Projects Prioritization due to Resources Constraints
Marek RudnickiPMO, Program Management, Project Management, Business Development| FreelancerPoland
I know this is a monster topic, but I need some advice from You!
Let me put the scenario.
Large financial organization.
Quite a large portfolio of 100+ projects. No experience on real prioritization so far, but there is project's scoring (but never actionized before).
Normally business coming with projects all year long.
As long as there is a budget they got always OK.
Not much roadmap visibility of what business can come up.
End of last year and this year shared resources become the bottleneck and an issue on project performance.
Mostly App development (IT) but also Legal and Procurement.
While shared business units are working on enhancing their capacity there is a strong idea, we should also limit the number of projects in the portfolio and better manage this part.
So we started to work on this now.
One of my challenges is no-one ever told the business you cannot start the project or you need to put this project on hold because there are no resources.
This will be a new experience for this organization.
Can You please share how You do it in your companies?
What works what doesn't. I am looking for a kind of working E2E model outline.
Vladimir LiberzonR&D Director| Spider Project TeamMoscow, Russian Federation
Marek, this is the job of the PMO.
If new project is proposed for including into the project portfolio its model is created by the team that have done feasibility study and then submitted to the PMO.
PMO portfolio planner includes it into the portfolio model and estimates what will happen with the portfolio and other projects if the decision will be positive. Portfolio planner makes what if estimates trying different project priorities. Sometimes those priorities that do not look logical but produce the best results if to consider existing constraints (resources, costs, target dates, etc.).
Next round is to estimate if replacing of the projects with the lowest priorities can improve portfolio success.
Of course estimates are made for the future parameters, past costs are forgotten.
If portfolio success criterion cannot be improved new project will be rejected.
If project inclusion is profitable the results of portfolio simulation are submitted to the portfolio manager who organizes the meeting with project and resource managers for discussing the changes to the project schedules and resource assignments.
At this meeting new proposals can be made or new restrictions become known.
If yes they are modelled and previous decisions adjusted, if no then the new project schedules, budgets and resource assignments are approved, new baselines created, new targets set.
I did not mention portfolio risk analysis because few companies are mature enough to do it on the regular basis.
As I wrote above this analysis is done when new projects are proposed but in any case it is done once in a year when portfolio plan for the future year is created.
Estimating different options of including new project into project portfolio looks complicated but usually it is done by experienced planner in one day. The range of reasonable project priorities is not large. Saving Changes...
