McKinsey & Company describe organisational health as: the alignment of a common vision throughout the company, the ability to execute that vision efficiently and the ability to renew the company using innovation and creativity. Organisational health is highly correlated with financial performance, but how do you go about improving it? Integrating Project Portfolio Management (PPM) with Business Intelligence (BI) improves decision-making and streamlines workflows, improving your organisational health and ultimately helping you to thrive in a competitive market.
What are Business Intelligence tools & what do they do?
BI tools refer to any technologies which are utilised to transform raw data into meaningful information. This information can then be used to make informed decisions for your business.
Some BI tools include:
- Data cleaning & preparation: data from a multiple of sources is combined for analysis, and any corrupted or incomplete data is removed, ensuring data is reliable
- Data mining: This is the process of discovering trends & patterns in Big Data sets. It is used to find usable data that would otherwise be too large to analyse
- Reporting: rich, interactive, real-time reports are generated from BI tools
Why is Business Intelligence vital to your PPM strategy?
The BI tools discussed above will prove invaluable for improving PPM functionalities such as:
- Analysis: BI tools allow large amounts of data that would be too big to study by hand to be utilised for health of your business
- Resource Management: BI tools provide useful insights for effectively balancing resources. Decisions such as resource allocation can then be based on accurate, factual data
- Risk Management: statistical analyses and drill-down abilities allow for a better understanding of risks, so that they can be identified and dealt with quickly and effectively
- Reporting: through cleaning data and providing real-time information, your reports will be more accurate, detailed, standardised and up-to-date
- Visualisation: relevant, detailed information can be highlighted and pinned in a dashboard quickly and easily. Visualisations like graphs can then be standardised so that they can be understood by stakeholders universally
How will this improve the health of your Organisation?
Through improving your analysis of data, resource and risk management, and providing clear visualisations and reports to stakeholders, the integration of BI and PPM tools will save you time and money and improve the success of your projects through ensuring:
- More accurate and reliable data: the ability to clean data and analyse it throughly means that the data you are using to make key business decisions is highly reliable, giving you confidence to make the best, data-driven decisions
- Processes are automated: using multiple platforms to communicate and share files not only wastes time, but also increases the chances of human error. Automating data collection in one integrated platform eliminates this problem
- Reliable predictions of the future: being prepared, predicting outcomes and adjusting for risks is essential to every business. Using BI in your PPM software, you can not only monitor KPIs, but can use predictive analytics to make reliable forecasts
PPM is vital to Business Intelligence too:
We have discussed why your PPM functions will be improved with the integration of BI tools. Equally, PPM tools offer a lot of value to your existing BI software. To develop useful insights, BI tools require useful data; the kind of data that can be generated using PPM tools. Integrating PPM into BI platforms will:
- Help to make data simple & comprehensible: BI tools deal with large sets of data and sometimes interpreting them can be confusing. PPM integration can mean automatically incorporating any custom fields and making information simple enough that anyone can understand
- Help to take BI insight and quickly transform it into action: Broadcom highlight that organisations waste a lot of time and money through failing to act quickly on new insights. This often arises from a lack of confidence in decision making and a lack of transparency, making it difficult to quickly respond to change. With PPM integration, greater transparency means ease of response and a detailed understanding of the outcomes so that you can be confident in your decision-making and can respond without delay
- Save time and money: Research suggests that having the right reporting tools can save you up to $200,000 a year, as so much time and money is wasted making ad-hoc reports. With an integrated PPM, reporting in real time is made quick and easy
Whether you are currently using PPM or BI, and regardless of your business sector, the integration of PPM and BI is almost guaranteed to drastically improve your organisational health. With Execview, BI tools like data mining are included within one, easy-to-use PPM platform so that you can effortlessly analyse all the data you need for effective decision-making.
By Alana Bowen-Burford
