How do you use project portfolio management tools to learn from past successes?

The Retrospective is a ceremony used in Scrum, but it can be effectively adapted to a portfolio perspective, regardless of whether your projects are agile or traditional. Specifically, organizing an annual year-end meeting that brings together project leaders to collaboratively review portfolio performance and consider potential improvements for the upcoming year can be highly beneficial.

??In my opinion, effectively analyzing portfolio performance is key to continuous improvement in project management. ??Benchmarking Compare project performance against industry standards to identify areas of excellence and improvement. ??Feedback Loops Establish mechanisms to gather and analyze feedback from all stakeholders for a holistic performance review. ??Trend Analysis Utilize PPM tools to track and analyze performance trends over time, aiding in predictive decision-making. ??Consolidate learnings and apply them proactively in future projects to enhance efficiency and success rates.

ServiceNow PPM is the most robust tool I have ever used for P3O management. I highly recommend learned how to create and modify your own dashboards as the project data grows. In the past I asked others to generate reporting I was looking to consume. Now I create that based on my own knowledge and I can say it's really impressive.

?? Learning from past successes with project portfolio management tools involves: 1?? Data Analysis: Utilize tools to analyze project data, identifying patterns and factors leading to success. 2?? Benchmarking: Compare current projects against successful ones, setting standards for success metrics. 3?? Knowledge Sharing: Use tools to document and share success stories, fostering a culture of learning and improvement. 4?? Continuous Improvement: Apply lessons learned to refine processes, methodologies, and strategies for future projects. Embrace a culture of continuous learning to elevate your projects! ??

The past holds valuable insights if we choose to learn from them. When using PPM tools, we should ensure that there’s an operational process in place that changes typical behavior where lessons learned are an activity during project closure. It should be an ongoing active process with living documents that capture those learnings as the projects progress in the portfolio. This ensures crucial information and insights can be analyzed earlier and share maximum benefit across the portfolio. Analysis performed on active projects provides the most significant supporting context to understand all the conditions and attributes pre and post-event when writing the lessons learned.

Certainly Lessons Learned is a valuable tool. Why make the same mistake as in the past if we can avoid it? Create a Sharepoint and make this material available to all teams. Another thing I suggest is sharing past experiences, create periodic meetings so that teams can benchmark each other, without a doubt many valuable outputs will come out of these meetings.

We used to have a book full of lesson's learned, so here are some pro-tips (suggestions) that I've picked up on the way. If you do this with your teams, ensure you: 1. Prioritize the most critical lesson's learned and stack rank them 2. Have the teams decide on what they should address by taking inputs from everyone and finding out what has the most impact (consider bandwidth and other variables) 3. Build habits over time - not something that sounds nice on paper to do or that a sponsor is saying is broken. But remember, have fun, and remember positive reinforcement. We don't thank each other enough for the small things we do daily, only if someone makes a mistake.

There is no point in creating a repository of lessons learned if they are not consulted. Remind and encourage your teams to periodically record and use these inputs before starting any project. This could save time and money!

There is a very nice tool in the Axelos’ P3O methodology that allows you to measure organizational maturity for project portfolio management. This helps you design plans and evolve towards a higher level for project, program and portfolio management.

I think creating a repository of lessons learned is a MUST doing in every portfolio. the more you feed the repository the more you can get the benefits from it