The general, unable to control his irritation, will launch his men to the assault like swarming ants, with the result that one-third of his men are slain, while the town still remains untaken. Such are the disastrous effects of a siege. —Sun Tzu

Executives are not generals who are irritated. Delivery teams are not swarming ants. However, Sun-Tzu’s metaphor overlays quite nicely on the concept of portfolio management. An organization that cannot manage the demand funnel and does not align its projects to strategies or enterprise goals may end up driving its leadership to irritation. If an irritated leader launches a project, which is not aligned or prioritized, the project portfolio may seem like a swarm response. As a result, these leaders will try to fulfill everyone’s request for everything all at once. To this end, the project delivery engine of the company will seize up, causing projects to fail and team members to pay the price.

The Key Practice of Portfolio Management

I’ve often written about portfolio management and its importance. As a key practice in an effective organization, portfolio practices sit at the very beginning of governance, oversight, and control. Portfolio management reaches beyond information technology projects. Therefore, the more inclusive the portfolio management process, the more robust the views of enterprise spend, resource commitment, value realization, and other operational efficiency metrics will be.

Choosing the Right Projects for Your Organization

Projects should align to organizational strategies and goals, and should be tracked for the results they deliver back to the organization. Otherwise, how would an executive team know if they were running the right projects? One of the first steps to ensure the right projects are selected is to define a standardized and objective set of criteria to assess proposed initiatives against.

While many companies select the right initiatives by listening attentively to the demands of the day, this process does not provide a comprehensive view of the future. Planning for capacity, capability, and future objectives – in an effort to meet the demand of new projects – is critical. However, a long-range and more complete view of demand provides even more choices. For example, how does one choose a HR system upgrade over implementing a new customer-facing application for fulfillment? Can we compare apples to oranges?

The first step to addressing this decision is to develop criteria to assess all projects against. This set of decision-making criteria will enable decision-makers to establish an unconstrained view of which projects rate highest and add the most value, as well as which ones rank lower.

The Three-Part Equation of Portfolio Management

But project selection is only the first step. Portfolio management is more than decision-making levers and a portfolio management tool. To create a robust portfolio management framework, a process and governance must be established (which includes a staged approval).

Through this three-part equation – levers + process + governance – an organization will realize the value of portfolio management. To keep the process of delivery from seizing up, it needs to be maintained and well oiled. Beyond this, there is a need to ensure that what goes into the machine is appropriate. The decision-making levers help organizations vet the right inputs (from the potentially vast array of initiatives in the demand pipeline). The prioritization process and governance are the grease that enables the approach to run smoothly. To paraphrase Peter Drucker, the decision levers help us choose the right things; the grease helps us do those things right. With this approach, we’ll be able to avoid a siege on the project delivery team(s), and we’ll hopefully avoid any project casualties in the process as well.

If your team needs help establishing a process and governance, in an effort to create a robust portfolio management framework, we would love to connect!

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• What does it do?
• Is there only one definition?
• What does it look like?
• How does it operate?
• Who should be part of the team?
• What capabilities make a PMO successful?

Lots of organizations use the three little letters P-M-O, but what those letters represent can be very different:

• A Project Management Center of Excellence (i.e., authors of the PM processes)
• A Governance Office (i.e., overseers of compliance)
• A project manager resource pool
• A portfolio management facilitator
• A resource management center, charged with balancing individual contributor or team supply and demand

Regardless of the type of PMO, you have these five steps will help you advance your team and add value to your organization.

1. Understand Your Current PMO

Have you had your PMO assessed? I’m not referring to a customer satisfaction survey from your stakeholders. I mean an assessment that addresses what you are doing, what you could be doing, and how to move forward, based on a standard set of criteria. Doing an assessment like this, however, can be a challenge to self-administer.

Do you have a set of objective criteria? Do you have a standardized approach to follow (is it tried and proven)? Are you an unbiased party to the assessment?

Assessing the maturity of your practices is not about a number.  Sometimes organizations get stuck there. The Capability Maturity Model Integration framework (CMMI) has a five-level rating system. Organizations that focus on simply attaining a “Level 3” grade are missing the point. It is more important to understand your why. As Simon Sinek has famously pointed out, “A why is like a compass direction. It tells you where you are going.” What value does your PMO provide? What motivates your team? These answers will be more important than a numerical grade on a five-point scale. It is valuable to understand where you are with respect to your value.

2. Follow a PMO Roadmap

Without a map that directs your growth journey, how can you assess if you are making progress? Your PMO roadmap should have both short-term and long-term goals, deliverables, and measures of value. A roadmap lays out the desired functional state of your PMO. It outlines the steps necessary to reach the future state. Similarly, the roadmap can address the span of control of the PMO. The PMO focus may be on IT only, one operating department, or the entire organization. Your roadmap will change based on where you provide coverage currently versus where you want to go.

3. Build with Experience

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel and borrow liberally from others (other leaders, other departments, other organizations). Tailor as necessary to make processes and methods fit your culture, your industry, your team size, and your capabilities. Don’t try to have your project managers architect your PMO. It is not that they are not able; it is about capability and experience. Do you want to risk creating a new team with someone who has never created a PMO before? PMs are great at delivery. However, that does not mean they are necessarily organizational architects.

4. Define, Capture, and Showcase Value

To borrow from a famous scene in the 1996 film Jerry Maguire, for your PMO to be successful, you have to be able to show them the money.  The “money” has to be the value your stakeholders want from the PMO. Be careful: if you are the PMO leader, don’t specifically focus on building the PMO you want to run. Your stakeholders’ perceptions are your reality. Define a way to measure value and report back early and often on how well you are doing against your metrics.

5. Strive for Continuous Improvement

Follow your roadmap, but don’t let the journey end. Think about continuous improvement and get a little bit better every day. Project management offices can get stuck in a rut. They deliver on a set of functions and they eventually stop evolving. Chances are that your organization is continuously changing, so be sure you are adapting to it. Change does not always have to be a Big Hairy Audacious Goal; little changes make a difference too. Think about change as simple, incremental, and always delivering value.

Contact us!

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What are the differences between a project manager, program manager, project coordinator, and project administrator? Without clear expectations, project managers run the risk of missing the mark on what their leaders want them to do. PMs should work more closely to manage expectations and ensure they understand what is needed from their leaders.

Project managers offer a wealth of experience, insights, and skills to bring to an initiative. Some projects may need simple guidance and oversight that a project coordinator can provide. Larger, more complex initiatives require detailed oversight, integration between players, and someone who can ask tough questions. Project managers are well suited for the latter. Establishing clear expectations of your project manager allows for better collaboration amongst your team, as well as the successful completion of your project.

2. Understand Your Role in the Project

Project sponsors typically take on the main role in terms of the operation of the project at hand. They are responsible for being champions, clearing hurdles, resolving issues, or escalating to higher levels for support. Project managers and sponsors collaborate to establish a better understanding of what is expected from each role. Just as a project charter helps to define the constraints within which a project will run, a meeting with a project sponsor will help to define the boundaries of a PM’s operations within the project. The project manager’s role is to successfully deliver the project for all stakeholders, as well as the project sponsor.

3. Focus on Collaboration

Some project managers are expected to be glorified administrators of the project’s schedule, budget, issues, risks, and more. And while this is often an under-utilization of a project manager’s talents and capabilities, more experienced project managers serve as empowered guides, mentors, and decision-makers.

Senior project managers own decisions, issues, risks, budgets, and project scope. However, these senior project managers do not make these decisions in a void – project managers are responsible for owning the processes as well. For example, a PM owns the issue list. They ensure information is recorded accurately and that all entries are acted upon in a reasonable timeframe. They do not own each issue; the team is given autonomy over their tasks!

The project manager does not need to check in with a sponsor for permission to resolve each issue. PMs have been authorized to solve issues and seek help (escalate) when needed. This is why collaboration amongst the team, as well as the establishment of expectations for the project manager, is important to the project process.

Project managers – do you want to ensure that your work is effective? Need to clarify where and when to escalate or to drive a resolution on your own? Let’s connect!

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