American Airlines Project Portfolio Management Tool

American Airlines

Problem Statement

At any one time, hundreds of development and maintenance projects are active. Each of these projects is the responsibility of the sponsoring department and therefore there was no central source of managing projects across all departments. American Airlines needs to develop a common repository for all projects across all departments in order to assess their strategic contribution to the organization.

Business Need / Opportunity

With the formation of the Project Management and Consulting Group (PM&C), which is responsible for providing project consulting services to the various departments developing and maintaining systems, there was a need for a comprehensive database of all the projects in all departments. PM&C will us the database to perform portfolio analysis. The analysis will focus on the strategic mix of projects across all departments and divisions. PM&C will evaluate projects based on their contribution to corporate goals instead of their contribution to the department or division. The project database will be used to manage project audits as well as provide data that would help better allocate resources.

Solution

The scope of this project is to design and implement a working prototype of a relational database containing the elements necessary too document project data, and track projects through the AA Phase Gate Model. The database will facilitate the analysis of the strategic mix of projects.

Goals and Objectives

The objective of this prototype is to identify the benefits, requirements, and feasibility of using this process and database as a long term solution to manage the portfolio of projects at American Airlines.