Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
First Steps Toward Recovery
Categories:
Lessons Learned
Categories: Lessons Learned
|
In my previous post, I discussed points to help prevent problem projects. Here, I'll talk about what to do when you realize an existing project is headed for trouble. Let me try to explain it like this: If you are driving a vehicle, what happens when you see a red light? You know that when you come to it, you will stop. After the light turns green, you will look both ways before proceeding. When our projects hit red lights, we as project managers must also stop and assess our environment. As you look at the big picture, review your inputs, factors and the overall sanity of the project. Examine your risk register or issues log. Is the status of risks or issues showing something that was missed and needs to be addressed immediately? For example, something easily overlooked is when the schedule for applying security patches is on the same timeframe as the testing phase. This sort of impact can cause testing to grind to a halt, with the team unaware of the source of conflict. A review of the risks or issues log would have highlighted these events. Another source to review is your budget plan. Have unplanned circumstances arisen, such as the need to produce more prototypes? Does the acquisition of resources require additional time? Is equipment becoming obsolete or in need of repair? Expenses such as these caution you to slow down and reevaluate your budget. Be aware that ultimately, you may need to secure a renewed budget approval. Consider client relationships as well. Are your clients becoming unsatisfied and impatient, regardless of how well you're completing deliverables and meeting milestones? If so, you may need to allay fears or even compromise on a feature of your project. Perhaps that means reconfirming a budget forecast, or something as simple as picking up the phone and calling the client with an impromptu status report. One last piece of advice: Take a look at lessons learned. It's very likely a previous project manager may have outlined specific pain points on similar problem projects. These will provide valuable insights that even the most technically experienced project manager can lean on. They're good for figuring out what to do in grey-area situations: when it was difficult to get management signoff on a needed budget increase; how a concern was handled when a client change request was denied; or how to garner support when team conflicts arose. After you recognize there's trouble ahead, how else do you assess the size of the problem? |
The Secrets to Managing an Innovation Portfolio
Categories:
Portfolio Management
Categories: Portfolio Management
|
Managing a portfolio of innovation projects is very different from traditional portfolio management. Innovation projects hold more uncertainty. It is usually difficult, if not impossible, to provide good estimates and a detailed project plan. And while most organizations care about managing the development of marketable new ideas, few really know how to foster them for business results. The first step to managing a portfolio is determining the role and ROI of innovation in a business environment. Innovation, in essence, has to bring tangible results and a competitive advantage to the organization by generating new revenue, reducing costs, improving asset management and increasing reputation. To achieve these goals, innovation portfolios aim for steady innovation flux, or a constant pipeline of new ideas, for a sustainable competitive advantage. That requires balancing short- and long-term benefits and costs of the following:
For example, it would be shortsighted to generate only incremental innovation; in the long-term, there will be no breakthroughs. However, incremental innovation brings short-term revenue, which is important to keep the company going. Basis and radical innovation generate new products, but require significant time and effort. A good portfolio balance mixes incremental, basis and radical innovation projects in a way that best fits the organization. Another important aspect of managing an innovation portfolio is selecting the right ideas. Selection is particularly crucial to innovation projects because of the commitment to a long-term "technology roadmap" (i.e., if you choose to invest in Blu-ray products, that means you have a Blu-ray portfolio). Investing in the wrong technology can put an organization in financial jeopardy. Complexity is also greater because you're creating something new and without precedent. So the challenge is choosing projects that support the organization's long-term objectives while still considering these aspects. In summary, innovation portfolios need different selection and prioritization criteria. Here are suggested criteria, ranked from most to least important:
The criteria above are mainly qualitative, so you should also use an enterprise-wide scale for grading each project's potential to generate innovation:
After selecting your innovation projects by balancing the above criteria, tailor key performance indicators. Here again, KPIs will differ from a more traditional portfolio. Some I have used in the past include:
Does your organization have research, development and innovation projects? Do you use an innovation portfolio? How are they managed? Share your thoughts below along with your Twitter handle, and Voices on Project Management will publish the best response as a blog post. |
Effect Change, Drive Business
Categories:
Change Management
Categories: Change Management
|
More times than not, change leads to new competitive environments -- and project managers who are able to adapt quickly tend to survive and capitalize. In such an environment, one of the most important tools a project manager has is the ability to effect change to drive an organization's competitive advantage, its ultimate goal. However, as I discussed in my previous blog post, change is always met with resistance and uncertainty.
Not only do project managers have to deal with resistance to change from team members, but they must also plan for and overcome general pitfalls of implementing that change. To do so, consider incorporating better change methods into your daily practice. Below is a list of 10 design principles -- culled from a list created by Booz Allen Hamilton consulting principals, which I expand on with personal experience -- that should be part of our overall change plans efforts:
What change methods do you use to provide your organization with a competitive advantage?
PMI's new title, Managing Change in Organizations: A Practice Guide, is currently available for free download for a limited time only. It contains knowledge to help project and program managers identify change elements and account for them in their project/program plans, as well as create clear and powerful strategies to guide organizational development. Explore PMI's Change Management Resources. |
Gen Y: Driving Lessons Learned
| Any project manager or team member can appreciate the value of historical data to learn from previous project experiences and reduce associated project risks. But have you considered whether it's available in a format that appeals to Gen Y team members? The traditional way of capturing lessons learned is by using a template to record the lesson and saving it in a repository. But given their collaborative nature, Gen Y team members may perceive this as a limited source of information, based on the experience of a single individual. Instead, many Gen Y team members are pushing for a more collaborative approach, in which all project documents can be classified under categories, linked to wikis, referenced in blogs and be shared via micro-blogging or clouds. The goal is to prevent having valuable project documents stuck in one person's hard drive. This new approach stands in contrast to the traditional view of knowledge as a finite asset, living and managed inside the organization's boundaries. With a more collaborative approach, it doesn't matter if the author of the lesson learned left the company, because the organization still "keeps" that employee's knowledge when she or he is gone. One happy medium is to limit the collaboration environment to the employees in the organization and restricted to the project team until the project is completed. The adoption of this new way of managing organizational process assets will require the endorsement of senior management. You will also need to implement a strategy that's attractive to all team members for full adoption of a new collaboration approach to lessons learned. To do so, introduce a collaborative approach that best suits your project environment. Perhaps task the Gen Y team members to present this new method and highlight its benefits to the project during a team meeting. Finally, remember that individuals take time to accept new practices, so have patience. How easy or difficult would it be for you to embrace a collaboration approach for lessons learned? What are the benefits for your team and your organization? |
Strategy Lives or Dies by Projects
| Without proper implementation, strategy suffers — and so do results. That's one of the big takeaways in the Economist Intelligence Unit's 2013 Why Good Strategies Fail: Lessons for the C-Suite. In the study, 65 percent of best executors — organizations that successfully completed 20 percent more strategic initiatives than others — report well above average financial performance and strategic implementation, compared to just 18 percent of peer organizations. Still, too many organizations stumble when making strategy happen, with 61 percent reporting difficulty bridging the gap between formulation and execution. While strategy typically is engineered at the top, it's with projects that it really comes to life. To help strategy thrive, smart organizations focus on selecting the right projects and then closely following their implementation. The study shows that 59 percent of best executors have the people who formulate high-level strategy involved in execution. Catholic Health Initiatives relies on five measures to determine the strategic value of a development project: business value, satisfaction, performance, cost and risk. And the U.S. not-for-profit tracks those measures not just during the selection process, but through the product's actual life cycle and even after the project is completed. The organization's teams continuously assess if a project strategically aligns with business goals by asking yes-or-no questions. If all the answers are yes, the project is marked green. If they see any red — meaning it's not strategically aligned — it's stopped in its tracks. To truly deliver on strategy, organizations also need talent with the right skills to support strategic initiatives now — and in the future. Among the organizations surveyed for the EIU study, those that made significant investments in talent and skills saw 62 percent of their strategic initiatives come into fruition. That number dropped to 53 percent at organizations that did not provide as significant an investment in talent and skills. At U.S. financial services company Performance Trust Capital Partners, portfolio leaders regularly analyze if team members' skills align with the company's strategy. Based on that evaluation, they know whether its IT team can deliver on current projects, requires training to deliver future projects or if a project needs to be outsourced altogether. Executives can come up with the most extraordinary strategy in the world, but it won't mean much unless they work with project professionals to get all those brilliant ideas executed. Read the EIU's full report, Why Good Strategies Fail: Lessons for the C-Suite. How does our organization ensure strategy carries through into project implementation? |