Project & Portfolio Management Seminar

2014-03-09

A seminar entitled “Project Management Office (PMO) powered by Project & Portfolio Management (PPM) Workshop” was successfully held by the Cyber Education at the University of Macau on March 9, 2014. The seminar was conducted by Gabriel Lau, Senior PMP Lecturer from Knowledge Century and assisted by Carol Ye, Consultant from WisageTech. Project managers, senior managers and executives from SJM, Banco Tai Fung, Bank of China, DSAT, TechNet and other relevant government agencies and Stephen Law, CEO of Wisage Technology, who had extensive experience in large-scale project management and systems development, were invited to attend the seminar.

The seminar began with the explanation of the difference of portfolio, program and project and how they were related to each other. Gabriel then explained how project portfolio should be viewed from multiple dimensions, such as planning, communication and execution and he also discussed the critical success factors in managing them.

The main part of the seminar was to teach the participants how to use 8thManage for project and portfolio management. The following 8thManage features were demonstrated to the participants and the participants also had the chances to do hand-on exercises:
• WBS breakdown
• Resource planning
• Deliverables planning and inter-dependence
• Milestones
• Budget planning
• Governance structure
• PMO management
• Critical Success Factors Tracking
• SLAs
• Approval flow
• Baseline comparison
• Actual cost (e.g. human resource cost) tracking
• Problem detection (e.g. Delays, Issue, Risks, Budget overrun)
• Communication tools
• All kinds of Dashboards and reports for overall management of individual project and Project Portfolio Management

During the seminar, Stephen had very positive interactions with the participants. For the management issues raised by the participants, he shared his experiences in Citibank and HKEx and advised the participants to take structural approach from the beginning to avoid suddenly affecting the speed of execution. Stephen also surfaced that “keeping people honest” was the fundamental in any management and he coached the group how to combine an effective tool with good judgment to do so.