Not Your Mama’s ERP: Strategic Portfolio Management Adds Another Layer

A Tempo Software executive explains how SPM is a fairly new evolution of portfolio project management and how it can help enhance organizations’ existing ERP systems.

Shannon Mason is the chief strategy officer at Tempo Software. The company offers strategic portfolio management (SPM) solutions to help businesses maximize efficiency.

Tempo supports more than 30,000 organizations across the globe, including more than half of the Fortune 100. Its platform connects with ERP systems and works with Jira. Organizations can take the Jira data and then port that into their ERP system to work with SPM.

With a background in portfolio, Agile tooling and software, Mason is responsible for go-to-market, product, and engineering.

Mason spoke with MES Computing about SPM and how this fairly new evolution of project management can supplement an organization’s legacy ERP system, even for the midmarket.

Define SPM.

We historically referred to [SPM] as PPM (portfolio and project management/project portfolio management). SPM is kind of the natural evolution of PPM that I think truly embraces how the right-hand side of the project development lifecycle has been able to speed up.

It used to be, ‘we run projects, they’re discrete – they start, they end.’ Then, all of a sudden with cloud development, you had these long-lived durable assets, so they don’t necessarily end.

That really asks an organization to think about their strategy and their portfolio of products and solutions in a much different way.

SPM is kind of the next generation of how we think about portfolios and programs and projects within the context of how the business gets stuff done.

How does SPM differ from ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)?

A lot of ERP systems, they look at, oftentimes, what’s happened. And you’re also usually looking at your mix of humans that you have in the organization as well.

SPM works with ERP. And it’s really about, OK, we have all this great data. We know where human effort is going. We know where allocations are going. We might even know how much we’re spending on those humans too, depending on which ERP systems we’re picking up in our organization.

And then we want that information to actually feed into, “what should we be doing next? How should we be behaving or operating next?’

ERP is a great operational backbone to the organization. SPM is your strategic nervous system. You can’t operate without the two. They’re attached to each other, the head and the spine.

Can you give an example of how ERP and SPM work together?

You’ve got your financial data. You might have your supply chain data, your HR data – these critical back-office functions are supported inside of your ERP systems.

On top of that, [an SPM] layer is going to add on: how do we model and prioritize and govern the work that we’re going to do across our portfolio and possibly, our programs we’re running, which can be thousands and thousands of people that are all identified in the ERP system that need to be put to work.

And then once we do those things, are we getting the return on investment there? Does that return of investment influence all the financial data that might be living inside of our ERP, or the choices that we make from an HR standpoint?

What type of companies or organizations are using SPM along with their ERP systems?

The market is still coming on board with the language of SPM, but when I talk to our customers, they all express the needs of an SPM: ‘We have this giant strategy. We have all these different initiatives that are happening inside the organization ... we don’t know how to actually internalize all of this change, internalize all of the updates we need to make.’

The types of organizations are almost everybody. I say that looking at Tempo’s customer base ... it ranges from companies that are making electric cars [that] are thinking about, ‘OK, I have a supply chain issue, tariffs have just been introduced’ ... to companies that don’t produce a thing, it’s software they produce. They have to make sure that people can get online and create a booking and how do you interact with that booking?

Our customer base is super wide because the problem is a general business problem. How do you think about your strategy? How do you execute against that strategy? Do you have the right number of humans to do that strategy?

How do you see SPM as a solution for the midmarket?

A midsized organization needs to figure out these same business issues. Most mid-market businesses, unless they’re a bespoke kind of lifestyle business, want to become big companies.

That is, to stitch all this together and make sure they’re prioritizing the work and doing the work in a smart way and actually getting the return on investment and not spending money on things that don’t make sense.