Project Portfolio Management vs.
Project Portfolio Excellence
A double-edged challenge facing business today is the ever-increasing number and frequency of software-related project requests and the demand for quick response and fulfillment. IT departments are floundering, unable to keep up with the demand, and forced to operate beyond their capacity for quality work. The result is poor quality, defective systems, and lost benefits and opportunities.
Companies are frantically looking for ways to meet this challenge. Prioritization is the magic bullet that many are focusing on. But prioritization is only one part of the answer. Another aspect of the problem is that most companies are currently trying to execute more projects than their capacity can support. So, the other part of the answer is to decrease the number of projects being actively pursued. Most companies would dismiss this idea as being impractical because of the belief that there's simply too much critical work that needs to be done. But logical anaysis instructs that:
- If a project is undertaken just because it's perceived as being critical...
- Then the project fails because of inadequate skill, will, or capacity to support it...
- It's worse than if the project wasn't undertaken at all...
- Because the resources expended in the losing effort might have been applied more effectively and successfully elsewhere.
With Project Portfolio Management (PPM), companies are told that they can effectively tame the backlog of projects that they’ve been unable to address. But if they focus only on prioritization without an understanding of their Capacity for Quality Work, their Project Portfolio Management process will end up being nothing more than a means of sequencing future project failures because, no matter what anyone says, PPM cannot allow you to execute more projects than your capacity allows, no matter how sincerely you'd like to, or how urgently you need to.
Therefore, a critical factor for portfolio success, especially if you're demand exceeds your capacity, is balancing demand and capacity to protect quality. When the requirements that ensure acceptable quality are not met, long term maintenance issues could outweigh project benefits.
One of the components of Project Portfolio Excellence is Project Request and Fulfillment Planning, a process through which demand (requests for project work) is balanced against available resources.
One of the requirements for success with Project Portfolio Management is that you already have a sound project management methodology in place. Because of this most companies will fail to succeed with Project Portfolio Management. They simply lack the discipline and maturity with their existing methodology, if they even have a methodology.
Project Portfolio Excellence is built on the premise that most companies are not yet where they need to be concerning the level of collaboration that's needed between Senior Managers, and Business and Technology Professionals to develop a successful and replicable project management methodology. It provides tools and techniques to build to that level of competence, so that your eventual implementation of Project Portfolio Management has a greater probability for success.
If your project management methodology is already stable and effective you may be ready to undertake Project Portfolio Management right away. But, if you haven't been achieving satisfactory results with your enterprise software and software-related projects, and you don't know why, there's a good chance that Project Portfolio Excellence can help you gain a better understanding of the deficiencies in your current process and help you take the necessary steps to acheive success with Project Portfolio Management.
PPM and PPE: One in the same
PPM and PPE: One in the same
I appreciate your comments and I know that, on most counts, you and I are in agreement when it comes to portfolio management.
Rather than say that "in FAR too many enterprises..." a comprehensive and appropriate approach doesn't occur I would contend that in the vast majority of enterprises it doesn't occur. I personally think the biggest obstacle to the adoption of a more comprehensive approach lies in the fractious, sometimes even adversarial, relationship between Business and IT.
That's why the starting point for Project Portfolio Excellence is understanding the importance of proper collaboration between Senior Managers, Business Professionals, and Technology Professionals (The Project Triad) and the presence and proper balance of Skill, Will, and Capacity (The Project Trinity). It then goes forward with a formal strategy (The Contract for Collaboration) and methodology (Project Request and Fulfillment Planning) to present an alternative approach to portfolio management.
The goals of PPM and PPE are, in many ways, the same: best utilization of resources for the greatest return for the entire enterprise. But I think PPE represents a distinctly different way of skinning the cat.
I believe PPE is better suited for companies which don't already have a robust project management methodology in place because its combination of tools, techniques, strategy, and methodology enable companies to ascertain why they're getting unsatisfactory results today, so they can adopt better practices before expecting to succeed with portfolio-level processes.
I can't readily dispute your assertion that "a comprehensive and appropriate approach to PPM includes every aspect of... PPE," because "comprehensive and appropriate" could mean anything. However, your acknowledgement that too many enterprises fail to appropriately execute the PPM process and your premise that this "is more reflective of PPM process deficiency (and process management discipline inadequacy)" describe precisely what led me to develop PPE.
It doesn't matter how complete or brilliant a process is if the majority of the intended audience is ignoring it or doesn't have the wherewithal to achieve it.
PPE is targeted specifically for those enterprises that will probably be destined to fail with PPM (by your account many, by my account most). It begins by giving them the tools and education to understand why they're not getting the results they expected today so they can figure out what they need to do to raise their level of competence. Eventually they may even be ready to succeed with PPM.
"Factory capacity"