Project pipeline management for support

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what is portfolio management project portfolio management and why should you care [Music] firstly we need to think about what a portfolio is a portfolio is a group of projects or programs that are aligned towards delivering the Strategic objective so think about maybe your I.T department they might have an IT portfolio where they're focused on delivering their it roadmap and bringing technological solutions and new software new tools over a period of years an operations portfolio would be more interested in operational efficiencies Process Management all that kind of stuff and the regulatory or compliance type of portfolio will be focused around all of the changes that would be needed to make sure that the business or organization continues to operate in a legal manner in the years to come so how do you manage a project portfolio okay so and yes it stopped raining as soon as I got in I've decided to have a talk with my friend John McIntyre from hotpmo about what exactly portfolio management is and why it's needed we also wanted to get a better idea of how you can tell if a portfolio is performing well or if it's failing and I know John's the person to talk to about this because I picked up his leaflet about metrics and measurements when I went to the PML conference earlier this year I can't begin to tell you how helpful this has been to me over the last few months so I'll leave details towards the end of the video about how you can get a copy of this but now let's go and talk to John why do we need portfolio management if you've got a big organization you've got it all well structured you've got it organized and then you want to change something in that organization you'd normally start a project off it might be a project manager it might be somebody doing it from the side of their desk but you follow project management principles you have a start you have a middle that you change how something works or you introduce something new and at the end of it you hand that that work off to business as usual running and the project manager formally closes down their project and that works really really well it's tried and tested people have been doing it for thousands of years but when you get to a stage where you have a large organization and you want to change lots of things then you've got more than one of these projects running and where you've got these project managers who are fantastic individuals who are kind of entrepreneurs in organizations driving change champions for everything they're trying to achieve on for the business you can suddenly find that they end up tripping over each other clashing with each other fighting for the same organizational resources and also you have another challenge where you've got all of these project managers fighting each other you need to decide which ones are allowed to win which of those projects are the important ones for you which are the ones that are going to drive the most growth for your business and lead you in the right direction and if you don't have a function that is able to look across all of your projects make those calls around what the right things to do are strategically and make those calls about which projects should be prioritized and how we iron out those priorities how we iron out those dependencies you can get yourself into quite a tangle quite quickly that's where the role of portfolio manager comes in is to solve that problem when you've got so much stuff going on it's somebody who kind of sits above that layer who can look across everything and say let's make sure the things we're starting are the right things and are the best things let's make sure if we're starting things we know we've got the capacity the ability the competence and the people to actually get those things done um and let's make sure that when we do have those things running we're continuing to monitor how that's going adjusting across the portfolio not just for one project plan but making sure all those plans still align and making those tricky decisions such as if there is a major change in government strategy for example that means a project that was top of our list suddenly isn't going to fly anymore then we can make those tough decisions about shutting projects down maybe spinning new ones up and pivoting where we're going and pivoting our Direction all the time with an item where the business is going and what our strategy looks like so how do you know if your portfolio is being well managed or not that that's that's a that's an interesting one because actually it's really easy to tell when your portfolio is not being managed well because what you end up with is a whole load of projects that are red you end up with everything gummed up like um like a big plate of spaghetti because everybody is tripping over each other and crucially you're not delivering anything so that's really quite a simple one the difficult question is how do you realize your portfolio is not well managed before getting to that big what I'll politely call uh-oh point of the of the portfolio and that's where the challenge comes in so what we're really talking about is not looking at those obvious lagging indicators which are the things I just mentioned but trying to track down those leading indicators the things that will indicate to us that our portfolio is on a really bad track and is on a destination to end up like that that that red flagged plate of spaghetti that I alluded to a second ago a good portfolio is one that is managing all of those things and preventing you getting into that situation right good portfolio management involves dependency management across all your projects making sure they're not tripping over each other and clashing but rather they're complementing each other project a is delivering something just in time for Project B to pick it up and so on and so forth um also we're making sure that everything is mapped back to strategy so if we are running projects if anybody in the organization is spinning up projects within our within our area we're making sure those are linked to strategy we can draw that direct line from the work we're doing here to how that benefits the organization and the other thing you see a lot with good portfolios is they're drawing on expertise not not just from project management methods and Frameworks but also from operational stuff so you see them drawing in a lot from from Toyota Yota from lean from Six Sigma those kind of models that look at how we standardize processes in enforce quality and we can genuinely learn a lot from from the factory working in the portfolio space because we talk about project management being unique and every project being unique but when you zoom out to the portfolio level you start to see patterns in your organization you'll find there are standard types of projects that you do over and over again and a good portfolio will have templates in place and measures in place that help you spin those projects up quickly and easily and run them with with pre-templated risk logs pre-formatted plans that they can use and it really really reduces the risks down for the project and for the wider portfolio as well crucially though I think one of the biggest things where I see Pro where I see portfolios start going wrong and leading themselves into being poorly managed is starting too many projects there's an adage studying kanban that says stop stop starting and start finishing and what we see a lot with portfolios there's a lot of focus with portfolios on getting that first gate in we'll look at how we prioritize ideas and as you and I know Stuart there are a lot of ideas out there if you're like me we have ideas pinging up sort of all day and wake up in the night and you have ideas and must write that one down organizations are just the same there are ideas everywhere everybody has a hundred things they would love to do today that will make the organization better and drive things forward however there is limited capacity in the organization and only a few of those are the ones that make the cut and the danger is what we see with portfolios a lot is people will have a kind of a funnel where we look at those ideas and decide on which ones are the right ones to do a lot of the time those funnels focus on whether the idea makes sense whether the business case Stacks up and if it does they then say yes and we kind of push this idea into our project Factory now the problem there is if you've not thought about the other side the capacity the resource available the dependencies everything else we've got going on what you can find is you end up starting a whole load of projects that actually end up gumming up the machine you're forcing more and more in and you end up blocking everything up more projects means more dependencies more projects mean more people are slicing their time too thinly and it ends up gumming up as well so I guess that's my other thing about how you know whether a portfolio is well managed or not is that they are saying no to projects at that gate not just because the business case doesn't Stack Up not just because it may not align with a business strategy but because you're acknowledging you don't have the capacity the skills or actually it's just a gnarly mess of dependencies that you don't want to throw this one into the middle of and those are things that will help you recognize that firstly you've got a well-managed portfolio but there are also things that are good leading indicators because if you get that right what you're doing is preventing yourself getting into this nasty situation further down the line where everything looks like this messy red plate of spaghettiness I know that you've actually got a leaflet which details all of the useful metrics that should be used on projects programs portfolios which is relevant to this also agile stuff as well which is here I picked up a copy of you at one of the the conferences that we met at earlier this year um it says on the back here you can be reached at hello at hotpairmode.com if people reach out to you on there are you happy to send them a copy absolutely Stuart we it's it's quite a good one if it folds out in a very very pleasing way if you'd like play playing playing with paper origami things and there's a whole load of different metrics inside um I would say to your viewers that please please please if anyone actually does email me or goes to the website and pings us their details and wants a copy of that through the post I'll happily send it to you but please don't fall into the Trap of trying to implement all of those metrics everything in there is a suggestion your portfolio will be unique to you and your organization you don't need all of them find the things that are relevant to you find the things that resonate with your world and choose those test them out see if they work for you if they work keep them if they don't work then don't gather kpis unnecessarily because you're creating work for yourself and for your project managers and they've got enough on their plates already as well I'm guessing you'd be willing to offer advice or consultation to people who are looking to customize these these metrics for their organization oh absolutely yeah I mean that's that's what that's what we do at hot pmo we work with predominantly pmos but portfolio managers program managers as well and we work with them to tailor how they're managing their portfolios and how pmos are helping their portfolios and maximizing project delivery okay now you know a little bit more about portfolio management and actual next area of Interest could be what is the role of a pmo so have a look at this video over here where I talk to Lindsay Scott from the house of pmo and the author of The PML competency framework