Key to Better Business: Setting Project Portfolio Goals and Creating Clarity

It is important to always be sure that project portfolio goals are aligned with your organization’s goals. When they are aligned, the PMO leader will have a greater chance of success. Hence, as each independent project comes through the pipeline, they need to be carefully considered against clear standards. 

In this article, we’ll detail the following explanations as to why it’s important to set project portfolio goals and create project portfolio clarity in order to achieve better business outcomes so that you:

Improve project delivery – easier to effectively and efficiently deliver the right projects at the right time.

Keep teams and management aligned – project portfolio and project clarity prevents miscommunication and unnecessary delays. 

Lower the turnover rate

Happier stakeholders with less chance for a toxic environment due to miscommunication and overwhelming frustration, and time wasted on inefficiencies, including unnecessary emails and meetings. Frustrated resources jump from the project, leave the organization, and cause projects to go off track and miss deadlines. The repercussions from this can be enormous as it can cause customer frustration and cost and profitability issues on the project. 

Better project delivery

When a project starts, it starts with an intrinsic want, but most likely, with a need to meet specific company goals.  And in large organizations, projects go through an entire workflow before they are executed and delivered. This is partially due to the fact that these types of projects can be dynamically ever-changing, quite costly, sometimes run on for more than a few years, if not a few months, and are labor-intensive, just to name a few. They also usually call upon several teams of experts in various departments to dive into that want or need, identify the requirements, design and develop a detailed solution, test it and then hand over a real, working solution that hopefully meets the organization’s goals.

After ideation, the next step may be to submit the project for approval. If so, it would possibly need to prove that it garners priority among the long list of other projects currently running, or waiting in line to be executed. In doing so, a project leader may have to identify if it meets the standardized business drivers, and what it will entail financially and human resource-wise to understand its value. 

Next, if approved, the next steps could be planning the project out on a timeline before properly kicking off the project. This will planning will require paying attention to all of the details, and then clearly displaying the plan to all of the stakeholders involved to make sure everyone on the project has clarity and is aligned with the processes and goals. 

Keep teams and management aligned 

One of the best ways to create project clarity is to keep your project teams and senior management aligned on the project plans, status, and end goals throughout the project. Excellent and efficient project communication is Job One for the project leader to help ensure project support, project involvement, and project success. The up-to-date team and management will always be on the same page. This means less re-work, more transparency, more clarity, more accountability, better meeting attendance, and an overall better understanding of the project and direction it is taking. Things change. Projects and status change. Keep all stakeholders aligned at all times. With the right tool that is a single source of truth (SSOT), where all stakeholders have some sort of access to shared data depending on their role and permissions, you can have this take place automatically, just like in Proggio.

Better team accountability

The aligned and informed team will be working harder on assigned tasks due to communication, understanding, and common direction. Following up with the team and all stakeholders means that team resources will be more accountable to assigned tasks and overall what is expected of them both from a work assignment perspective and from a project responsibility perspective. Meeting attendance will rise and meetings will be more productive as project resources play a more active part in the project’s success.

Get automatic accountability when activities taking place over a shared workspace are updated automatically in a project portfolio social feed. When stakeholders’ know that their progress is followed by their peers, they are more likely to be engaged with one another as well, and in turn, assisted in staying up to date and aligned with project topics.

Conclusion

The more transparent the project goals are to all stakeholders, the more you’ll find them all on the same page. Set goals. Measure against those goals and always follow up on important project communications to ensure the direction for the project is clear to everyone, everyone understands their role and the current project status and everyone is working on those same goals. Keep everyone up to date throughout the project engagement for the best possible outcome.