Gaining Clarity Through Project Portfolio Management
The ability for enterprises to sustain is built on a recurring cycle of identifying and delivering portfolios over a period of time. Through proper governance and decision making, organizations maintain this lifeline by prioritizing, adding and pruning components based on strategic alignment.
Like individuals, organizations define their core values to determine what’s important to them and what they want to accomplish within the realm of these values—their goals and objectives. Through establishing this identity, they continuously align how time and resources are spent through project portfolio management (PPM).
🏞️The Landscape
The scene may sound familiar.
A highly motivated and dedicated team. A burgeoning portfolio of projects, programs, and operations to cover the next couple years. An ambitious plan to methodically balance execution and risk for all these initiatives.
Clear direction from Senior Leadership on the importance of delivering everything. Seemingly adequate capacity to support the initiatives.
All appears well per the information available at the time and then you start executing.
Numerous technical challenges are encountered. Timelines begin to overlap amongst the various programs.
New projects are added on short notice while the collective expectation remains the same. Capacity that was once there has dwindled trying to balance planned and unplanned organizational commitments and conflicts arise.
Everything is a priority and must get done.
Unfortunately, what once appeared as opportunity, has sadly turned into disaster.
🧭 The Journey
As portfolios grow and the organizational environment changes, whether in response to market changes, shifting timelines or new leadership with new ideas, for example, PPM plays a critical role in connecting the organizational body of work with the strategic shifts; here are 5 steps which I use:
Engaging Senior Leadership on whether the portfolios, programs and projects are strategically aligned with the mission and vision given the current environment, capacity and capabilities of the organization, business unit, or division.
Once this discussion has taken place, it’s time to start making decisions. Time, budgets, and resources are finite in most organizations and need to be safeguarded. Prune what doesn’t align, document the rationale, communicate the decision to those impacted and analyze the portfolio impact.
As PPM is the vehicle in adapting to strategic change, the important thing is to have an organizational understanding of what is trying to be accomplished and how, and connect it to the mission and vision. This is especially important as people are impacted by these changes from the portfolio dynamics.
Monitor these changes over time. While frequency may differ by organization, the key here is to periodically review and understand the cumulative impact of these decisions.
Lastly, the ability to sustain change is driven by organizational culture and rooted in the lowest common denominator behavior(s). Be sure to ground the conversations in facts and assess what’s working and not working in the governance and decision making framework and adjust as needed.
📍The Outcome
Project portfolio management is a critical function in maintaining organizational homeostasis through balancing risk and value across the enterprise.
Seeing how the various components work together in this ecosystem helps organizations understand how changes impact both the portfolio objectives and enterprise and can use this as a foundation for more informed decision making.
💡Why this matters?
The ability for enterprises to sustain is built on a recurring cycle of identifying and delivering portfolios over a period of time. Through proper governance and decision making, organizations maintain this lifeline by prioritizing, adding and pruning components based on strategic alignment.
Gaining Clarity from Chaos
Chaos creates a stressful environment where things can spiral quickly. Pausing gives you the opportunity to regain control of the cadence and create the space to reset, pivot, and course correct back to the goal of the project.
I’ve been in project management for nearly 20 years and have been fortunate to have held a diverse set of experiences from roles focused on one area of the development lifecycle to end-to-end product owner. The most valuable currency earned collectively has been the lasting relationships built and lessons learned.
🏞️The Landscape
Chaos shows up in different forms in the project portfolio environment—a project that went sideways, frequently changing priorities, constant firefighting, overworked project teams, delays in critical decisions—the list can go on and on.
This is the reality for a project manager and the question is how do we bring clarity? 🤔
🧭 The Journey
When looking to understand the causes of chaos, here are 5 steps I use to create clarity:
Pause and Breathe—give yourself and others a moment to reset and reconnect.
Curiosity is your friend—create an exploratory environment for the team to ask questions. Lead with the intent of the conversation(s)—to understand the various components and not to assign blame; this detail is critical.
Unleash your inner master builder—it’s time to connect all the story pieces together like building blocks and see the full picture. This step can result in multiple creations depending on how the blocks are put together. Be sure to note this when reviewing with the team.
Remember the goal—briefly revisit what the project was originally designed to accomplish and document the plan to reroute back to the goal. If this is no longer feasible or the goal has now changed, escalate to the impacted stakeholders and governance committee for next steps.
Close out and lean in to learning—when the project has reached its conclusion, review the information in steps 3 and 4 for underlying patterns and implement the corrective actions.
Pro tip—be sure to document as you move through the steps so that you can build an information library and archive in a central location for future reference and easy accessibility.
📍The Outcome
Chaos creates a stressful environment where things can spiral quickly. Pausing gives you the opportunity to regain control of the cadence and create the space to reset, pivot, and course correct back to the goal of the project.
Lessons learned are incredibly useful as you have the opportunity to dive into the data and understand whether issues are systemic or isolated in nature. Whichever bucket this falls into, these learnings help strengthen your processes and add to the valuable catalogue of historical project performance for your organization.
💡Why this matters?
While there is no elixir to cure chaos simultaneously, with grounded discussions, surgical focus, and detailed planning clarity can happen systematically.