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How Fit Is Your Portfolio?
Categories:
Portfolio Management
Categories: Portfolio Management
| We all know a healthy project portfolio is aligned with an organization's overall strategy. But how do we get there? First, define "project portfolio." A bunch of independent projects does not make up a portfolio — it is simply a group of projects. A portfolio is composed of multiple projects aligned to help the organization execute its strategy. Second, define "portfolio management." Portfolio management enables organizations to identify, select and prioritize the investments that will maximize business value. The major components of portfolio management include supporting strategic objectives, ensuring value creation, prioritizing projects based on their relative importance, managing the flow of benefits and integrating stakeholders around business objectives. Here are a few questions to help determine how well your organization is managing its portfolio:
If some of your answers were "no," don't worry — you are not alone. But implementing good portfolio management can be a great challenge. Enterprise project management professionals usually joke that it is a "simple" three-step process:
Step three, in particular, is very difficult — yet it is the core of portfolio management. Portfolio management is the art of getting more than the sum of its projects' results. To do so, corporate strategies must be laid out clearly. This helps portfolio managers to measure value that would not be generated by any individual project. While software tools make it easier to simulate portfolios to help in decision-making, portfolio management ultimately depends more on governance and appropriate processes than on calculations. The portfolio also needs to be flexible enough to cope with changes in strategy and environment, which is why portfolio managers must perform regular check-ups — a portfolio that fits your organization needs to link to its strategy at all times. How healthy is your organization's portfolio? How do you monitor it? Share your thoughts below, and Voices on Project Management will publish the best response as a blog post. |
What's the Story? Stakeholders Want to Know
Categories:
Stakeholder Management
Categories: Stakeholder Management
| There is nothing like a good story to connect with project stakeholders and team members. Storytelling has been used to communicate sophisticated ideas for millennia, ranging from the parables in the Bible to the morals found in fairy tales. Done right, storytelling is a captivating way to explain why your project (or a decision within the project) was initiated, what it will become and the benefits that will follow. Creating a good story requires skill, and while you may never become the next J.K. Rowling, applying some effective development techniques can help you hone your own storytelling style. The "story spine," a tool created by U.S. playwright Kenn Adams, helps project professionals craft well-structured stories. The outline is a series of sentence fragments that prompt the narrative elements of your story. You can even use it in a group setting -- perhaps during an exercise in which you ask team members to craft a story to explain the technical decisions made by team. The template is as follows, with a project management example in italics on securing buy-in to solve an emerging risk issue: The Platform introduces the issue or topic.
The Catalyst explains why this is important today.
The Consequences explains the journey and the "problem."
The Climax is the turning point that leads to the proposed solution.
The Resolution is the final -- and positive -- solution to problem.
So next time you need to sell an idea to management or to your project team, why not try a good story? Have you ever tried telling a story to gain buy-in from stakeholders? What technique did you find helpful? |
The Customer Mindset Is Always Right
| In most cases, project managers are assigned to projects after the development of strategic initiatives and project charters. Seemingly, we have little to do with strategic planning and more to do with operational implementation. Although I agree that the latter is an important element of our profession, it is also a reactive one. Our value proposition is not fully used in the strategic planning needs of the organization. I increasingly expect project management to go beyond being a reactive role and become proactive. And one method of doing so is becoming customer-service-oriented. Now, I am not referring to the traditional definition of "customer," but rather defining the organization itself as the project manager's single true customer. Thus, becoming customer-service-oriented enables project managers to evolve into business leaders by:
The diagram below illustrates the concept of increasing the customer approach to project management. The project manager gains experiences and increased value by being customer-service-oriented. The repetitive experiences add up to knowledge that project managers need to, over time, drive customers to better outcomes and experiences. The focus on customer service ensures project managers are aligned with the interests of a project and an organization's purpose. According to the research of Dr. Jay Kandampully and Dr. David Solnet, a "service vision" improves an organization's overall performance. They illustrate two case studies, Dell and Southwest Airlines, of companies that used service orientation to create a competitive differentiator in their industries. Project managers can do the same for the profession. Once they harness a customer-serviced-oriented mindset, they can put it into practice to proactively interpret organizations strategy, align leadership and rationalize organizations' critical projects. The first steps toward redefining the profession as proactive instead of reactive are to offer services with this approach in mind, such as:
In my own experiences in leading the business transformations of multiple organizations, I have noted they tend to begin with an initial reactive approach of a cost reduction effort. They then mature to designing a service culture to offer global end-to-end processes, with service-level agreements that ultimately enable it to achieve its strategic growth plans. What other approaches do project managers need to redefine their role from being reactive to proactive? |
Getting Real with Lessons Learned
Categories:
Lessons Learned
Categories: Lessons Learned
| By now, if you have been following my blog posts, you know the importance of lessons learned. In past posts, I have provided many tips on how to conduct them, who should be involved and the types of project management tools to use for evaluation in the sessions. But how do you get true value of lessons learned? To glean results that can really fuel change, focus your lessons learned on the following questions and actions: What did not go so well? Do not finger point. Ensure the discussion is targeted toward the actions, not a person. Try to gather specifics. For example, if a delay caused a slip in the project timeline, discuss the lesson that caused the specific problem, and alternatives that might have avoided the delay. Perhaps there was a miscommunication that caused the delay. In that case, extract the lesson that led to that miscommunication. These are the lessons that you want to document and mark for corrective action. Actions or lessons that are not documented well cannot be translated into controllable elements. What went well? Determine your successes, and then strategize what needs to be done so these actions can be repeated. Adopt processes around these successes that may not already exist in your system for managing projects. If it is a process that has been working well for a long time, integrate it with your new and existing policies and procedures but in a way that it remains intact and unchanged. You should also consider rewards and recognition events for successes. There are many ways to accomplish this, even when budgets are tight. For example, using social media by posting praises and kudos to employees online can go a long way. What are we going to do to improve projects going forward? This is really the main objective of lessons learned. You can get together to understand what went wrong and what was right on your projects, but more importantly, you will want to leave the session with a direction on how to have future successes on a continuous basis. For this to happen, take the time to rank the learnings in some ordinal manner. For example, consider what needs to be addressed immediately and how to make the action possible; determine what can be changed and how to minimize the impacts; and explore how to ensure processes are apparent and possibly even mandatory. No matter what ranking system is used, conclude the meeting with an accountable action plan. What do you see as next steps after getting together, gaining reality and gathering the lessons? Share your thoughts below, and Voices on Project Management will publish the best response as a blog post. |
Three Timeless Project Management Rules
Categories:
Reflections on the PM Life
Categories: Reflections on the PM Life
| We all seem to have our own set of "durable" project management rules. We rely on them again and again to help guide us to a successful project outcome, regardless of the type of project, technology or environment. Years ago, I read Kelly's 14 Rules & Practices, which to me made sense for any project. Authored by Kelly Johnson, the founder of Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works® for Advanced Development Projects, the rules helped teams on pioneering aircraft projects produce innovative deliverables under budget and on schedule. I plucked three from this list and adapted them to apply to my project management career: 1. The number of people connected to the project must be aggressively restricted. For me, it has been quite common to have people seek a connection to a project, especially if it has had a high degree of executive visibility. Project managers who invest in aggressive stakeholder management -- that is, blocking non-essential roles -- have clearer communication in their projects and better-defined roles, which also helps new team members know their role relative to others on the team. 2. There must be a minimum number of reports required, but important work must be recorded thoroughly. I have been on some projects where the effort put into status reporting almost exceeded the effort put into project activities. Too much in the way of project reporting is just as dangerous as too little. Based on the type of project, the most successful project managers focus on a small number of essential metrics (schedule, budget, milestone, deliverable variances, etc.) that are easily understood by both the project team and the stakeholders. 3. There must be a monthly cost review covering not only what has been spent and committed, but also projected costs to the conclusion of the program. It is typical for project managers to host meetings to review prior project spend as future spend forecast. The crucial term in this rule is "what has been committed" to the project, both in terms of funding and resources. Many times, project managers fail to include funding and project resource commitments during a cost review. Even though I read them long ago, Johnson's rules still resonate today. This October marks the 70th anniversary of the 14 Rules & Practices. Talk about durability! What are your "durable" project management rules? Skunk Works and the 14 Rules & Practices references courtesy of Lockheed Martin. |