Author: Kiron Bondale

When organizations decide to adopt project portfolio management practices within IT, the usual starting point is to revamp their work intake and authorization processes by incorporating the active involvement of one or more cross-functional external (to IT) governance committees.  The expected benefits of this change include a reduction in stealth work as well as a gradual evolution in the IT engagement model.

When designing the changes to these processes, a common challenge is finding the right balance between too much involvement of external governance bodies and too little.   Even if governance committee members are available, excessive involvement may be perceived as IT abdicating its responsibilities.  With insufficient involvement, IT resources would continue to be diverted from the highest organization value initiatives.

One way to reduce the risk of this happening is to define the scope of external governance over different types of IT work.  Almost all IT work can be classified as one of the following:

• Large projects
• Service requests/small projects
• Operations(”Keep the lights running”)

Objective definitions for each of these categories should be developed to facilitate the consistent differentiation between large & small projects.  These definitions should ideally include multiple criteria – for example, a combination of estimated cost and planned effort.

For large projects, selection and prioritization decisions should be the responsibility of the governance committee.  Sufficient project status details should be provided to the governance committee as part of their regular reviews of the active project portfolio to facilitate decision making.

For service requests or small projects, work authorization and prioritization should be done by the IT management team, but the aggregate annual or quarterly resource effort and costs for such work should be pre-approved by the governance committee and aggregate actuals should be reported on a regular basis.  This will ensure that strategic projects do not suffer the “death by a thousand cuts” that can result from too many service requests being delivered.

For operations activity, work authorization is performed by the individual IT line managers, but the total costs and resource effort should be budgeted annually and actual cost reported to governance committees on a regular basis.

Providing governance committees with consistent visibility across project and operational work should improve balanced decision making without over utilizing their limited capacity.  In essence, this approach embodies a core objective of project portfolio management: optimizing the return on limited (governance) resources!

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PMO Leaders, Project Managers, Stakeholders, lend me your ears; I come to neither bury knowledge-based certifications, nor to praise them!

There are two broad types of project management certification approaches – purely knowledge-based or those that incorporate experience-based evaluation. 

PMI uses both approaches – the PMP certification uses a predominantly knowledge-based approach while the PgMP certification uses a balance of knowledge and experience-based methods. Although PMI’s PMP certification is the global de facto standard, other project management associations also offer knowledge-based certifications. 

I previously wrote in “The dualism of the PMP credential and challenges with any knowledge-based certification”  about the limitations of a knowledge-based certification and didn’t want to recycle that content.  However, a very common question in LinkedIn’s Project Management Q&A category is “Should I get my XYZ PM certification?”, so I felt that there might be some value in assessing the most common justifications.

Fact

1. It’s a hiring prerequisite – right or wrong, in many companies, hiring managers or recruiters will only look at your resume if you have a certification.  While this might not be the only method of evaluating someone’s suitability, it is a filter that simplifies the workload for these gatekeepers. 

2. You might be paid more – according to the Sixth Edition of the PMI Salary Survey, it could increase your salary by up to 10%, either through a change in role, base compensation or bonus.  This will obviously be influenced by factors including local supply and demand for project management skills and geographic differences. 

3. It’ll improve project management consistency – certifications provide a common lexicon so long as your organization’s methodology and its practitioners use a single association’s body of knowledge.

4. You might gain some project management technical knowledge which you didn’t possess before – given the comprehensive nature of most PM bodies of knowledge, even experienced PMs are likely to learn something new by studying for a certification exam.

Fiction

“It’ll make you a better PM – as the majority of the issues I listed in “Seven Deadly Project Manager Sins“ illustrate, the differences between a “good” and a “bad” PM often relate to their ability to appropriately apply soft skills and no knowledge-based certification can assess this.

2. It’s the best way to learn about project management – While attending a certification prep course or reading certification study aids might increase your knowledge, a foundation project management course, managing real projects or being mentored are more cost effective means of gaining the same knowledge.  A common recommendation I’ve made to PMs is to read their association’s monthly journal cover-to-cover each month and then to assess their knowledge of the profession at the end of the year.

3. It will differentiate you from others – the ubiquity of the PMP certification has mostly marginalized this benefit.  Specialized or esoteric project management certifications may still provide this benefit. 

While this article is not written to make you avoid knowledge-based project management certifications, hopefully it has helped with the decision-making process.

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Organizations that have achieved consistency with their project management practices or have mastered “doing projects right” might launch Project Portfolio Management (PPM) initiatives to attempt to “do the right projects” by improving the alignment of their enterprise portfolio with the organization’s vision and purpose. 

Governance committees get formed and effort is expended in defining and implementing processes for project selection, evaluation and prioritization as well as ongoing portfolio monitoring and balancing.  However, momentum and enthusiasm wanes once the governance bodies experience the level of complexity and effort involved in trying to evaluate and prioritize hundreds (if not thousands) of projects.  Soon, evaluation and prioritization practices are branded as “academic” and the organization reverts to its previous subjective politically or emotionally-driven approaches.

I highlighted this issue in my earlier article, Applying Consumer Marketing to Project Prioritization, as being a barrier to achieving PPM success, but did not position the valuable role that Program Management plays in helping to resolve it.

Vaughan Merlyn wrote in his article Portfolio Management: So Much More than a Collection of Projects! that Program Management can build the bridge between high-level purpose and project proliferation. 

However, to achieve this benefit, programs need to be recognized as being something more than just a set of interdependent projects.  Projects deliver outputs but programs must be able to generate meaningful business outcomes. 

The benefits of this approach seem logical – a governance committee should be more capable of selecting and prioritizing a small, manageable set of programs as program evaluation criteria will likely focus on true business value.  The same cannot be said for projects – while some might produce outputs that will generate real value to an organization or its customers, many only produce deliverables that are inputs to be consumed by other projects or internal processes. 

For Program Management to be successful, the role of the Program Manager needs to mature beyond the traditional project coordination and integration activities to include identification, evaluation, selection and prioritization of projects.

Program Managers must possess an understanding of the business processes and specific key organization performance indicators related to their program domain and should use these as the core driver in their decision making. 

One of the reasons that project managers struggle when they are promoted to Program Management roles is that while they were used to focusing on winning battles, Program Managers need to focus on winning a war, which means knowing which battles to fight and which to avoid.

Using the analogy of financial portfolio management, an investor can be profitable by directly trading in individual securities, but as one’s investment portfolio grows, the ability to remain well informed of research and fundamentals that guide decision-making becomes progressively harder.  This challenge has been the raison d’être for mutual funds, and the same rationale could be applied to Program Management. 

PPM can succeed without Program Management, but as the enterprise portfolio grows, the bridging benefits Program Management provides will more than justify its costs.

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