These Companies Rely on the Lean PPM™ Framework
Achieve Success Together with the Lean PPM Framework
The success of your company is not measured by the success of individual people or departments. To move forward confidently as an organization, you need reliable data, a simple decision-making process and alignment across departments.
Our lean PPM framework makes this possible.
Just Enough PPM
Lean PPM™ includes all activities, meetings and roles you need for project portfolio management — without all the things you don’t. Make portfolio decisions quickly with this streamlined framework.
Lean PPM Is Easier than You Think
Chances are you already have most of the roles, meetings and activities you need in your organization. With Lean PPM™ discover what you team may be missing, or what you may not need after all.
Check out the four basic Lean PPM™ activities to learn more.
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Download the most important templates for the Lean PPM framework.
Strategize
Translating Your Business Strategy
Senior Management determines the business strategy for the organization, and a successful project portfolio should be aligned to that strategy. In this step of the Lean PPM™ framework, that strategy is translated into criteria that projects are evaluated by to determine their priority.
All projects, even projects already in progress should be evaluated and prioritized based on the decided criteria.
Collect
Collecting Project Proposals
In the Collect step of the Lean PPM™ framework, new projects are proposed and project initiatives are developed. Project proposals are created for each initiative including a description, and estimates of the benefit and effort required.
The Collect step also includes proposal coaching where the portfolio coordinator and the project initiator talk through the idea, improve the initiative and determine if the project should move to the next step of the process. If your organization has different committees who review and decide on different types of projects, the portfolio coordinator will also steer the initiative to the right committee.
Decide
Deciding Which Projects Will Be Implemented, and When
The Decide step of the Lean PPM™ framework begins with a pipeline review where new project initiatives are checked for quality and receive a ranking. Next, the Strategize, Collect, and Execute steps of the PPM system come together in the portfolio board meeting. This is the highest-level decision-making committee for PPM. The portfolio board monitors overall progress in the portfolio, resolves conflicts, confirms the composition of the portfolio, and decides on future resource deployment. Finally, the decisions of the portfolio board meeting are communicated out to the rest of the company.
Execute
Managing Approved Projects
The Execute step in the Lean PPM™ framework is where project management happens. Your teams may use different project management tools and methods, but Lean PPM™ works independent of the chosen tools and methods. The key to successful execution of projects is transparency across teams about project progress and requirements.
Any project management conflicts that cannot be resolved are escalated to the execution steering committee. Only issues that cannot be answered within this process are escalated to the portfolio board meeting.
Meisterplan Is Your Software for Lean PPM
Get all the features you need for effective project portfolio management.
Strategize
- Customize your project evaluation criteria
- Easily rate each project based on that criteria
- Automatically calculate a project priority score based on your project evaluation criteria
- Sort your project list by priority
- Drag and drop projects to reorder their prioritization
Collect
- Supports your project intake process from idea to active project with the Board view
- Create portfolios or sub-portfolios specifically for new project initiatives
- Mark projects with the current stage gate
- Use what-if planning to see how new initiatives would affect your portfolio
Decide
- Clear and simple visuals that make your portfolio easy to understand
- The ability to focus on the strategic value of projects using the Board view to make informed decisions
- Scenario planning to effectively adapt plans
- Real-time updates to the portfolio for transparency
- Instant resource allocation to measure the impact on the portfolio
Execute
- Resource staffing on the role or individual level
- Financial tracking to keep projects on budget
- Clearly identifiable over allocation of resources
- Project milestones and dependencies
When you don’t have a resource management tool you end up putting work on people without knowing how loaded they are. That leads to health problems, such as stress. It leads to people working ridiculously long hours. The retention of your staff goes down. With Meisterplan, we can protect our people.
There are a lot of things that go into a project plan besides the timing and resources. We need a lot of context and it shouldn't be a surprise when a project needs attention. Our projects need to tie back to our mission and what we want to achieve. With Meisterplan, we can make informed decisions and move the organization forward.
For tactical resource planning at the role level, we use Meisterplan, with Clarity providing the data basis. We have used this to also introduce the topic of portfolio management in IT.
With Meisterplan, we can always see what exactly the impact of doing any project is – and it´s really simple to use.
Meisterplan allows me to have a more productive conversation when determining the highest priority projects and also see the overall impact to the portfolio.
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.
itdesign has developed tremendously over the last 12 years: Today, no one can come close to what your team is doing.