Your company's transformation deserves a PPM tool that helps you overcome the most common project portfolio management problems. With AirSaas, you can speed up your decision-making, maintain total transparency on your project priorities, and say goodbye to micro-management of tasks.
There are many project portfolio management tools on the market: how does AirSaas stand out from the crowd?
The world's easiest project portfolio. AirSaas is designed to be used by IT teams and business managers alike, and requires no training whatsoever. Invite your colleagues to experience AirSaas' ergonomic interface and sleek design.
Give your project governance the best decision-making tool. AirSaas's project portfolio provides a synthetic view of indicators you need to make value-driven decisions.
Your project portfolio doesn't have to force you to abandon your favorite project management tools. AirSaas connects to the most popular tools on the market (Jira, Azure devOps, Asana...) to provide you with the information you need to manage your project activities at a macro level.
The company's strategy is clear, the project governance body is in place, it is now necessary to provide relevant and up-to-date indicators to prioritize projects based on emergencies, potential gains, accessible resources, etc.
The performance of your Copil depends on your ability to make the right decisions in the right time. AirSaas gives you access to a dashboard of your project portfolio. You can use the filters to find the projects you need to focus your efforts on.
The importance of good reporting is well established. The more managers and management of the company are aware of the progress of the various projects, the more the various frustrations disappear. The problem is that the process of collecting the information necessary for this reporting is a time-consuming task for your employees.
That's why we offer you the automatic flash report. Generate a presentation (.ppt, .pdf, url) in one click, with all the updated data formatted in slides in the colors of your company.
Each project portfolio view provides you with different insights. The timeline gives an overview of the projects with their associated milestones. At a glance, you can see the overruns, dependencies, and projects to be carried out in parallel.
Consider different scenarios by moving projects over time and choose the strategy that brings the greatest benefit. The tool will show you recommendations based on various factors (availability of resources, importance of the project, delay on important milestones, etc.)
Monitoring budgets and optimizing resources is key in the IT department's job. This is the combination to be monitored continuously to manage its activities.
AirSaaS recovers the time and budgets consumed thanks to its connectors with your financial and project management tools. On the other hand, a declaration module is available to have up-to-date, consolidated and exportable information.
Start now with an effective project flash report solution
Your teams complain about the lack of commitment of the professions on the requested projects. And on the business side, frustration is felt due to delays and the failure to take their requests into account.
AirSaaS offers a common structure to follow for the implementation of a project. The dashboard view allows a shared understanding of development constraints and collective decision-making by the governance body.
The tool places collaboration at the forefront and makes it possible to report on the problems encountered, the successes of the course, share meeting minutes, etc. to involve the teams around a common interest.
A poor project definition is often the first source of frustration for IT teams, and always one of the main reasons for delayed project delivery.
On AirSaaS, users are supported to ask themselves the right questions and fill in the key information in a good framework (expected gains, success criteria, efforts to be made, etc.). Then, let's keep in mind that the filling can be done collaboratively and asynchronously until the moment when the project can go to the “ready to validate” state and be presented to the steering committee.
Regularly measuring the degree of confidence in the success of the project among the teams is essential. This way you can rectify the situation before the announced failure becomes too costly for the company. On AirSaaS, you can send a survey at regular intervals, and thus improve team engagement by listening to their concerns and by streamlining collaboration between business and IT.
The content of your communication plan should allow business managers and your management to understand the overall progress, bottlenecks and risks of slippage. It must also value successes to motivate teams and encourage recalcitrants to join the movement of successful projects. Reporting is often considered to be a time-consuming activity. AirSaaS helps you in this process by allowing you to automatically generate your flash reports to be sent in one click.
Start now with an effective project flash report solution
Many people confuse project management tools with project portfolio management tools. However, these two types of tools do not serve the same purposes.
So what is the difference between these two types of software?
The project management tool aims to ensure the optimal management of a particular project. Often thanks to a dashboard, it will simplify various tasks:
Unlike the project management tool, the implementation of a project portfolio management tool makes it possible to optimize the execution of several projects simultaneously.
As it develops, a company is led to carry out more and more projects at the same time. While good communication and a structured organization may be sufficient to manage a few projects jointly, there inevitably comes a time when the implementation of a project portfolio management tool becomes an essential ally in maintaining operational efficiency.
To summarize, what is the purpose of a project portfolio management tool?
It allows you to :
Although the first tools for managing project portfolios were created some forty years ago, it can still be noted that new software continues to appear regularly.
Today, all of these tools cover project portfolio management needs, but that hasn't always been the case! Indeed, some of them were initially created to allow project management.
Problem targeted at the date of creation
Looking at this graph, we can see that more than half of the project portfolio management tools were in fact originally designed to meet project management needs. It was only then that these were completed in order to cover both issues at the same time: project management and project portfolio management.
It's worth noting, however, that some of these tools had been developed to meet both these needs (Sciforma, Ganttic), and that Planview was even focused on project portfolio management from the outset.
Today, it's very rare to come across a tool that doesn't cover both aspects simultaneously. However, if these tools differ in the functionalities they offer, this is partly due to the problems they were targeting when they were first developed - but it also has to do with the vision of project management they support.
Start now with an effective project flash report solution
One of the reasons why project portfolio management software does not all offer the same features is that it depends on how they were designed historically. But it is also a consequence of the vision of project management that they advocate.
But why are there different visions of project management in IT departments?
The role of the IT department has evolved significantly in recent decades. From a direction mainly focused on technology, it is now much more involved in solving business needs. In addition to the obligation to ensure the operational functioning of information systems and the company site, the IT department is now expected to create value for its organization.
As the nature of their projects has evolved, the expectations of CIOs in terms of project portfolio management have therefore gradually evolved as well: they still need a tool to manage technical missions, but also software that simplifies their collaboration with the businesses, and the execution of projects they have in common.
The advent of digital technology offers CIOs the opportunity to support their company differently, and in particular by exerting greater weight in the execution of business objectives. An IT department that digitizes business workflows now brings them a lot by simplifying their daily lives and optimizing their efficiency. The IT department can even help a company change its business model by supporting it in setting up new online services. We can also cite the example described by Pierre Raschi (CEO of Reference DSI): a butcher shop was able to renew its aging clientele thanks to the intervention of a timeshare CIO.
The rise of digital technology has therefore structurally led to the IT Department being entrusted with more tasks, some of which are sometimes very different from the simple maintenance of information systems. With new responsibilities, the IT Department's expectations in terms of project portfolio management tools have therefore inevitably changed.
The transformations described above inevitably lead to a change in the way the IT department will interact with the employees of its company. In fact, an IT department focused mainly on technical tasks will tend to try to keep the behavior of the various users of the information systems under control. Whereas an IT department that wants to add value to its employees' core business will need to develop a closer relationship with them: if it wants to be able to support them in implementing new ways of working, it needs to be able to understand their needs in detail.
Thus, depending on the mission it sets itself, the IT Department will not need the same type of project portfolio management tool.
To contrast these two styles of IT, they could be represented by Maslow's pyramids:
Once you understand that not all project portfolio management tools offer the same features, you have to ask yourself: what type of tool will enable me to achieve my IT department's goals?
Of course, there are project portfolio management tools that are more or less comprehensive, offering various features such as:
But rather than just listing the features, project portfolio management tools can be grouped into different categories.
Some project portfolio management tools such as ERPs try to meet all the needs that CIOs may have. While they are often effective, it must be recognized that they lack flexibility once implemented.
Conversely, other tools (particularly those in SaaS mode) offer fewer features but have the ability to integrate with tools that are already installed. Choosing this kind of solution avoids duplication and, above all, reduces the cost of changing tools: upgrading to a full ERP is a complex, time-consuming and costly project.
Each of these types of tools reflects the perspective on the role that the IT department should play in the company. If it chooses to implement lighter and less comprehensive tools, it is because it considers that its mission is no longer necessarily to have to respond to all the needs that its company has and will have simultaneously, but rather to be able to adapt to the company's evolution. These tools are therefore easy to set up and change, and the IT Department can continue to respond effectively to specific issues according to the expectations of the company.
In the event that the CIO wishes to establish greater collaboration with the departments of his company, it can be very interesting for him to opt for the implementation of a tool including a collaborative space. Indeed, this space will make it possible to structure exchanges and centralize important information much more effectively than on software such as Slack or Teams. Thus, this type of tool can be a real lever for involving businesses, and optimizing their support by IT teams.
Project portfolio management software that has been developed to provide a high-quality user experience has two major advantages for an IT department.
First off, getting business departments on board is much easier when they are offered a tool with an intuitive interface: it is difficult to expect strong commitment from business units when IT teams simply invite them to work on tools that were not designed with business profiles in mind. Project portfolio management tools with a good UX are therefore generally one of the options to be favored for a CIO wishing to bring IT and business teams to collaborate together effectively.
The other major benefit is the rate of adoption of the project portfolio software: UX-focused tools are quick to get to grips with and do not require much training for business users. This is a strong point that should be taken into account by any IT manager who wants to involve their company's business units more in IT projects.
All tools contain a methodology. One of the tips for optimizing the adoption rate of new software in a company is to choose a tool with an intrinsic methodology similar to that of the company: whether in terms of the goals being pursued, the working practices already established, or the IT department's vision of project portfolio management.
It is therefore essential to question existing practices, in order to choose your project portfolio management tool accordingly.
Of course, we recommend choosing a tool that uses a methodology fairly similar to the processes already in place in your company. However, it should also be noted that a project portfolio tool can also help to implement new working methods and gradually change the corporate culture. The culture of a company is the result of the behavior it adopts in a particular environment. So if you change the environment, particularly by changing the software used, you change the culture!
While the choice of a new tool can be a catalyst for a change in practices, you still have to make sure that this transformation of the teams is also accompanied by decisions and guidelines: offering a new tool is not enough to shake up the habits ingrained in the daily life of a company.
To sum things up: choose a tool whose core methodology is not too far removed from your company's reality, or, if not, from the one you want to install.
AirSaas is a fairly lightweight project portfolio management tool that does not aim to be an all-in-one software package, but which includes most of the key features that an IT department needs to ensure the execution of its projects.
Jira
By integrating with Jira, Airsaas enables you to automatically retrieve project progress data from the platform. This gives you an effortless overview of all projects and their status.
Microsoft Teams
AirSaas is integrated with Microsoft Teams. The most important information on current projects will be sent automatically to your dedicated Teams communication channels. With this integration, you can easily share project progress with the whole company. If you use other solutions, please let us know!
Our bet: to succeed in involving businesses, the IT department needs thePPM tool that they will know how to handle quickly, without friction. We believe that it is not by forcing businesses to work on complex software that companies will be able to break the logic of silos and structure a close collaboration between business and CIOs.
We have taken the collaborative approach to the max: AirSaas offers a search engine for (external/internal) solutions accessible to business managers. When a department has a need, it already looks for solutions on its own without necessarily informing the IT department, which may even end up facing shadow IT.
The idea here is to provide the IT Department with a solution to manage these practices and structure their efforts to find solutions, while helping them understand the technical constraints of the IS.
AirSaas is a lightweight PPM solution that integrates with existing tools and uses a strong collaborative methodology to involve the various professions.
Choose an effective project portfolio management tool now.
