At Project Momentum in Barcelona last week, I attended an experience sharing session with Patrick Brunner and Wilhelm Glas of Siemens and their EPM partner Eric Schott. I retained from it that it is critical to develop a robust and crisp vision of why you want to deploy Microsoft EPM in your company.

In Siemens, it is estimated that 40% of revenues come from projects, so processes were in place to perform Enterprise Portfolio Management. However, they were spread across many tools with some level of data re-entry and significant admin efforts to collect and maintain the data. The objectives for EPM are transparency, breaking information silos, providing and integrated solution (based on SAP and MS Project Server together with MS Sharepoint) that is easy to use by PMs, by end users and by executives.

The business case for EPM highlighted major savings in the area of time reporting and data aggregation, consolidation and reporting which justified the project. The vision of providing real time information on activities, resources and costs, and to be able to aggregate it at various levels in the company, is a compelling one at Siemens.

One of the key advices from the presenters was: “Talk to the people about needs not tools and focus where it hurts the most to mobilize persons in the organizations on EPM”.