Australian National U Moves to Project Portfolio Management
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 07/29/10
Australian National University has adopted a project portfolio management application from alfabet. The university's Information Services organization is implementing planningIT to better align its projects with institutional goals and to manage a portfolio of planned and active projects. Currently, the project register in IS' planning and project support office includes 31 projects underway and another 129 under consideration.
According to a press statement, Australian National U has struggled to coordinate business initiatives with the IS resources required. This gap has made it difficult for staff to write complete business cases that include the impact of project requests, associated risks, and cost estimates. Likewise, decision makers had incomplete data for being able to prioritize projects.
Project portfolio management is a category of software application that allows an organization to compare the details of projects and gauge their relative benefits against strategic goals, allowing it to shift resources to those that will provide maximum return or benefit.
The company released version 6.0 of planningIT in May 2010. The new release includes improved collaboration and reporting features and functionality for maintaining archival data on projects to help the user identify trends in project management practices.
About the Author
Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.