I hope this blog finds you well and safe, both at work and at home.

I wanted to share what one of our customers has done with Zeno.PM to help their organisation make some critical decisions regarding their project portfolio. Now more than ever, it is vitally important to have instant access to timely data to aid executive decision making.

How old is the data you are relying on?

Now I wouldn’t normally write with such a product focus, but quite simply the need for speed has never been greater so I’m hoping our customers can use this now in their own environments and perhaps those utilising other tools can do something similar and as easily.

The challenge was how to identify what projects and programs of work would be impacted by the many changes to our ways of working being introduced to address the risks of Covid-19. How do you quickly assess project impact and present a consolidated view across portfolios or enterprise landscapes?

The “Custom Fields” area in Zeno.PM allows you to create fields that will appear in every project, program and portfolio “Basics” section. These fields help shape and inform projects and can assist in aligning project and programs with larger enterprise directives or strategic pillars (see below):

By creating Custom Fields and then “Field Values” relevant to potential Covid-19 impacts, you can quickly review projects against a defined set of impact criteria, ensuring a consistent approach to assessment across the portfolio. For example, you might create fields that identify Covid-19 risk exposures to:

  • Resourcing – can project resources work effectively, or work at all?
  • Benefits realisation – can this still be achieved? Is it digital or does it require something else?
  • Delivery Risk – can the project even be delivered in the current context?
  • Enabling/dependent – does the project enable something else or is dependent on another project or event?

Project managers then adjust these new fields in their “Project Basics / Initiative Metrics” area giving the entire project portfolio an additional assessment value for these new risks. In the below, I have created a Custom Field for “Covid-19 Delivery Risk” and provided 3 options for selection:

Zeno.PM’s “Custom Data Pivot” can then be used to get a portfolio or enterprise view of all projects mapped against these new impact measures. You can access this via the PMO Portal for all projects In Delivery or by portfolio (see below).

Finally, simply build your own report that maps in your projects to your Covid-19 impacts. You can then save your profile to re-run the custom pivot or push the information to MS Excel for further analysis.


Hopefully the above will be of value in helping you quickly assess the impacts of Covid-19 in your PPM world. As ever, please get in touch if you’d like more detail or some support in setting this up in your Zeno.PM instance.

Stay safe…