Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
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PPM: Managing the Business Case
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
As companies cut back on their budgets, it becomes more and more necessary to make smart decisions about which projects get approved, which ones are modified and which ones are rejected. Most organizations have formal processes for this project decision making, usually as part of the annual planning exercise. Invariably, the process involves senior (and by definition, expensive) resources and the cost involved in approving the project portfolio for the year is considerable. However, it’s a cost that is easy to justify because it is vital to the organization’s success to make smart decisions about how to spend your project budget.
However, after the initial decisions are made, they are rarely revisited. In many cases, the annual planning process is three to six months before the start of the year, so decisions are being made about the projects that will be implemented up to 18 months ahead. In that time, many things will change--just think about how different your company is from the end of 2007. So why do we not revisit those decisions? Part of the problem is that there isn’t a process in place to undertake that review in an objective fashion to validate the assumptions and ensure that the organizational goals will still be met. That’s where I believe that portfolio management can assist.
Portfolio management as a corporate sanity check…
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