the risk that you'll lose sight of what is needed to continue to cultivate a healthy business. Enterprise project portfolio management (EPPM) helps you determine the strategic goals you should you set, ensure that teams are working on projects that execute against those goals, and measure progress effectively.

The easiest way to implement EPPM is via enterprise project portfolio management software. I'll cover how software can help, as well as signs that your org is ready for EPPM and how to set it up.

What Is Enterprise Project Portfolio Management?

Enterprise project portfolio management is the process of translating an organization’s business strategy into a portfolio of projects and associated tactical actions. Successful delivery of these projects (using enterprise project management software) enables an organization to achieve its business objectives.

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What Makes Enterprise PPM Different From Traditional PPM?

Traditional project portfolio management involves managing a group of interrelated enterprise projects in a centralized fashion (with the goal of unlocking an organization’s strategic objectives) but in enterprise PPM, the projects you are selecting, prioritizing, and managing reside at the executive level, rather than the business unit level.

These are C-suite, enterprise projects that span multiple lines of business—endeavors like organizational transformation, market readiness, or financial modernization.

You'll also likely use specific PPM tools for traditional project portfolio management.

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What Is An Enterprise Project Management Office?

An enterprise project management office (EPMO) is a centralized office that helps manage a portfolio of enterprise-level projects in a coordinated way.

Rather than juggle a portfolio of business-critical projects across a team of executives too busy to deal with them, only to miss targets quarter after quarter, an EPMO can act as a single-threaded owner to drive strategic alignment, accountability, and execution across multiple business functions.

An EPMO offers several benefits:

• Identifies potential areas of redundancy across business units
• Creates a clear mechanism for project selection and prioritization
• Improves resource allocation and resource management
• Uses performance and project data to collect lessons learned and improve project execution

Signs Your Organization Is Ready For EPPM

Adopting EPPM sounds good in theory. But, how do you know if your organization is ready to implement EPPM and/or an EPMO? Ask yourself the following questions:

Project Selection

• Can team members consistently articulate the business strategy, no matter where they fall within the organization? 
• Can team members explain how their daily work aligns to the big picture strategy?

Project Prioritization

• Do you spend 50% of your time or more making progress against previously articulated goals, or is most of your time spent “fighting fires”?
• Does your organization have a track record of successful project completion?

Project Execution

• Are you working on any projects that span multiple business units?
• As a leader, do you have real-time visibility into project execution throughout the project life cycle?
• Are you able to effectively make progress against business-critical projects to prepare you for the next stage of growth?

If you answered “no” to two or more of the above questions, your organization may be ready for EPPM.

How To Set Up EPPM

Below is a five-step plan for successfully implementing EPPM at your organization:

1. Inventory ongoing projects at the business unit level to understand the current state.
2. Create and set objectives and key results (OKRs) or key performance indicators (KPIs), as well as metrics to measure them by, at the enterprise level.
   1. What do you want to achieve in the next year? How will you get there?

3. Compare the list of ongoing projects with your company OKRs or KPIs.
   1. Make any required updates to align your list of projects with your list of OKRs. This may involve making some tough choices to cancel or postpone projects that do not match your top organizational priorities.
   2. Right-size the project list. It’s unrealistic to accomplish 15 projects in a quarter, even if they perfectly align with your OKRs. Even if you had the staffing capacity, no one is going to pay attention to that many goals. Ruthlessly prioritize to optimize performance on your most critical engagements.
4. Create a reporting system for teams to record project progress that feeds into portfolio and OKR tracking at the leadership level. Although it may take some time to build, this system needs to be user-friendly and easy to maintain to encourage continued usage.
5. Monitor and control.
   1. Come up with a workflow to reset OKRs on a specified cadence (quarterly or annually) that is relatively light touch and simple to maintain (e.g., it should not take more than one month to craft OKRs for the next quarter).
   2. In addition to tracking project progress, document lessons learned along with some type of log about the decision-making behind why the organization deprioritized certain projects. That way, you won’t waste time rehashing prior conversations.

Software For Enterprise Portfolio Management

PPM software is your friend when it comes to doing EPPM well. As a project manager, your goal is to:

• Minimize the amount of time project team members spend on reporting (or work about work)
• Maximize the amount of time and energy team members spend on project execution
• Give leadership and other stakeholders the information they need to see, at a glance, without forcing them to weed through extraneous details.

Here are our picks for the best EPPM systems on the market that can help you deliver your enterprise project portfolio successfully.

1. 1. Kantata — Best for streamlining digital projects with automation features
2. 2. Scoro — Best for project portfolio visibility
3. 3. Celoxis — Best enterprise solution with on-premise deployment options
4. 4. Bubble PPM — Best enterprise PPM tool for NPD and innovation
5. 5. Wrike — Best enterprise portfolio software with AI & machine learning that helps you focus on the important tasks
6. 6. OnePlan — Best for scenario and financial planning
7. 7. Productive — Best for agency PPM and profitability tracking
8. 8. monday.com — Best enterprise PPM for its thousands of integrations and capacity of growing with your enterprise
9. 9. Zoho Projects — Best enterprise PPM software with CRM functionality
10. 10. Acuity PPM — Best for quick PPM software adoption

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