Managing for an Uncertain Future
From the Voices on Project Management Blog
by Cameron McGaughy,
Lynda Bourne, Kevin Korterud, Peter Tarhanidis, Conrado Morlan, Jen Skrabak, Mario Trentim, Christian Bisson, Yasmina Khelifi, Sree Rao, Soma Bhattacharya, Emily Luijbregts, David Wakeman, Ramiro Rodrigues, Wanda Curlee, Lenka Pincot, cyndee miller, Jorge Martin Valdes Garciatorres, Marat Oyvetsky
Voices on Project Management offers insights, tips, advice and personal stories from project managers in different regions and industries. The goal is to get you thinking, and spark a discussion. So, if you read something that you agree with--or even disagree with--leave a comment.
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By Wanda Curlee
Marisa Silva, “the Lucky PM,” recently published a five-part series on portfolio management, “Thinking Outside the Triangle: Project Portfolio Foresight.” What intrigued me in the series were her thoughts about the future. She aptly points out that the project management discipline is about helping to understand the future. But the future, of course, is anything but predictable.
Project, program and portfolio managers take different views of the future. The project manager is at a tactical level and focuses on moving one project to its successful conclusion, or the future. Throughout the project, the project manager attempts to keep it on track. However, Marisa stresses that the project manager needs to think beyond the golden triangle of scope, timeline and budget by assessing the external environment and how it affects the project.
For example, imagine you’re a project manager leading a large, complex project. The project is key to the organization updating its antiquated systems. The vendor is about to announce a revolutionary change to the product that the project is implementing. What do you do? This affects your future and the company’s.
At the next level, the program manager is orchestrating a group of projects to deliver a complex environment and a single benefit or a set of interim benefits. Again, the program manager is gazing into the future to deliver these projects and benefits. He or she is constantly re-evaluating how to maximize the benefit for the company via the set of projects.
Finally, the portfolio manager takes a disparate set of projects/programs, maps them to strategy and then works magic to move the company from an “as-is” strategy state to the “to-be” strategy state envisioned by the leader of the organization.
Simple, right? Absolutely not. The portfolio manager is consistently looking at how to optimize the portfolio to keep within risk tolerance. He or she also optimizes resources to drive the best value for the company. Talk about looking into a crystal ball!
But according to Marisa, even this is thinking inside the triangle. The astute portfolio manager needs to have foresight. He or she should be thinking about various visions of the future and be adaptable enough to change. In other words, portfolio managers must have situational awareness of the current world and how it can change dramatically (sometimes in an instant). They must be ready to adapt to that change.
To describe the enormously complex world we now reside in, two acronyms have been coined: VUCA (vulnerable, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) and DANCE (dynamic, ambiguous, nonlinear, complex and emergent). As the project, program or portfolio manager, you help your organization prepare for and adapt to an uncertain future.
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Wanda Curlee
on: April 25, 2016 09:36 AM |
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