Project Portfolio | Alignment
Problem Statement
To identify and prioritise projects that lead to achieving your strategic goals within resource and budget limits.
Goals
Ensure that:
- project ideas and projects are visible,
- they are aligned to the organisation’s goals,
- personnel and cost needs are assessed, and appropriate limits established,
- undertakings are prioritised by management.
Approach
We introduced Project Portfolio Management (PPM) standards and methods and communicated them within the organisation. Acting as Project Portfolio Management Office (PPMO) we took the following steps:
- consolidated project ideas and projects with resource and budget needs into one portfolio,
- weighted the business goals with the leadership team,
- aligned the activities to the goals and established the urgency,
- performed a prioritisation workshop resulting in a stack ranked project portfolio.
Benefits
Transparency is gained by consolidating project ideas and projects with their respective resource and budget needs in one project portfolio. This allows managers to see and be able to assess the demand for personnel from their departments.
Aligning projects ideas and projects to the strategic goals ensures that the focus will be on achieving these goals.
By ensuring staff and money are available to meet a project’s needs before prioritisation, pre-programming of bottlenecks will be avoided.
Process Implementation
Teamwork is essential. The teamwork between PPM, PPMO and Project Management (PM) is summarised as follows:
Use Case
Daniel, a department head in a pharma company, had been providing staff to support projects over the past years. He noted that while most projects were completed on time, some seemed never to be completed. He wondered if these “prioritised” undertakings were really required. His boss Chen was having the same thoughts.
The business was still in the process of establishing their strategic goals, however we made use of what was available to develop a prioritisation process.
Prioritisation process:
- took the available goals and weighted them with the leadership team,
- aligned the project ideas / projects to the goals and established the urgency of each,
- stack ranked the portfolio and drew the limits of resource and budget availability,
- held trade-off discussions with management to decide which projects below the line to stop, which to continue and consequently which above the line to postpone.
After the prioritisation was made, Daniel was able to manage his staff to satisfy core business and project portfolio demands.
More PPMO Services
Approval of project starts once personnel are available, monitoring and reporting portfolio progress, updating the portfolio as changes require, expediting decisions to ensure that prioritised projects are completed.