PROJECT PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT

Organizations must focus limited resources on the highest-value projects and investments, declining those which are good but not good enough.

Many orgs struggle to differentiate good investments from the best investments, often resulting in resource allocation to lower-value initiatives and resourcing constraints and/or delays for higher-value initiatives. Without a coherent model for managing projects as a portfolio, and only a vague idea how many projects are in the pipeline, how much they will cost, how they will be staffed, or who is qualified to run them, the effectiveness of strategic planning is diminished and delivery is challenging.

Project portfolio management incorporates evaluation and selection processes that enable leadership to identify and focus efforts on the best investments. While project management addresses your organization’s need to do projects ‘right’, project portfolio management addresses your organization’s need to do the ‘right’ projects at the ‘right’ time.

If your org is wasting time, funding, energy, and effort by:

  • Spreading resources too thin – under resourcing high-value projects while dedicating resources to lower-value investments

  • Adding more people and complexity to existing processes without cross-functional consideration and alignment on fit-for-purpose, efficient, and effective processes

  • Rushing into projects and investments without clear understanding of dependencies and requirements, causing unnecessary stalls and delays while the clock is ticking and contract resources, licenses, etc. require payment

Attainment will help you:

  • Assess, evaluate, and collectively select the highest value projects and investments

  • Prioritize functional requirements, identify cross-functional dependencies, understand resourcing requirements and constraints, and sequence projects and investments

  • Evaluate, select, engage, and manage vendors

  • Plan and execute projects with cross-functional coordination and efficient and effective fit-for-purpose processes

RESOURCES AND CONTENT

The right projects at the right time

Highlights:

  • Good portfolio management increases business value by aligning projects with an organization’s strategic direction, making the best use of limited resources, and building synergies between projects. Unfortunately, organizations often do portfolio management poorly. As a result, they fail to deliver strategic results because they attempt the wrong projects or can’t say “no” to too many projects.

  • Nearly all organizations have more project work to do than people and money to do the work. Often the management team has difficulty saying “no.” Instead, they try to do everything by cramming more work onto the calendars of already overworked project teams or by cutting corners during the project. Despite a heavy investment of people and money in projects, the organization still gets poor results because people are working on the wrong projects or on too many projects. Trying to do too much causes all projects to suffer from delays, cost overruns, or poor quality.