Portfolio Modeling

[Dominic Moss]

I have been trying to find a reliable critique of the features and benefits
of Portfolio Modelling, the documents provided by Microsoft give a feel for
the capabilities but do not go into real detail. Are there any contributors
to this Forum who can provide examples of their use and experience of this
feature?

--
Dominic Moss

www.projectability.co.uk

Helping people achieve more with Microsoft Project

Tel +44 8707 303 400
Fax +44 8707 303 500

 

[Gary L. Chefetz \(MVP\)]

Dominic:

IMHO, the modeler is lovely to look at, but produces absolutely useless
results. A magic eight ball will provide nearly as good guidance. The
analyzer, on the other hand, is a very powerful tool; focus your efforts on
that.

--

Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
"We wrote the book on Project Server
http://www.msprojectexperts.com

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[Dominic Moss]

Hi Gary,

I am glad the Project Server Guru is so dismissive of this "feature" I have
to admit I am a bit embarrased when customers ask about it - with your
permission I will quote your critique in future.

I agree with you on Portfolio Analysis, demonstrating how using additional
Outline Codes invests this feature with additional layers for reporting and
analysis always gets people excited, the more I explore this feature the
more compelling it becomes - I guess any examples of how it is being used
could be of benefit to the newsgroup community - I will try and write up
some examples with screendumps in the near future.

--
Dominic Moss

www.projectability.co.uk

Helping people achieve more with Microsoft Project

Tel +44 8707 303 400
Fax +44 8707 303 500

 

[James]

I simply had to add a comment here....

We use the Portfolio Analyzer and find that it actually works quite well for
us. BUT we have found that you do need to be prepared to set up and use
additional versions of project plans. It is at the end of the day an
Executive Modelling tool AND the users need to be disciplined enough to take
the results of the Modeller and plug these into the Resource Substitution
Wizard to actually invoke the changes that the Modeller has come up with
(and we want to apply).

In terms of assessing whether getting a better utilisation of resources
across a group of projects would work, and prioritisng projects within that
group we find the results of the modeller to provide an interesting way of
applying different options to see what the impact may be on those projects.
Interestingly we have found that some projects can actually reduce their
duration as a result of more effective utilisation.

There's no doubt this feature could be improved though. For example you have
to manually create a model, and quite often you just want several copies of
the same model and just apply different options or scenarios to each one.
then make a decision. I have just learned of a utility that does copy a
model and we just acquired a copy, but I have yet to try it but it sounds
like that could be very useful !

I have to say I was surprised by Gary's comments - our own experience has
been that its quite useful (to a limited audience) and would benefit from
some additions. As a first pass though we think its OK !

Regards

James

 

[Gary L. Chefetz \(MVP\)]

James:

IMO, the results are too ethereal for most to comprehend. I applaud your
ability to make use of the tool and I'm glad that you actually have the time
to invest in the machinations is requires.

--

Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
"We wrote the book on Project Server
http://www.msprojectexperts.com

-

 

[James]

Hi Gar

James:

IMO, the results are too ethereal for most to comprehend. I applaud your
ability to make use of the tool and I'm glad that you actually have the time
to invest in the machinations is requires.

--

Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
"We wrote the book on Project Server
http://www.msprojectexperts.com

-

 

[James]

Hi Gary,

I agree it requires some committment and time in order to understand it, but
we have definitely found the investment in time and effort very
worthwhile....

Also we found that (as you elduded to) that Execs find it too complex to use
and gain results, so in our environement, the Administrator builds the
models and runs the scenarios and simply presents these options to the Execs
at a Programme Reveiew meeting every couple of weeks....

We based our approach on the fact the most Execs will ask " Don't bring me
problems - bring me results !!"

So we do, and then ask them which one they want to run with !

Regards

James

 

[Gary L. Chefetz \(MVP\)]

James:

My biggest gripe is that modeler makes the assumption that all resources
with qualifying attributes are interchangeable at any level of the project
plan. From my years of experience running software development projects, I
know this assumption is incorrect for that practice. Throwing more bodies
into the mix doesn't always mean a shortening of timelines. In fact, in
reality, sometimes quite the opposite is true, but you'll never see this
reflected in the modeler. Often, the continuity of a resource on individual
work paths is essential and integral to effective and efficient output.
There's no way to represent this in the input to the modeler and no way to
validate the output against these requirements in the modeler's results. At
best, in this type of environment, the results are very, very high-level
suppositions.

--

Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
"We wrote the book on Project Server
http://www.msprojectexperts.com

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