What's New

• AIS Featured in "Best Review"
• New Version Just Released: "Microsoft Project Real World Best Practices"
• AIS Announces the Portfolio Advisor
• Execuserve and AIS Announce Partnership
• AIS and Business Analysts

Project Management Events of Interest

AIS Webinars & Seminars

What's New

AIS Announces the Portfolio Advisor

For years, senior Operations Managers have utilized linear programming models to successfully optimize a finite resource to best advantage across multiple contending options. In recent years, Delta Airlines successfully utilized just such a model to optimize flight routes for their aircraft that resulted in an immediate savings of over $235,000, per day. At AIS, we have taken these same techniques and built a very straightforward and yet powerful model that optimizes a finite pool of funding dollars across multiple contending projects within the project portfolio.

Typically, organizations spend a great deal of time and effort assessing alternative project proposals with an eye to selecting those that will yield the best return to the company, support it’s strategic objectives, contain minimal risk, etc. But once all of the selected projects are underway, they invariably spawn multiple, ongoing requests for incremental funding. The problem becomes, how does the enterprise allocate scarce financial resources to best advantage across the portfolio? Simply put, how does one feed the eagles and starve the turkeys?

This is precisely the problem that the Portfolio Advisor solves. One enters in the total funding dollars available, and the Portfolio Advisor then computes all possible outcomes to arrive at how these dollars should best be allocated to minimize expense and maximize return across the portfolio. Also, multiple alternative funding levels can easily be entered, with the resulting recommendations stored for side by side comparison.

Absent such a capability, organizations are invariably forced into going through manual, one off financial analysis efforts each time a set of requests come forward. Or worse, funding decisions revert to being based on some combination of identifying “sacred cows” and company politics.

The Portfolio Advisor provides a sound foundation for senior managers to make financial decisions, as it identifies easily and quickly optimal funding for the portfolio’s projects given available dollars. Once completed, the recommendations from the model can then either be implemented or situationally modified as desired based on senior management judgment. And those decisions then become a matter of record as to why and when funding decisions and associated allocations were made.

Finally, because the Portfolio Advisor is systemic, consistent and therefore repeatable, it has significant implications for supporting Sarbanes-Oxley related compliance initiatives in addition to being an outstanding tool for sorting through contending alternatives to arrive at optimal funding allocations at any given point in time.

For additional information, please contact us directly at 781-829-9888.