There will always be more projects than resources to work on it!
As a PMO/CIO/Transformation Director, there is a task that is surely close to your heart if you are passionate about your job: that of resource and project portfolio management.
En 2006, the Project Management Institute defined it as the centralized process management, methods and technologies of a set of projects. An activity that makes it possible to optimize arbitrations and their planning, while evaluating the level of risk of projects and their financial viability.
🚫 STOP !
Yes, at the time of five-year IS roadmaps, IT/business logic of confrontation, a primarily financial vision Project portfolio management has long been the norm.
But, starting with a certain size of company, a Certain volume of transversal projects, of the arrival of rapid internal or external changes in organizations. The “over control” no longer works! Portfolio management needs pass from management that is sometimes bureaucratic and too centralized to management that is liberated, more collaborative and quick to manage An approach of innovation and transformation that delivers effectively and continuously.
In the following lines we will be interested to what has changed and what can work better in current project portfolio management. We tell you everything about art and how to modernize this approach. For invest upstream in order to suffer less downstream. Objective: modernization & efficiency!
One last word before we start... with pragmatism, what do we hear? To summarize... it'sAnd the opposite of theoretical or abstract! These are practices that come from from the ground, allowing spend your resources intelligently, With a proven approach that can be readapted in your context of innovation and transformation.
For a long time this process Was the domain of an expert who was responsible for creating and managing a road map for an entire company!
Planning, execution, reporting and analysis, management of requests, resources, monitoring and implementation, benefits... The PPM approach was sometimes equipped with a kind of of a fairly rigid “all in one” ERP project, if it wasn't Excel or PowerPoint!
This portfolio management process answered plus to a need for vision and control “central”. In short, a DAF oriented vision :-)
The Balance sheet of this approach? PPM had become an “expert thing”, a resource management tool that does not provide enough visibility into the execution of the roadmap to all stakeholders involved in the transformation of each business.
Let's put it simply, this portfolio management worked, for only part of the company... and within the framework of a fairly long project management.
Then, technology became the major vector of agility and innovation. Digitalization has arrived... and with it, a growing flow of more complex, shorter, more transversal projects, which have tended to make the central planning approach obsolete.
More and more specialized SaaS tools have emerged, on task management, time tracking, finance, etc. They have clearly brought a better user experience than that offered by ERP PPM software all in one.
Businesses have begun to massively use these software competing with ERP/PPM tools. For their clear added value, even going as far as an omnipresent and more or less supervised “shadow-it”.
Yes, and beyond this or that software, the management of innovation and project portfolios has changed on many levels:
The diagnosis is in part made.
But What are the priority levers to activate? How to facilitate initial and ongoing management of a portfolio of projects that is not constantly drifting out to sea? How can you help the organization make decisions quickly? Ensuring that teams are motivated?
We reread our documentation, interviewed our experts... and we invite you to go through this selection of beliefs !
Advancing project portfolio management will involve create and maintain the conditions for a culture of cooperation, transparency and strong co-responsibility between all the teams involved.
The challenge will be move from a management that focuses on controlling the budget and resources to a management that will maximize collaboration and commitment stakeholders.
Here are a few practices to consider in this first lever to maximize collaboration and trust versus control:
Thanks to a platform directly integrating a collaborative space, we will facilitate the release of speech. You will be able to consolidate the feedback of the points of attention, the feedback of the decisions, the points of success. Maybe it seems like nothing?. But it can really simplify your daily life and that of its teams!
When you become a PMO/CIO/IT Project Portfolio Manager, one of the first possible pitfalls is that of Fall into micromanagementt. To want to control too much the execution of the project by the teams.
To help you continue to bet on trust. Get help from a platform.
With AirSaaS, the concept of a milestone (a Key step to succeed in the project for a date) has attributes: the responsibility, weight and degree of trust.
To monitor the progress of your portfolio, you can: look at the progress of each project through the progress declared by the project manager then displayed on your portfolio page at the bottom of each project card.
You also have the option to follow The progress of the milestones. Thanks to an automatic calculation taking into account the milestones achieved and their weight.
To summarize this first lever, we cannot resist the pleasure of sharing A quote that we love. That of Ludovic Lajoie, resulting from a comment on a Linkedin AirSaaS post.
The objective is to overcoming horizontal silos : between teams and management And vertical silos in terms of decisions.
Yes...Cooperation cannot be decreed! She encourages herself, she makes herself easier. Of course, we are dealing with cultural and human aspects that take time.
The more the company and its project portfolio grow The ability to maintain a level of communication that is clear, consistent, and easy for everyone to access is vital.
Whether it is the managing director, who no longer very well understands what the teams say to him, between the members of the management committee who no longer speak the same language, or the teams between them who are trying to synchronize as best they can.
Problem: Information, portfolio data is scattered in the information system and the various points of progress.
As a result The shape blocks the background and everything is rowing.
You might think it's incidental, but it's actually one of the fundamental elements of informed decision-making at the top. Most of the time the decision is an arbitration. How can I decide between A, B and C if I am not presented with comparable information?
We have indeed need to standardize reporting.
Bonus: en simplifying the collection of information And in automating reporting, AirSaaS will allow you tohave time to help project managers with their challenges and to facilitate collaboration between teams.
In preparing this article, we interviewed business transformation drivers and CIOs. One of them, thank you again Frédéric :-) gave us his opinion on this question of pragmatic project portfolio management.
His feedback is fascinating. In his partly agile and liberated company, they have in a way: implemented a limitation of work in progress based on discussion.
The whole issue is well in advance. To choose is to move forward! Even if it seems obvious, at a time of hyperinflation of projects it seems more than useful to remember it!
As a bonus, this will allow your project managers to be less polluted by “toxic” sites.
It will also remind some a universal principle well known in tech and IT: the GIGO for Garbage IN - Garbage OUT!
80% of projects don't need a Gantt schedule! The idea is to invest in thinking to create several workflows for each type of project portfolio! Not to pour in Cannon syndrome for flies.
For example, using the principle of the “T-shirt sizing agile”... for Start by thinking about the types of projects that exist in your project portfolio!
We selected three examples of pragmatic divisions and inspiring.
From this simple division... you will be able to understand a redefinition of the management and the dos and don'ts of your project portfolio by category.
What is fundamental will be to properly design a workflow associated with each division.
What are the criteria that make a new incoming project fall into this or that category. And for each one, what will be its “definition of done” (DOD)?
Then once launched, how will a project move from one category to another. What will be the criteria and processes associated with this movement?
Second example borrowed from project management within Axa, the use ofA simple image that of the toll lanes of a project highway associated with specific workflows:
For each of these categories Within the project portfolio, a specific decision-making and operational protocol was designed. We also thought about possible lane changes along the way.
The key challenge was to pass from bureaucratic management to “adhocratic” management.
Adhocracy (from Latin ad hoc: set up specially to meet a need, and from kratos, power, authority) is defined by Robert Waterman in 1990 in “Adhocracy, The Power to Change” as “any form of organization that goes beyond the usual bureaucratic boundaries to seize opportunities, solve problems, and obtain results”.
At the same time one classification method And a process to help make work easier Between the professions and the CEO.
But above all an approach to generate engagement around the roadmap.
One continuous dialogue with all business departments to categorize a project using four levels (strategic, legal, management, department) reprioritized every month!
These approaches recall the inspiration of Lean portfolio management And of the agile philosophy, enterprise-wide. Frameworks including SAFe: for Scaled Agile Framework. It was popularized in 2011 by Dean Leffingwell. If well implemented, it makes it possible to set up within the same company ranging from 50 to 150 people, to create a common language between the different teams concerned with the development of a product.
Yes, and healthy project portfolio management is measured by its ability to know how to stop a project at the right time!
The question of managerial courage and leadership is central to this issue.
Indeed, many internal or external events influence the life of the project.
Being dynamic and responsive to change is essential.
In the image of a need for agility, a project can be accelerated, paused, or even stopped. This is not necessarily a sign of failure, and on the contrary helps to avoid wasting energy.
If you are not in a position to completely stop a project, pragmatic project portfolio management can involve the freedom given to employees to go and choose other tasks/projects from a backlog as soon as a project/feature is blocked.
We cannot finish talking about this fourth lever without sharing the reference of the book by Arne Roock, one of the best-selling books published in 2012: Stop starting, start finishing!
Among other things, the author campaigns for the limitation of work in progress, visual management and develops the portfolio approach. kanban.
Stop Starting, Start Finishing : This means you can't finish what you didn't start and you should never start what you didn't commit to finish. Unfortunately, working on many high-priority projects at the same time can lead to significant problems and in particular: inefficiency!
There is Lots of ways to see information !
And the information is spread out!
If you manage a flow of initiatives involving several teams, you know how it is difficult to see clearly.
It is essential to stop and agree what we really want to show in this portfolio? Is it primarily budgets, progress reports, weather forecast?
Faced with the excessive volume of information offered, we are quickly in the Christmas tree syndrome. Overloaded reporting, nice but not very effective for deciding!
In AirSaaS, with smart views you have the possibility to customize the project view to show exactly what you want to see at a glance.
A smart view includes:
And if you are on the timeline:
The important thing is to offer not a portfolio view, but a number of views and therefore Practically unlimited choice of prioritization criteria !
Vital projects for CODIR, projects that need to be finished in the neighborhood, etc.
In addition to shared views, Private views will allow everyone to see better based on its own criteria.
As you noted in this article, we covered the concepts of silos, collaboration, and cooperation. Sometimes it's useful to go back to semantics. Back to the meaning that has the virtue of clearly understanding the different issues and degrees in working arrangements:
Thanks to Isabelle Leroux, Transformation consultant for this semantic and yet pragmatic reminder!
We are no longer in the same state of mind;) and it is possible with a hint of leadership to be distilled in management at all levels... Increasing the level of trust and commitment are key.
You have all the keys to modernize your PPM approach ? To finish the gesture, we suggest that you continue reading one of the articles in “Pro de la Transfo. “: How to implement a project approach in my company.
