Unique Projects, Common Goals

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: Governance, Portfolio Management, Strategy, ProjectsAtWork

Projects may be unique endeavors, but they can’t be managed in isolation. They must be integrated and assessed within the context of strategic enterprise goals — a portfolio-level perspective enabling synchronized adjustments on the way to delivery. And this requires project leaders to adjust as well.

I’ve been writing this series of PMO and portfolio management related articles with the aim of stepping chronologically through the portfolio management process and we are now at the point where the work of project delivery actually begins. You might think this is where things will be little changed in a strategic portfolio management environment — after all, isn’t the process of delivering successful projects much the same as it’s always been? However, I think there is a fundamental shift underway on project execution that is going to change how we view projects. This shift isn’t going to change the mechanics of project delivery — although this also continues to rapidly evolve with the ongoing expansion of Agile and acceptance of hybrid approaches) — but rather the context for projects, and that’s what I want to focus on in this article.

For some time I have been writing about the importance of managing projects to benefits rather than constraints. In other words, to ensure the project delivers the contribution it is expected to…

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