WBS Dashboard Placement for Projects Establishing PPM

 

This month's topic is Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and before it gets away from us, I want to make sure you do not inadvertantly promote confusion about a particular deliverable.

In a project to deliver PPM for the first time, there is a deliverable that you cannot confuse in your WBS. It is related to communication, but you don't want to get it mixed up with the Communication Plan developed with the Project Management Plan. The communication deliverable for your PPM project is the "dashboard" or other display of the status and health of the projects being managed.

In your WBS, don't call activities to create this dashboard anything like the "communication plan." Use the deliverable name, such as Portfolio Dashboard, if you know it, otherwise just use a working title like they do in the movies. "Project Status Display" for example. Separate them geographically as well, keeping the dashboard activities away from project management tasks and into project deliverables design and development teritory.

While we're thinking about this dashboard, we might as well develop more WBS activities. Start with these three activities:

Identify sources of information (data) for status and health of projects covered in the scope of your PPM project. Among these are financial reports, some of which may be new. There will also be schedule and resource information, from a variety of sources.

Identify the roles that will create the dashboard that will go into production immediately upon project delivery. This first phase may be a subset of what is planned eventually, but make sure there are enough resources to handle the load into the near future.

Determine if hiring is needed because of inadequate resources available.It is easy to consider those who are looking at the dashboard. They are leaders and stakeholders and can intimidate you. People who work for these leaders may be expected to compile data and approve updates to the dashboard, or it may be expected that new production support resources will do this. The most fun happens when there is disagreement over who is going to do the work.

If hiring is needed, consider hiring early so that the new resource(s) will be able to learn the process, but even help with implementation and documenting and procedures and management.

You can build on these ideas for activities in your WBS. But first, make sure you build your WBS to avoid confusion between your project communication and the dashboard being created by your PPM project.