How does a project portfolio office go about answering the question of what value does the portfolio provide the organization? There are bunches of obstacles to creating and maintaining a set of projects that can deliver the most benefits to the enterprise.

Project Management Portfolio Office Challenges:

- Chaos in the external environment

- Clashes in the executive suite

- Competency in the portfolio office

Portfolio offices are staffed by senior project management professionals assisting business leaders in steering the funding of the organization to respond to the chaos in the external environment, politics and personalities in the C-suite, and they may not be prepared to understand the details of the content of the projects or the mechanics of portfolio data analysis. Whew.

We can help by understanding business needs, ensuring those needs are included in the business case for portfolio selection, and creating forums for portfolio alignment. Yup – I’ve done these things.

But what is really the answer to surviving a job in a project management portfolio office? I believe that in large part it is a focus on outcome management. This is a phrase coined by my peer in the industry, Russ McDowell. We need to help an organization identify the key measurements that drive the health of the organization. Next, we identify how projects support improvement of those metrics.

What are the key outcomes your organization needs to manage? Vote Now! Enter your vote below:

Copyright 2009 PM Perspectives LLC Rosemary Hossenlopp PMP

How do program offices go about answering the question of what value does a program provide the organization? A program is a set of related projects, managed in a coordinated fashion. The added cost of the program or project management office (PMO) is expected to be offset by the benefits of someone coordinating all the day-to-day project information flying around; cost, schedules and risks. In addition, the PMO has a more strategic reason for its existence; keeping a discussion of benefits alive.

OK, let’s define benefits? Simply put, why does the project exist? How does it help the organization?

Identifying and managing those benefits is a primary role of a PMO!

Benefits can be either:

* Quantitative; Examples include revenue gains, cost reductions or market share increases or metrics related to mission or business objectives
* Qualitative; Examples include customer satisfaction, market perceptions.

So what is quick ways to do quantitative alignment where business objectives are clear? I was working a new contract and needed to write some business cases. The business cases were due yesterday. Without a lot of time to research, I quickly found the division strategic goals and mapped the features of the projects to those strategic goals. It helped me visually frame whether these projects should be important. How? I checked for density; lots of check marks meant they were aligned with divisional goals. This quick and easy method allowed me to ensure that as a contractor, I wasn’t just following orders but I was allowing an organization to move towards improving their business.

What’s another quick way to do qualitative alignment with the business? Getting stakeholder support. In other cases where strategic goals don’t exist or there is stakeholder conflict, it is more important to align the projects with stakeholder buy-in. I was thrown in as a software release manager last year and was provided a messy, incomplete feature release; each of these would become a project. I cleaned it up and asked for input on what was important. Since the stakeholders were a wee bit hostile, I did this all face-to-face and quickly assessed what was important, sold it to management. The users were smart and experienced. Therefore I knew that their intuitive, gut-level support of the projects was intuitively the best way they knew to improve their organizational efficiency.

Which way is best; neither. You work with what you got when under severe timelines. But we always seek to deliver the right set of project and product solutions that allow organizations to best meet their needs. Another words, this is how projects delivery real benefits to the business.

Copyright 2009 PM Perspectives LLC

Operations and project work is bridged by organizational project management (OPM). Projects better serve the organizations when there is a better fit between project work and the strategic plan. The organization benefits if high-value projects are executed well so the ongoing operations can use the project outcome.

How do project managers go about answering the question of what value does their project provide the organization? The answer to that question from a project manager is pretty tactical; just align the project to either the program goals, or the business case.

So what’s a pragmatic and practical approach to get this done? Use some standard tools available in our project management toolkit. They are:

Project Alignment Tools and Techniques

• Charter that states high-level business, mission and project requirements

• Scope alignment with business case intent and content

• Product/service requirements alignment with high-level requirements

In practice we have some challenges. Some BIG challenges. What are they?

Project Alignment obstacles

• Lack of business case

• Multiple stakeholders with conflicting needs

• Missing charter

• Adverse Internal Organizational Environmental Factors

• Challenges in Risk Analysis

o Missing, or

o Forced silence

• Organizational Change Management impact analysis isn’t included

Did I get this obstacles list correct? What is missing? I welcome your comments.

Copyright 2009 PM Perspectives LLC

There is a key issue in the project management industry. What? Well, it is no secret that many projects can’t answer this important questions well; what value do you provide the organization?

I want to start a discussion on Organizational Project Management. What is that? There is momentum in the industry that somehow we should better align project work with the needs of the organization. Compare it to a bridge between project work and operations. Someone needs to be a toll keeper to monitor the traffic that gets to use this bridge.

And, by the way, who is responsible to be a toll keeper on this bridge? There could be a couple of answers:

- Project managers responsible for getting the work done.
- Program managers responsible for coordination among projects
- Portfolio managers responsible for intake of the projects and measurement of the health of the project work.
- Business managers responsible for the project funding decisions
- The organization that has to use project results.

Do you have any examples of great projects or great companies that have a clear definition of which of these groups should be the toll keepers for Organizational Project Management?

Oh, and by the way, do you even like the name Organizational Project Management?

Would love to hear from you

Thanks for your interest in writing a chapter in the premiere organization project management (OPM) book.

We need key project management professionals to write on issues that matter to senior leadership.

What will you get from being an author on this ground-breaking organizational project management book?

- Access to OPM author speed research teleseminar
- Access to OPM author writing to a C-Level audience teleseminar
- 5-10 minute Audio Interview professionally edited for use on your web sites or blogs
- 30 minute Audio Interview professionally edited for use on your web sites, blogs or for DVD sale
- Access to a project management consultant marketing boot camp Webinar series
- Peer review of chapter
- Professionally edited chapter
- Global availability of books through Amazon
- Significantly discounted case pricing of books for use in their classes and consulting practices

We look forward to working with you.

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