Make the Commitment to Project Portfolio Management
The corporate strategy remains just a pipe-dream unless projects are initiated to move the company towards its strategic goals. Like players on a team, projects must be coordinated with each other and with organizational realities and objectives. Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is the process that facilitates this coordination. Used effectively, PPM ensures that projects are aligned with corporate strategies and priorities and optimizes resource allocation. It bridges the gap between the executive decision process and project execution.
How do you get started? Many organizations begin with tool implementation, but this can be a mistake. More important to the success of PPM is the change readiness of your organization around seven key elements of organizational culture.
Assess Organizational Readiness
Is your company ready to implement PPM tools and practices? You’ll need to make sure that you put the following organizational attributes, infrastructure, and practices in place:
1. Develop a coherent strategy.
PPM uses project activities to move the organization towards a goal. According to research on PPM, groups and individuals who conduct strategic planning are consistently more successful at achieving goals than those who don’t utilize it. The strategy provides a source of shared vision that should be used to determine which opportunities to pursue – the first step in portfolio selection.
2. Manage projects and programs well.
Walk before you run. Trying to implement PPM before mastering the basics of project management puts the cart before the horse. Without project management methodology and practices in place, you don’t have the basic project performance data you need to work with. Bad project data means that cost and schedule estimates are exercises in fantasy.
3. Know what projects already exist.
What’s in the portfolio? Many companies don’t know. An inventory of all the initiatives competing for resources is a baseline requirement to even begin portfolio management. Many companies set criteria for what counts as a project to be listed (for example, only projects that surpass a predetermined threshold number: a schedule of 30+ days or 100+ hours; or a budget of at least $50,000). Counting projects is a first step towards deriving value from portfolio management, because certain realities are quickly revealed: if you schedule 130 percent of your human resources to projects, for example, a lot of things will not get done (and valuable people will quit or go crazy). Even this basic step surfaces redundancies and dead issues, allowing a PPM initiative to create value almost immediately. The inventory has to include all projects, since resources are working on all projects – not just on the high-profile ones. And it should include projects that are being carried out by outsource providers and consultants, as well, since even those projects have at least someone within the company as a liaison, contract manager, and/or project manager.
These hours often get lost in the decision-making process, only to show up later as a cost or schedule overrun. Operations work, to the extent that it draws on resources needed for projects, must also be considered.
4. Fully describe all planned and existing projects.
Once the parameters of the list are decided upon, each project on it must be described. Details such as technologies required; estimates of time, cost, and personnel required; and a basic risk/reward calculation give portfolio managers the data they need to compare and contrast projects. Companies skilled at opportunity identification and business-case development on one hand, and at tracking existing projects on the other, have a significant advantage at this stage. Their lists will be more complete, and their estimates more meaningful. Many questions must be answered in detail before you can begin to select and prioritize the projects in the inventory, and some of the answers won’t come easy. Which projects make the most money? Which have the lowest risk? Which have subjective value, in terms of community image or internal morale? Which are not optional – projects dictated by regulatory requirements, for example? In the information-gathering process, a second level of shakedown will naturally come about. Some projects will be held off because human resources aren’t available, some because the technology is immature, some due to looming external risks. Much, if not all, of the information necessary to populate the database about projects in the inventory is generated by the steps in the project management process: scope definition, risk management, scheduling. The software and resources required to generate, analyze, and deliver this information shouldn’t be scattered all over the organization, but unified under the flag of a PMO.
5. Confirm that the project data is reliable.
You won’t make good decisions based on bad information. This is where the enterprise-level project management tools with portfolio management capabilities really earn their keep. Gathering data in such a way that it can be put into context and become information is where software reigns supreme. How long will each project take? How much will it cost? What’s the expected ROI? What’s the status of the projects already underway? Being able to view the most salient information on each and every project in thumbnail-sketch form allows executives to compare apples to apples … and weigh the relative benefits of apples vs. oranges. What is less certain is the organization’s willingness to use these features of the software and to train the users appropriately. This is a cultural change issue that is often not well addressed when selecting a PPM tool.
6. Know who is available to work on projects, and when.
A second part of the inventory process should be, literally, counting heads. Who are the project managers? Surprisingly, many large companies struggle to identify project resources. For some companies, the scarcest resource isn’t money but project managers. A critical factor in project selection thus becomes: Do we have a project manager who can manage it? How many project managers and project team members do you have? What is each one doing, right now? When will he/she be finished? What are his/her areas of expertise? Without a system for knowing what each person in the pool of potential project personnel is capable of, and when they will be available, you cannot really be said to manage a portfolio. People do projects. Without them, all you have are ideas.
7. Have a PMO in place.
Assuming that you plan to implement PPM at the enterprise level (which we recommend), an enterpriselevel PMO needs to own the project inventory, prioritization, selection, and tracking process or, PPM cannot be done well. Gartner, Inc. has recommended this PMO strategy, and those companies that have put enterprise-wide PPM in place have relied on it. In fact, while intra-departmental portfolios may perhaps be selected and balanced without involvement of a PMO, it’s doubtful that anything on a wider scale can succeed … and you can’t optimize the system by balancing only parts of it. This is undoubtedly why Gartner predicted years ago that companies failing to establish a PMO would experience twice as many major project delays, overruns, and cancellations as would companies with a PMO in place. New research tells us that companies are moving toward the PMO as the owner of portfolio management. Over 30% of companies are presently structured this way while over half who say they will implement PPM in 2013 plan to give the PMO responsibility for the process.
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