Planning and Budgeting in the days of Covid 19, with Microsoft Project's Portfolio Management

*** Email us at info@WesternPrinciples.com to organize a demo ***

Planning and Budgeting season will soon be upon us, and this year you’ll be doing it in the era of Covid-19.

Microsoft Project can help you intake, strategize, collaborate about, and select the right projects and programs to help you be agile and successful through 2020 and beyond.

Western Principles can help you get started.

What do you need to facilitate planning?
In the good old days -- last year -- you would get together in meetings to do your planning and budgeting.
In these times of social distancing, and work from home, how will you do planning and budgeting in 2020?

In 2020, with the challenges of Covid-19, you’re going to need a system that allows your team to work remotely and:
• Contribute project and program ideas,
• Collaborate on project analysis and high-level planning,
• Score the projects against key strategic and risk criteria, so that projects can be compared against one another,
• Create scenarios through sensitivity analysis of projects against various factors like changing conditions – and also against projects that may be underway, and,
• Select the right projects into your portfolio.

Microsoft Project Online as part of Office 365 , and integrated and extended with other solutions like Teams, and the Power Platform, gives you a powerful and configurable solution to help you choose the right projects and complete your planning and budgeting for the future. Let’s look at how.
1. With Office 365 and Teams, you can create idea intake forms to allow people from all over your company – regardless of where they are actually working – to contribute ideas.
2. Those ideas can flow between people, wherever they are, as part of an automated workflow to analyze each idea, add more information like risks and options, improve on the idea, perform high-level planning, and determine the costs and benefits. These capabilities are all within Microsoft Project, and can be extended with the Microsoft Power Platform.
3. Use the built-in scorecard to evaluate projects against your strategy and other scoring criteria you define. These are ultimately weighted with your business weighting model, right inside Microsoft Project.
4. With Project’s portfolio analysis, you can run multiple scenarios, changing variables, and compare proposed ideas to one another and existing projects. These help you see what budget you need and forecast your resource needs, and ultimately to help you understand the impact of your decisions.
5. Finally, the process culminates in the ability for executives and committees to get the information they need to make tough decisions and select the right investments projects, regardless of where your people are.

Microsoft Project does it all
Microsoft Project will help you do this. In volatile times, like in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, you need to do planning and project selection more than ever. Microsoft Project provides the solution to choose the right projects, do projects right, and get the visibility to people, projects, and programs and make tough decisions, fast.
All of this, and your team can be geographically dispersed while collaborating together to drive your future business success.

We can help
Western Principles is a gold-certified Microsoft Project & Portfolio Management partner.
We know Microsoft Project and can help you with your portfolio management, this year, to help you with planning and budgeting in the face of Covid-19.
We can help you configure, implement, report, and integrate your Microsoft Project system, and train your team to get the best return on investment from it.
Let’s get started together. Visit us on the web, call us at 1-800-578-4155, or email us at info@westernprinciples.com.
We look forward to helping you.

Видео Planning and Budgeting in the days of Covid 19, with Microsoft Project's Portfolio Management канала Project Management Tips by North Highland