Practicing good project portfolio management can help you keep your projects on track and revenue rolling in
Keeping a portfolio of projects on track is a difficult task, especially when your MSP is working projects from a ticketing system built for managed services. Louis Bagdonas, Senior Program Manager – MSPs at Moovila, spends his days helping MSPs set up project management processes that intelligently, and automatically, sort through the chaos so projects stay on track, get completed on time, and become a valuable profit center.
We sat him down and asked him to share his best practices.
Create a framework
“The first step to creating order in your portfolio management system is to think about the framework,” he says. “Do you want to order your projects by the type of work? Does it make more sense to set up a system that organizes them by customer? Or should you group projects by who needs information about them?”
Deciding on a framework is influenced by the way your team works, the projects you do, and your work style. Start by asking yourself a few questions about how your team works.
“Start with, ‘What questions do you get asked frequently about the portfolio?’” says Bagdonas. “Are the questions about the customer or specific types of projects?” Or maybe they are about which projects frequently go over or under budget or how long projects take.
The most common way Bagdonas sees MSPs organize their portfolio is by customer.
“This can be a function of the PSA,” he says, “which doesn’t offer many ways to view a portfolio. In the PSAs, it is common to have only two options: customer and project type.”
But there are other ways to do this.
Choose from four groupings
In Moovila, we offer four ways to set up your project framework. We call them groupings.
They are:
Program
Category
Product
Stage
As you set up your project, keep in mind that you will be able to filter them from a simple menu using any or all of these four groupings.
You can also change those labels as your portfolio – and the ways you want to access your data – grows and changes.
Program: A high-level view
“We think of Program as the highest-level grouping,” says Bagdonas.
Rather than ordering everything by customer – as many MSP project managers do when using their PSA’s tools – we find it beneficial to create a framework that lets you control access to the projects by who wants to know what.
Thinking this way allows you to create a framework designed to give your team – whether it’s sales, engineering, or project management – the answers they need, when they need them.
Looking at the workflow that way, we created example tags for Templates, Budgeting, Triage, Professional Services, and Managed Services within the Program grouping. This makes it easy for people to view only the projects that interest them as they work.
If you are working on building out projects, you have a tidy list of prebuilt project templates to choose from. If you are budgeting, all the projects that need your attention are gathered under that heading. If you want to see every project that is offered as a professional service or under managed services, expand either of those groups.
“But, if you are the project manager,” says Bagdonas, “you probably want to sit down and quickly call up all projects that have been won and that need you to assign engineers, set dates, and all that good stuff. We labeled that group as Triage.”
Now, when we look at our Program grouping, we get a tidy list of all our projects organized into these handy buckets.
You can name these tags whatever you choose. We chose these labels because they reflect the way a lot of our MSP partner's work. You can rename them, create your own, or add more. This way you can continue to build out your ordering system as your projects – or team – grow and change.
Use categories to drill down
Within each Program grouping, we tag each project with a category. “Category is similar to ‘project type’ that we see in the PSAs,” says Bagdonas. “These are the next step down from Program.”
Under professional services, for example, we created categories for each type of project in that bucket: migration, network upgrades, site work, etc. This allows us to quickly see – as in this view (below) – what category of projects are currently on deck.
You can also see who is working on the project, the customer, and the project status – all at a glance.
Use Product & Stages tags for finer filtering
The next level down is Product. “This is the most specific tag,” says Bagdonas. “Maybe you are doing an implementation project. But is that implementation a firewall, a switch, or wireless?”
This granular grouping allows you to filter down to very specific types of work, which can be useful when considering resource allocation, budgets, and other things.
You might also want to view your projects based on where in their lifecycle they are.For this, we use the Stages tag. This allows you to see which projects are ready to invoice, say, or those that are waiting to be scheduled, awaiting a parts delivery, are on hold because of the customer, or that have had their budget approved.
Filtering by this more granular product tag is a useful way for people to find appropriate projects when invoicing, scheduling specific resources, meeting with customers, or ordering hardware. You can customize these filters and add stages that suit your workflows
Filter by priority
Once you set up a framework that suits your workflows, you can focus your efforts using the Priority filter. The filter flags projects as critical, high, normal, or low priority. For example, if a project is for a VIP customer, a high-dollar undertaking, has an immovable milestone, or is – for any reason – urgent, you can tag it as such. Then when you are filtering your projects, you will naturally focus on the most urgent ones first.
When it comes to keeping projects on track, if you would like to see things by your higher risk projects, then you can filter by the RPAX score. This allows you to see projects most at risk at the top, so you may know where you need to jump in and give support across your portfolio.
Smart project portfolio management gets the work done
Creating a framework that quickly brings your lagging projects to your attention helps you easily prioritize work. Instead of responding to customer complaints, missing deadlines, and falling behind on revenue, you will get a clear picture of the work on your MSP’s plate, so you know where to focus everyone’s attention.
Additionally, an organized system lets you quickly pivot when a customer cancels work or there is an unforeseen delay. Say a customer delays an implementation at the last minute due to unforeseen circumstances. This might once have created chaos, leaving expensive engineers idle while you come up with a plan B. But, with a carefully ordered project system, you can quickly filter your backlog for comparable projects, sort them by priority, then reschedule your team to focus on the next most urgent project for another customer. This seamless process reverses chaos in minutes.
With an organized framework, your customers will be happy you are getting their projects done. Your engineers will be delighted to get a clear directive. Your PM’s will save time. And your bottom line will grow.
Ready for a personalized demo of more intelligent ways to manage a portfolio of projects? Book a demo today.
