Get Ideas Into the Porfolio Process

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.

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Topics: PMO, Portfolio Management, Strategy, ProjectsAtWork

An organization’s ability to achieve its goals is dependent on many things, but nothing is more critical than selecting the right projects to deliver those goals, and that means you need the best candidates. How do you maximize the chances of that happening? Start with the ideas.

It’s an obvious thing to say that if you don’t undertake the right projects in your organization you won’t achieve the right results. However, most organizations focus their efforts in this area on the review of business cases and project proposals during the annual planning and project selection processes. That’s important, but it assumes the best potential projects make it to the point of having business cases developed. How do organizations ensure their best potential projects make it to that point rather than getting filtered out earlier, or worse, never getting proposed in the first place?

I work with a lot of different organizations and the vast majority will tell me they don’t have a problem with idea generation. They’ll point out they get a lot of problems identified which employees feel should be addressed, a significant number of innovative suggestions to push the boundaries of their products and services, and a considerable number of ‘regular’ improvement ideas. I don’t doubt that’s true, but how do they know whether they are …

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