Gaining Clarity Through Project Portfolio Management
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.