By: Ajit Mishra

In our attempt to review PPM Tools, today, we will focus on one of the best solution available in market called Microsoft ® Office Project Portfolio Server or MOPPS. Author of this post has been deeply involved with this product and used the tool to fullest. Therefore this review will deeply dive into the capabilities & benefits.

History & Background

Formerly called UMT Portfolio Server, after the acquisition by Microsoft in 2007, this product is widely known as MOPPS. Prior to the take-over, UMT had created a niche for this product in various global IT PMO's. With Microsoft brand behind it, this product has gone through slight change in interface & the recent version is 2007. MOPPS widely helps organizations realize their potential by identifying, selecting, managing, and delivering portfolios that best align with their business strategy. Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 is a key component of the Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution and helps ensure executives gain visibility, insight, and control across their project, program, and application portfolios. MOPPS 2007 tightly integrates with Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 to provide organizations with an end-to-end project portfolio management solution. The bidirectional gateway enables administrators to link multiple Microsoft Office Project Servers to MOPPS, providing executives with a consolidated view of all projects within the organization.

Benefits:

Improve Transparency & Accountability

MOPPS plays a vital role in consolidating all investments (for example, projects, programs, and applications) within an enterprise repository to help ensure executives gain visibility, insight, and control over all portfolios. This in result improves transparency & establishes accountability across domains. It is easy to define multiple workflows to standardize, communicate, and enforce the portfolio governance framework across the organization. Few more key result areas could signify the salient features such as:

• Automate and enforce governance processes: Define multiple workflows to help ensure each project is subject to the appropriate governance controls throughout its life cycle—from proposal to post-implementation.
• Employ best practice methods: Use out-of-the-box templates and embedded best practice methods (such as the Business Alignment Framework) to effectively manage project, program, and application portfolios.
• Capture all investments within a central repository: Consolidate business and IT investments within an enterprise repository to improve visibility, insight, and control. Define templates for each investment type (for example, project business case) to standardize and streamline the collection of data across the organization.
• Measure and track portfolio performance: Monitor projects, programs, and applications throughout their life cycles to proactively identify potential issues, make decisions, and help ensure your portfolios deliver maximum business value.

Objectively Prioritize and Evaluate Competing Investments

Use best practice techniques to objectively prioritize the organization's business strategy, automatically derive prioritization scores, and build charts that effectively evaluate the competing investments from varying angles.

• Objectively prioritize business strategy: Employ proven techniques to define and objectively prioritize the organization's business strategy for the upcoming planning period.
• Build consensus among executives: Prioritize the business strategy with each executive individually (for example, CIO, COO, and CTO) to identify the divergence of opinion. Use the results to help facilitate a Business Driver Prioritization Workshop and drive consensus across the group.
• Automatically prioritize competing investments: Employ best practice techniques to automatically derive prioritization scores (such as strategic value, financial value, risk, architectural fit, and operational performance), helping to objectively assess projects, programs, and applications.
• Generate charts to effectively evaluate the investments within each portfolio: Use the prioritization scores to build charts to evaluate the competing investments from multiple dimensions before finalizing funding decisions.

Optimize Budgets and Align Investments with Business Strategy

Embedded best practice portfolio analytical techniques help analysts to optimize budgets and recommend portfolios that best align with the organization's business strategy. This objective process enforces a rational rather than emotional approach to portfolio selection, helping ensure the selected investments are aligned with the organization's strategic priorities and will maximize return on investment.

• Select the optimal portfolio under varying constraints: Employ sophisticated algorithms and embedded best practices to quickly determine the optimal project or program portfolio under varying budget and business constraints (for example, cost, FTE, and inter project dependencies).
• Reach the Efficient Frontier: Take advantage of advanced portfolio analytical techniques (for example, insight analysis) to identify and break the constraints prohibiting the portfolio from reaching the Efficient Frontier.
• Choose investments that best align with the organization's business strategy: Perform a business alignment assessment to help ensure the selected portfolios are aligned with the organization's strategic priorities.
• Implement a rational rather than emotional approach to portfolio selection: Often it is the squeaky wheel or the executive who shouts the loudest who influences portfolio funding decisions. Use best practice methods (such as the Business Alignment Framework) to establish a rational portfolio selection process that can be easily standardized.

Tightly Integrate with Office Project Server 2007

Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 integrates with Office Project Server 2007 to provide organizations with an end-to-end project portfolio management solution. The bidirectional Gateway enables administrators to link multiple Office Project Servers to Office Project Portfolio Server 2007, providing executives with a consolidated view of all projects within the organization.

• Benefit from tight integration with Office Project Server 2007: Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 tightly integrates with Office Project Server 2007 to help ensure organizations can quickly deploy powerful portfolio analytical techniques within the Office EPM Solution to provide a world-class, end-to-end project portfolio management platform.

EPMGuru Verdict

• MOPPS comes with an affordable price tag. Rather, MOPPS is the least expensive among all other PPM tools.
• At a time of recession, Microsoft comes up with huge discounts on Enterprise Agreement to promote its Enterprise Project Management Solution (EPM).
• In my personal experience, MOPPS is an effective tool that can easily suite any business line building & optimizing Portfolios…be it for projects, programs or Application Portfolios.
• Prior knowledge of MOPPS in the form of training is vital for requirement definition, workflow building & deployment. Microsoft EPM University provides well defined live training for 4 days in conjunction with Quantum PM. (This author has attended the MOPPS-Business Architect Training to say it is quite impressive.)
• If your organization uses Microsoft Project Professional as a planning tool, first you need to transition into EPM leveraging Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 capabilities.
• As a next step towards maturity, it is advisable to deploy MOPPS which easily synchronizes with Project Server through Project Server Gateway.
• We at EPMGuru.com recommend exploring this tool for PPM excellence.
• You can visit http://www.epmconnect.com/ for a live demo of MOPPS 2007.

Weaknesses, Comparison with other PPM Tools, Pricing
This section is available on request and we are not publishing keeping the product vendor's interest. However, independent reviews, price comparisons & potential buying/implementation risks can be availed upon a request to epmguru@epmguru.com