Project Portfolio Management Quotes

Organizations that manage IT delivery as projects instead of products are using managerial principles from two ages ago and cannot expect those approaches to be adequate for succeeding in this one. Visionary organizations are creating and managing their Value Stream Networks and product portfolios in order to leapfrog their competition in the Age of Software

When applying agile practices at the portfolio level, similar benefits accrue: • Demonstrable results—Every quarter or so products, or at least deployable pieces of products, are developed, implemented, tested, and accepted. Short projects deliver chunks of functionality incrementally. • Customer feedback—Each quarter product managers review results and provide feedback, and executives can view progress in terms of working products. • Better portfolio planning—Portfolio planning is more realistic because it is based on deployed whole or partial products. • Flexibility—Portfolios can be steered toward changing business goals and higher-value projects because changes are easy to incorporate at the end of each quarter. Because projects produce working products, partial value is captured rather than being lost completely as usually happens with serial projects that are terminated early. • Productivity—There is a hidden productivity improvement with agile methods from the work not done. Through constant negotiation, small projects are both eliminated and pared down.

One executive team I worked with had at one time identified three criteria for deciding what projects to take on. But over time they had become more and more indiscriminate, and eventually the company’s portfolio of projects seemed to share only the criterion that a customer had asked them to do it. As a result, the morale on the team had plummeted, and not simply because team members were overworked and overwhelmed from having taken on too much. It was also because no project ever seemed to justify itself, and there was no greater sense of purpose. Worse, it now became difficult to distinguish themselves in the marketplace because their work, which had previously occupied a unique and profitable niche, had become so general. Only by going through the work of identifying extreme criteria were they able to get rid of the 70 and 80 percents that were draining their time and resources and start focusing on the most interesting work that best distinguished them in the marketplace. Furthermore, this system empowered employees to choose the projects on which they could make their highest contribution; where they had once been at the mercy of what felt like capricious management decisions, they now had a voice. On one occasion I saw the quietest and most junior member of the team push back on the most senior executive. She simply said, “Should we be taking on this account, given the criteria we have?” This had never happened until the criteria were made both selective and explicit. Making our criteria both selective and explicit affords us a systematic tool for discerning what is essential and filtering out the things that are not.

For managers new to portfolio management, the idea of stopping work, even just for now, is a foreign concept. They are tempted to ask people to multitask instead of stopping work on one or more projects.

Type 1 leadership was about functional requirements and individual systems; the focus was operational. Type 2 was less about managing individual projects and systems, more about managing portfolios of projects and infrastructures, as well as playing a senior team leadership role; Type 2 leaders left the details of managing operational functions and individual systems to others, though they remained accountable for it all working. Type 3 evolved into a job of managing strategy and resources, leaving the details of management of portfolios and infrastructure to others.

Universities use their endowments to finance a range of activities, from scholarships to building projects. Harvard has promised to use its financial resources to make sure that anyone can afford to attend. Harvard did not give a reason for Ms. Mendillo’s departure. In an interview, Ms. Mendillo, a former chief investment officer of Wellesley College who spent an earlier 15-year period at the Harvard Management Company, said she felt the time was right to move on. “We’ve made a great recovery from the financial crisis, we’ve repositioned the portfolio and we’ve built a great team,” she said.

Interestingly, Agile’s scrum-team approach has its own way of aggregating some execution risk. For example, in a traditional “single task owner” approach, the risk of execution is not aggregated at all, leaving that task owner to add a lot of task-level buffer to self-insure and deliver on his commitment. In contrast, a 5-person scrum team aggregates the risk that any single individual will make slow progress, as the other four team members can often make up the deficit. But why aggregate only up to the scrum-team level? Taking a lesson from the insurance industry, the more that risk can be aggregated, the easier it is to manage. Applied to projects, this will nearly always mean that it’s better to aggregate risk at the project level. As a result, an Agile project can improve speed by avoiding sprint-level commitments.

as an organization, you incur capability debt, because people (managers and technical staff) can’t improve their capabilities when they’re overburdened with too much work to do.

The product managers now meet together as a group. They think about what they can accomplish together to meet their group performance. Now,

The problem is you are working on projects. Service-level response times interfere with project work and cause multitasking. Maybe someone has to do that work, but maybe not you. Or, if you do have to do it, someone else can rank-order the work, and you can work in short timeboxes so you have a chance of completing the necessary-to-the-organization work without multitasking.

project starts to go off target the

obvious, rather than rolling up numerous ad hoc spreadsheets, and an effective and broad system for data capture can save time and increase visibility into business performance. Without it, you must be very precise in the data you collect in order to avoid overburdening the organization or hitting material data-quality issues. However, don’t let a broad reporting system allow you to neglect the process of effective reporting. A mass of data is not the same as a report. Even if executives can drill down into real-time portfolio information, that is too ad hoc to be a process for keeping projects on track, and you will still need a structure of reports

There are many potential explanations for the less-than-robust performance, but IBM’s current strategy suggests that one component at least is a challenge to the traditional shrink-wrapped software business. As much as any software provider in the industry, IBM’s software business was optimized and built for a traditional enterprise procurement model. This typically involves lengthy evaluations of software, commonly referred to as “bake-offs,” followed by the delivery of a software asset, which is then installed and integrated by some combination of buyer employees, IBM services staff, or third-party consultants. This model, as discussed previously, has increasingly come under assault from open source software, software offered as a pure service or hosted and managed on public cloud infrastructure, or some combination of the two. Following the multi-billion dollar purchase of Softlayer, acquired to beef up IBM’s cloud portfolio, IBM continued to invest heavily in two major cloud-related software projects: OpenStack and Cloud Foundry. The latter, which is what is commonly referred to as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, may give us both an idea of how IBM’s software group is responding to disruption within the traditional software sales cycle and their level of commitment to it. Specifically, IBM’s implementation of Cloud Foundry, a product called Bluemix, makes a growing portion of IBM’s software portfolio available as a consumable service. Rather than negotiate and purchase software on a standalone basis, then, IBM customers are increasingly able to consume the products in a hosted fashion.

The modern general partnership (GP) needs a team of executives who can execute on the following seven core requirements: 1. RAINMAKING: A nose for new deals, and how to find them. 2. DEAL ANALYSIS AND EXECUTION: Ability to value a company and buy it for a sensible price on sensible terms, including arrangement of a sensible level of debt to support the acquisition structure. 3. IMPROVING THE PORTFOLIO COMPANY: Knowing how to help management make their companies great, not just good. 4. SELLING THE PORTFOLIO COMPANY: Recognising when it is time to sell and knowing how to achieve a fair price. 5. MANAGEMENT OF THE GP: Managing project teams, coaching junior staff and leading by example. 6. SERVICING THE INVESTORS: Not only with profits but also timely and accurate information and building strong relationships. 7. FUNDRAISING: Being able to present the case for why investors should entrust you to do a great job with their savings. Building this trust over many years is essential.

Test-drive employees Interviews are only worth so much. Some people sound like pros but don’t work like pros. You need to evaluate the work they can do now, not the work they say they did in the past. The best way to do that is to actually see them work. Hire them for a miniproject, even if it’s for just twenty or forty hours. You’ll see how they make decisions. You’ll see if you get along. You’ll see what kind of questions they ask. You’ll get to judge them by their actions instead of just their words. You can even make up a fake project. In a factory in South Carolina, BMW built a simulated assembly line where job candidates get ninety minutes to perform a variety of work-related tasks.* Cessna, the airplane manufacturer, has a role-playing exercise for prospective managers that simulates the day of an executive. Candidates work through memos, deal with (phony) irate customers, and handle other problems. Cessna has hired more than a hundred people using this simulation.† These companies have realized that when you get into a real work environment, the truth comes out. It’s one thing to look at a portfolio, read a resumé, or conduct an interview. It’s another to actually work with someone.

Green Projects Consulting provides a variety of services such as project portfolio management trainings, project portfolio management strategy and project portfolio management implementation services. Furthermore we have extensive experience in building value driven PMOs, organizational transformation, change management and advanced project management applying critical chain project management and TOC principles to achieve exceptional growth for our clients.

After comparing desired with available resources, it became crystal clear that the company was pursuing many more projects than it had people to staff. In particular, by trying to engage in many highly demanding platform launches at the same time, the company was unlikely to do justice to its portfolio of options. Nor was it likely to manage the enhancement launches (as opposed to platform launches) that current customers were demanding, because many of these were still on the drawing board and were competing for the same scarce design and engineering talent as the major platform launches. In short, the company was taking on too much. The results of this overcommitment meant that project deadlines perpetually slipped, promises to key customers were often broken, and people were beginning to feel burned out. This situation is not uncommon. The processes through which companies take on projects usually lead them to discover that they haven’t got the resources to do justice to everything on their plates. In particular, when managers have not clearly thought through which resources for projects will be needed to support their needs to either build new platforms or learn through options, the different types of projects compete with each other, creating confusion. This lack of coordination is also typical of companies that haven’t matched their strategy to available resources. A far wiser approach is to pursue a few well-run projects than to chase down a grab-bag of forever-behind-schedule and over-budget initiatives.

Here is the key point: Once you have determined how many projects you can support, and what mix of projects you need to support your strategy, similar projects must compete against other similar projects for budget and staff for the resources dedicated to that category of project. Let’s say that you have decided to allocate 20 percent of your available resources to positioning options. Any new candidate for getting resources that is a positioning option should compete for that 20 percent against all the other positioning projects. They shouldn’t compete against other kinds of options or against platform or enhancement launches. This ensures that you will pick only the very best positioning options for your portfolio. What’s more important, it gets you out of the constant tug-of-war between short-term and long-term projects. The strategic choice is how many of your resources you will put into each category. Then within each category, the very best projects should compete against one another for consideration.

What portfolio of skills does the project manager need?’ The answer to this question should be, ‘The project manager must have a portfolio of skills which includes both leadership and management, together with technical skills and entrepreneurial skills.

The following fundamental principles are core to this standard: Strive to achieve excellence in strategic execution; Enhance transparency, responsibility, accountability, sustainability, and fairness; Balance portfolio value against overall risks; Ensure that investments in portfolio components are aligned with the organization's strategy; Obtain and maintain the sponsorship and engagement of senior management and key stakeholders; Exercise active and decisive leadership for the optimization of resource utilization; Foster a culture that embraces change and risk; and Navigate complexity to enable successful outcomes.

One of the top questions I get from managers is: “How can I carve out time to focus on long-term work when there’s so much to do right now to keep the trains running?” In the framing of this question, there is an assumption that popping your head up to plan for the months or years ahead comes at the expense of successful near-term execution. It doesn’t have to be this way. One of my colleagues runs her team with a strategy that is similar to that of an investor’s. Just as no financial advisor would recommend putting all your money into one kind of asset, neither should you tackle projects with one kind of time horizon. My colleague makes sure that a third of her team works on projects that can be completed on the order of weeks, another third works on medium-term projects that may take months, and finally, the last third works on innovative, early-stage ideas whose impact won’t be known for years. By taking this portfolio approach, her team balances making constant improvements to their core features while casting an eye toward the horizon. Over the past decade, they’ve shown that this strategy works: her team has an amazing track record of identifying new opportunities and scaling them to huge businesses over the course of three years.