The Untouchables

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.

  Organizational Project Management   Portfolio Management   Strategy  

I spend a fair amount of time talking to organizations about portfolio management. The nature of those conversations can vary considerably, but one of the common elements is that we quickly focus on just a few projects.

While the broadest definition of “portfolio” may be all of the organization’s initiatives, there are always a small number of those initiatives that demand the greatest attention and focus. These are the strategic projects that will make or break the organization’s performance in the next period, and potentially for some time beyond. It’s probably not even every initiative that forms part of the strategic portfolio; even there, some initiatives are more significant than others. It is critical to get these most critical projects right, and that means they need to be treated a little differently.

One of my customers described these projects as “the untouchables,” and I like that term—the projects that must be protected at all cost from anything that may put their success at risk. But what makes an untouchable project, and how do we ensure the right ones receive that designation? Well, it doesn’t start with a list of projects; it starts with the organization’s goals and objectives.

Broadly speaking, an organization will establish a series of goals for …

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