Let's be honest, sometimes, organizations struggle to manage their priorities. Sometimes, top management has an incomplete understanding of resource use and project performance, therefore new project requests are approved without knowing if the capacity to deliver is realistic, and, sometimes, the IT business plan and the company's overall plan is clearly not aligned.
Does this sound familiar?
Today's organizations have a fundamental need for modern tools AND a different approach to managing their transformation plans and associated project portfolios!
Wikipedia reminds us: Project portfolio management is the centralized management of the processes, methods, and technologies used by project managers and project management offices (PMOs) to analyze and collectively manage current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics. While project management focuses on “doing projects right” — a task-level perspective - project portfolio management aims to “do the right projects” - a decision-making perspective.
Simpler and More effective project portfolio management is essential to the success of any organization because it helps decide what gets funded and what does not. It helps see what is realistic and what isn't. It helps establish what goes against strategic alignment and priorities and what enhances them. Essentially, what is effective and what is not.
Indeed, companies must find ways to find balance between investing in daily operations and Leading Strategic Change Initiatives.
But how can we shine light upon the initiatives that (truly) maximize overall business value?
New portfolio management approaches exist to facilitate and develop the organizations' decision-making, execution, and cooperation capacities, making them more efficient by:
The challenge lies in the fact that these are precisely new approaches.
Task-level project micromanagement has become such a deeply rooted habit. If you try to implement a macro plan... they will bring you back to task tracking!
This guide is here to support you educate and be patient so as to help all your stakeholders understand and embrace the change, rather than leading a corporate political journey.
Like for a stock portfolio, choosing where to invest your budget and your time is no small task. We have collected testimonies and feedback from CIOs, project managers, PMOs, and top management.
Discover their innovative and pragmatic approaches in this comprehensive guide to portfolio management, which will also lead you to thematic articles to dive deeper into each presented practice.
We hope you enjoy your reading.
A program = a group of projects with a name that should be meaningful to everyone.
A program named “ERP, Financial Information Systems (FIS) program)” will never spark interest!
An appropriate Portfolio Management tool for a successful organizational transformation will allow you to publish your program, “organize” your tasks and projects within it, so they create a clear, comprehensible overall view for everyone. A common workflow is available “on demand” and not only during PowerPoint presentations during steering committees.
Indeed, all team members need to know where to find the shared workflow, to find meaning in their actions and reference points when they need them, almost like a self-service tool.
Before adapting and transforming, each user must first find their bearings. As it is the team members who will have a significant impact on the project, which in turn has a significant impact on the company's evolution.
Beyond the “marketing” effect, we can observe the parable of the stonecutter — a story that deals with the relationship of desire and pleasure. Depending on the meaning one chooses, there are opposing approaches to work: “I'm just building a wall” vs “I'm building a cathedral.”
Continuous communication of strategic issues has a leverage role as members must find meaning in each and every task of their mission. They are often involved in a project that is as important, if not more, to the company than their main mission.
From meaning comes commitment, and each part plays a decisive role.
To align business units, top management, and IT around a common vision, you can rely on AirSaaS, a new generation PPM tool.
Aiming for a (real) decrease in development time will lead to more potential for progress than any other approaches. Agility, digital acceleration and “uberization” have speeded up the pace of innovation! We are slowly but surely witnessing the end of the 3 to 5-year IT plans and roadmaps that we used to know.
Indeed, proper project pacing in the roadmap matters!
In an ideal organization, A Project Should Not Exceed a 3-Month Duration. It certainly is a challenge!
Critics might argue:
Thus, the “pioneers” will reply:
It's up to you to find your new work breakdown structure and target pace for the “recommended” durations of projects in your project portfolio.
What does it really mean to be a “key user,” “project manager,” “business reference,” or “sponsor” inside your organization?
What are the roles and responsibilities of each member in governance and project management within your company? With no rules, no one can be held accountable for anything!
Alan Zucker, founding director of Project Management Essentials, states that defining roles for individuals and groups is an important first step. ”Many organizations fail to establish expectations in the beginning and it leads to confusion and conflict down the line.”
He calls out three key questions to ask:
Like in Scrum, Lean-agile culture Assigned key roles. At a higher level, in project portfolios, this task of defining the responsibilities linked to the roles also needs to be addressed.
Explaining the prerogatives of each project member is fundamental, but it is sometimes invisible in everyday tools!
To help the establishment of roles in a project, we have enhanced this feature in AirSaaS. You will be able to define who does what and make sure all participants know what is expected of them.
During the project setup or its lifecycle, you can add either:
✔️ People and Then Assign Them a Role
✔️ Roles in which you will add people
Beyond just assigning a typical role to someone, a sentence will provide context for each role in the project. It helps let all participants know what is expected of each. This sentence is, of course, a custom field in AirSaaS, depending on your organization's culture.
To try something other than a RACI matrix that will be forgotten in the slides of a kickoff meeting presentation... try AirSaaS, the Portfolio Management Tool That will transform your governance!
As you are familiar with SCRUM rituals, Christmas dinner rituals, birthday rituals, birthday rituals, Halloween, tea ceremonies... It's Time to Take a Closer Look at Your Project Governance Rituals.
Reminder: a ritual is a set of fixed rules and habits. It should not be mistaken for a routine, which is a repetitive and automatic habit born from a succession of actions performed continuously.
We are particularly thinking about routine meetings!
In portfolio management, establishing new rituals will be one step towards a successful cultural transformation (along with roles and planning).
It is up to you, PMOs, CIOs, to agree with your teams to “design” and name this new workflow that will include your new governance rituals and support your company's transformation.
The underlying issue is to create new decision-making, communication, and cooperation habits, daily and yearly!
What matters next is regularity. Setting Up and Upholding Such Routines.
To illustrate, below, find a series of management practices implemented in a specific organizational context.
To create your own rituals and successfully embrace these new behaviors, get help from a platform!
Once the purpose, the responsibilities, and the rituals are established, it will be time to agree on The Schedule. Take time to define what is important (and what is not). Even if it takes you months to agree on such with all the members of the executive committee, it is worth investing your energy and offering thorough explanations! Anyway, in general, even with only the most important projects, the teams' workload is already overloaded!
Project prioritization — designating them as having high, medium, or low importance — is a common practice within organizations. However, Alan Zucker, founding director of Project Management Essentials, humorously demonstrates us that management tends to classify most (if not all) projects as highly prioritized. “This type of system alone doesn't help allocate scarce financial and human resources sustainably.”
He recommends an additional step of ordinal ranking, where projects are listed in order of how they will be executed: first, second, third, and so on.”These executive forces to think about trade-offs and make hard decisions about which projects are most important to the organization.”
Are you familiar with the HIPPO syndrome? It stands for Highest Paid Person's Opinion. In other words, the opinions of the highest-ranking person in the committee tend to be naturally favored.
One basic trick to try to avoid this bias in Project portfolio management Is to ask the highest-ranking person in the steering committee to speak last in each roundtable discussion.
Many project portfolio managers often fall into the trap of favoring certain topics, which can affect the perceived success of your project portfolio management. These projects are usually those in which the manager is personally invested, and, such an incredible coincidence, the manager will probably give them more time and attention.
As a result: favorite projects are less likely to encounter problems or suffer from neglect. However, being too focused on favorite topics can cause other projects in the portfolio to suffer and face challenges that could otherwise be avoided if they received the same attention.
To dive deeper into this subject, check out our post: "How to select the "right" projects using effective project selection methods".
Why add this project to the portfolio when it's only been 10 days and everything is going well? We still hear CIOS/PMOS and project managers saying this too often.
In total, the total amount of man-days for these small, invisible projects, a sort of shadow project management, is likely equal to or greater than that of so-called hidden projects!
The idea is to reward what works effectively. We want reliable trains and competent pilots, not just talk.
Another common-sense reminder is that working on Many highly prioritized projects Simultaneously can lead to major issues in project portfolio management, particularly regarding inefficiency!
This means that you can't finish what you haven't started and you should never start what you aren't committed to finishing. Q.E.D.!
Many organizations indeed focus more on “taking off planes” than on “landing them,” explains Alan Zucker, director of Project Management Essentials (yes, him again). In other words, they focus on starting projects but do not pay as much attention to their follow-up, all the way to the completion.
Rather than starting a large number of projects that may not reach the finish line, Zucker mentions that focusing on completion leads to better results for the organization. ”Minimizing the number of simultaneous projects will accelerate the work, which means you will be able to see the value generated by these projects more quickly.”
Making Better Decisions So as to “do the right projects” is the promise of these tools and practices in project portfolio management!
Yes, this is where personal opinions start to matter!
You have improved project management... that's a great start! Now let's take it up a level to improve your transformation governance.
Centralizing data, decisions, framework, and execution monitoring—tools can assist you in managing the project portfolio. With A project portfolio management platform like AirSaaS In your company, you will enjoy five key advantages:
To “debunk” the myths about the maturity thresholds needed to approach project portfolio management processes, we invite you to discover:
👉 The five levels of project management maturity for a company, from beginning stages to competitive advantages.
👉 The 7 arguments for and against implementing a project portfolio approach in an organization that is not yet “mature” in project management.
🚨 Spoiler alert: don't wait for your company to be “mature” in project management to launch a portfolio management initiative, otherwise, it never happens!
👉 As a bonus, we asked a PMO member of the Pro Transformation community for her feedback on implementing a Project Management Office in a low project maturity structure. (Thank you Constance) 💡”Like a tea bag in hot water, you continuously infuse the company with project culture, from project management to PPM, towards operational excellence.”
Even the easiest project portfolio management tool requires a minimum amount of support. It is partly the role of management to share the purpose, expectations, limits, and scope of the tools. However, by relying on resources such as PMOs, facilitators, or project portfolio managers Who have already driven this type of mission, you will significantly increase your chances of success.
Invest in support so that your employees gain confidence and can immediately avoid the classic traps of a PPM/program management tool. The more your employees are aware of such an approach, the more you will benefit from your PPM.
Just like any business project, you must consider the implementation of the PPM solution as a whole: ideation, scoping process, execution, transfer, roles, rituals, change management... AirSaaS is a business tool for transformation!
Ensure that employees fully understand the ins and outs of the approach beyond the tool. To achieve this, there's no secret: Communicate, Train, Coach and Support.
If you don't want to take the time to get external support, an alternative solution would be to upskill internal facilitators. Raise awareness through content and exchanges within specific communities. We highly recommend course: Transfo Pros. It can be of great help to guide your transformation!
Efficient here means continuously, without waiting for an executive committee/steering committee/project committee... and most importantly... based on reliable data. Not “tampered with” in a PowerPoint report. Authentic data. Because, let's remember: “without transparency, there is no commitment.”
Even so, rest assured, it is still the role of tech & business pilots to actively contribute to the access of key report information, etc.
Nevertheless, we have entered the era of cooperation. Facilitating access for sponsors, business units, and/or executive management to key information on milestones and decisions is a very strong and necessary act of transparency. It acts as a lever for alignment and engagement.
Sylvain Bourdette, CIO of Proxiserve and AirSaaS user, told us:
Regarding this new accessibility to data, be careful. While dealing with a growing volume of information, one can quickly fall into the “Christmas tree syndrome” of the portfolio. In an overloaded report, pretty but not so effective for decision-making!
With AirSaaS, using smart views, you have the ability to customize the project view to show exactly what you want to see at a glance, “rotating the cube.”
As a project portfolio has 1000 facets; AirSaaS allows you to create public or private views adapted to the context and audience: marketing quick wins, delayed projects, HR, HR, HR, program prioritization...
What matters is not to propose only one view of the portfolio, but an almost unlimited number of views, therefore nearly endless prioritization choices! Allowing each audience to see what they (really) need in the portfolio.
For example, a Kanban view of decisions to be made. A list view of team tasks whose status is “complicated” and on projects of a certain size...
The only limit is what you need. :-)
See an example of an AirSaaS Steering Committee View below:
To finish with this before last best practice, let's remember that not all tools are the same! They are more or less simple, a guarantee of a potential wider use. They are more or less innovative, a guarantee of better potential time savings.
To learn more about what lies ahead in portfolio management, take a look here: AirSaaS, the new generation PPM tool.
A pragmatic PPM approach implies a new mindset. We Must Swap the Old for New: Command & Control vs Trust & Commitment!
Current portfolio management often focuses too much on the rational side of the process: task management, technical aspects, budgets, processes, goals... In today's context of great resignation and team discontinuity, strengthening your organization's culture is one of the foundations for successful transformation with lean portfolio management!
Success depends on developing and nurturing alignment, behavior, and leadership engagement.
Regarding the definition of culture, I would like to share a quote heard at an agile conference whose author is unknown:”Culture is what we do when no one is telling us what to do.” “It is what is common to a group of individuals, what binds them together.”
Any change that limits itself to making an effort on attitude and behavior often proves itself counterproductive. For more efficiency, the focus must be on deeper perceptions and beliefs. By seeking out "hidden" beliefs, the unspoken truth.
And be careful not to confuse principles with values. Principles are not values. Members of a mafia might share values of friendship, compassion, and respect, but in violation of the most humanly recognized principles of morality and ethics.
Expose your main principles which guide your action. At least three and no more than seven! Here are a few that might inspire you:
Sincerity, empathy, trust, self-organization, transparency, win-win cooperation. It's up to you to compose your own mix of principles that will be relevant to your environment. An authentic and original "mindset" is essential for successfully co-managing your portfolio!
One last point, on the scope of project portfolio management in companies. It is certainly not a process reserved for mid-sized and large companies! On the contrary, where the lack of management and PMO resources is most critical, a PMO as a service platform can make all the difference.
