September 2021
What is the Difference between Project Management and Project Portfolio Management?
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Business Agility Hub
How ready are you to tackle what's next?
Check out the content and resources below that can guide you in building adaptability and agility into your business.
Build Agility into your Business, Set it in Motion with Meisterplan
What will business be like in 3 months, 6 months, 12 months? If we knew the answer to that, planning would be easy. We would know if a major disruption was on the horizon. We would know how the economy will change. We would know what demands to expect from our customers. No one has a crystal ball, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be ready.
Successful organizations excel at incorporating these key capabilities into their business processes. These competencies separate businesses that can adapt to challenges and opportunities, and those that struggle.
Anticipate
The ability to identify, foresee, or forecast demands, requirements, opportunities, threats, and changes.
Adapt
The ability to decide when and how to change course and to take steps to do so.
Accelerate
The ability to speed up the execution of projects and implementation of initiatives through improved productivity and effectiveness.
Building these capabilities is the first step toward realizing business agility. Turning them into actionable, repeatable processes is the next. Our cloud software, coupled with our Lean PPM™ framework, enables business leaders to more quickly adapt and answer the question “Who should implement which projects, when?” Learn more about our Lean PPM™ Framework.
Collect
The action of collecting new project proposals and developing change-ready initiatives.
Decide
The action of deciding which projects will be implemented, and when.
Execute
The action of accelerating the execution of focused priorities with flexible teams.
Learn more about the capabilities successful companies employ to identify change, adapt direction, and speed execution of key initiatives.
Webinar: 3 Ways to Build Resiliency for Today…and Tomorrow
Articles
Building Organizational Resiliency
Check out these articles for ways to build resiliency and agility into your business. Whether you’re a seasoned PMO looking to establish a practice in a new organization or a business leader trying to determine the value that business agility can deliver, these practical tips and best practices can help.
Videos
See the Software in Action
Make Plans That Work with Meisterplan and Lean PPM™
Make sure you have the right people working on the right projects at the right time with our project portfolio management software and our Lean PPM™ framework.
- Easily set the right priorities for projects
- Simulate changes to your plans with "what-if" scenarios
- Always have a clear overview of employee availability
Know What’s Happening and What’s Planned?
Meisterplan gives you an overview of what projects your company is working on – across all teams and their different project tools.
Understand If You’re Setting The Right Priorities?
Your teams will always work on the right projects because with Meisterplan you can easily prioritize those projects that deliver the most value.
Answer the Question ‘Can We Fit in Another Initiative?’
With Meisterplan, you’ll always be able to balance capacity and demand when new initiatives come up.
COVID-19 Crisis Resource Center
A distributed workforce dealing with uncertainty, remote project teams finding new ways to work, and stark economic pressures influencing business priorities are all challenges in today’s environment. Meisterplan helps organizations navigate the challenges of today’s dynamic markets by giving you the confidence to make sound decisions.
Templates
Effective Lean Project Portfolio Management™
The purpose of project portfolio management is ultimately to provide a clear answer to the question “Who should implement which projects, when?” In Lean Project Portfolio Management™, it’s important that a sensible division of labor is established through clearly defined responsibilities. Use the following templates in your organization to create a working Lean PPM™ framework.
What is Lean PPM?
The Lean PPM™ framework consists of all the roles, tools and meetings your organization needs to develop and prioritize initiatives and quickly adapt your plans so your organization thrives even in times of constant change.
Why Lean PPM?
The Lean PPM™ framework is perfect for those responsible for building and developing a Project Management Office (PMO) because it enables you to determine the most important work and get it accomplished fast even with finite resources.
How is it different?
The Lean PPM™ framework is a playbook you can use while your teams may use different project management tools and methods, as Lean PPM™ works independently of the chosen tools and methods.
Here you will find templates and guides for the most important aspects of Lean Project Portfolio Management™:
In Lean Project Portfolio Management™, it’s important that a sensible division of labor is established through clearly defined responsibilities. Use these roles in your organization to create a working Lean PPM™ framework.
The Lean PPM™ framework ensures overall project portfolio coordination efforts are in fact lean in nature. With that in mind, it’s important to only set up the truly necessary meetings and make sure they are efficiently conducted through good preparation.
Need a visual to better understand how all the required meetings within each stage of Lean PPM™ interact? Download this graphic to help to visually bring it all together.
In this guide, Successfully Introduce Lean Project Portfolio Management™ with Meisterplan, we will show you step by step how to introduce lean yet effective project portfolio management to your company and how to implement it with Meisterplan.
Case Studies
Nordex Harnesses Change to Remain a Leader in Wind Energy
With more than 2,260 employees and consolidated sales of over 3 billion euros, Nordex SE is one of the top 10 wind power plant construction companies globally. As the number of projects across Nordex increased substantially, it became clear that they had a major need for professional management of projects and IT resources.
“The decisive factor is that Meisterplan gives us a powerful tool for project prioritization and analysis. We now have an overview of our entire project portfolio within minutes, and with interactive analysis included!”
Effective Resource Management
I needed to be able to show the impact of decisions quickly, and dynamic features of Meisterplan like the auto-scheduler and the scenario planner really help to do that.
Trafag and Smartsheet
Trafag’s previous planning process was very tedious and lacked the transparency and flexible resource management that was needed to gain quick answers to their “what-if” questions.
Meisterplan for Jira
With Meisterplan for Jira, you could combine that more traditional work with the scrum projects in Jira. This gave them a better understanding about the true capacity of their employees.
What Our Customers Love about Meisterplan
“Powerful yet easy to use. For a long time I was looking for the right tool to support a method called "project management by autonomous systems". I found Meisterplan to be the exact counterpart to show the huge amount of projects going on and to prioritize according to company and IT strategies.”
“Very good extension to existing project management. We run our own self-developed project management solution. Meisterplan helped us to save this investment because it only puts the interactive portfolio management on-top of it. This give us more agility and flexibility.”
“Excellent solution. We used Meisterplan to clarify our efforts and values in all planned project. By using Meisterplan we could prioritize the most valuable projects and focus our resources on that. By doing that Meisterplan saved us lots of time. It is very easy to use, integration of Excel projects fast and simple, outstanding personal support.”
“Meisterplan helped us get to grips with our client delivery projects, allowing us to identify and track our key milestones, manage our resource planning, and forecasting . The product is simple and easy to use and the support and people are second to none. Supports the decision-making process of the Management Board.”
“Upon completing a POC with real data, this was the only tool for Portfolio Planning (PPM) that was consumable by my partners within the organization, and enabled this functionality for the first time. The GUI allowed it to "actually stick". It was essentially turn-key and customer support was of the highest quality.”
“Meisterplan is a great tool to streamline your complete resource management. It's super easy to use, has an intuitive interface and integrates to existing planning tools. You always see the current allocation of your resources and with simple drag-and-drop you move projects and see the changes for your resources and financials.”
“This tool gives us the invaluable insight we need to make important decisions about when to start projects and when to hire. It can help you align your hiring needs with your sales pipeline. It's the only tool in its class that provides capacity planning and projections to coordinate hiring and sales leads.”
“Meisterplan filled a significant gap for us in understanding how we are utilizing our capacity. We now have a much better idea when we need to either say no to new projects or adjust timelines and team members assigned to projects. No other tool gave us this high-level view. It brought our stress level down.”
“I used this solution for prioritizing our internal projects and found it very helpful. It is easy to use and offers a wide range of planning capabilities to find the optimal project portfolio. This saved a lot of costs and supported efficient resource management. It is easy to use, dynamic and interactive portfolio planning.”
“Very usable for enterprises with large number of projects to prioritize. It was designed to help PMOs and resource managers find the best fit in the project portfolio. It is easy to use and easy to implement. The user interface is really simple but offers useful functionalities for project and resource planning and prioritization.”
“Meisterplan simplified our resource management. Great too to streamline your complete resource management which will save you lots of planning hours and avoid misunderstandings. You always see the current allocation of your resources and with simple drag-and-drop you move projects and recognize the changes for your resources and financials.”
“With Meisterplan we were productive in just a few hours without extensive training. It offers the chance to use our own project management method which makes it quite simple to roll out. And it's well done for project portfolio management. Project Portfolio Management and Project Management Processes become simple and fast.”
“Great solution for business strategy alignment. For us it was difficult to find out which project is really aligned to our overall business goals. Meisterplan is the ideal solution to find the optimal way of prioritizing project in order of the impact of the business strategy.”
“With Meisterplan we can setup individual attributes within the complete scope of data, join personalized analysis of project teams, budgets and portfolios. It is fully customizable and can be rightsized to our needs and requirements. According to other known project portfolio management solutions this is one of the big bulletpoints and USPs of Meisterplan.”
“Best resource management solution. We took Meisterplan for planning our consultants and external projects and found it quite helpful. It's so easy to assign resources to projects and to see what happens with their capacity. At the end we improved our planning accuracy and the communication with our customers.”
“Easy to use resource planning application. Until now we used Excel for resource planning. With Meisterplan, it was so easy to import our existing excel planning that we could start with the solution in less than a day.”
“With Meisterplan we easily can align our projects with business goals, resources and financials. This led to fast and reliable business decisions.”
“Meisterplan is an eye opener for resource bottlenecks. After a very short on boarding process we imported our own data and only a few moment later we have seen where we have resource bottlenecks and overloads. That was impressive. Meisterplan makes visualizing and analyzing resource allocations very easy.”
“Project and/or portfolio management for company at any size. Low implementation cost. Tested the application for two month, using the demo projects and creating new portfolios and scenarios. Very visual, easy to use, not expensive, very reliable service, multiple interface, logging all scenarios in pdf.”
“Everyday is a Meisterplan Day. Thanks to the simplicity of the product and its excellent usability the Project Portfolio Process PPM was holistically optimized and strategic decisions for projects ensured. Eager to further enhance maturity of PPM with future releases of the product.”
“Easier and quicker overview of project portfolio. The most professional "tetris" for projects and resources. No other software can support valid decisions in such a short time.”
“Best product for portfolio management with resource bottleneck. I've chosen Meisterplan among 50+ PM tools due to easy-to-use resource allocation and project aligning features. Most suitable for high-level roadmap planning having limited resources for project development.”
“Powerful and easy. Just beginning with Portfolio Management in the Corporate IT, this product is easy to get in use, although powerful in function. At one glance we are now able to focus on the decisions needed.”
“State of the art resource planning. We manage more than 100 projects and change requests every year. Meisterplan helps us maximize our resources and keep track of our projects. The operation is simple, so no training is required for the application. For me, Meisterplan is the best resource planning tool currently available.”
“Meisterplan is an excellent Resource Management tool. The visual interface makes the software intuitive to understand and use. I have found few other tools that can match its capabilities. Definitely love the scenario comparison function. It's pretty easy to get up and running, but you can get more complex as you get more comfortable.”
“Good visualization/presentation of projects and capacity/resource view. It gives all information at a glance and the deep dive on projects or resources is intuitive. I appreciate the intuitive use of main interface (project roadmap and capacity/resource view).”
“Impressive project planning: We tried this package after years of using the main competitor and have found this Meisterplan easy to use with impressive resource planning and prioritisation features.”
“I give Meisterplan an A+ for the experience of modifying the project timeline and resourcing. Consider this model if you’ve struggled to forecast resource capacity using spreadsheets or large commercial tools.”
There is no other product that does what Meisterplan does in terms of portfolio management and resource management without unessential extra features. If there were another product that does what Meisterplan does, I would have found it, because I tried them all.