By Philippe Rocheteau, Managing Director, Rocheteau & Associates, Inc.
Where have all the good Project Portfolio Management (PPM) tools gone? Perhaps nowhere, and that’s exactly the problem. Most haven not adapted to accommodate the reality of turbulent project process dynamics, and instead they remain stuck in a time when business moved at a slower pace.
While digital transformation has driven other solutions across the business to become more adaptive and work in real time (think ERP, document sharing, etc.), PPM tools have stagnated. It’s not rare to find project managers planning on whiteboards, building details into Gantt charts, presenting with slides, and doing the heavy lifting with spreadsheets. Adaptability is left behind and none of the data is aligned.
Today’s modern near real-time project schedules demand adaptive strategic management solutions vs. tactical support systems that have been morphed into project management tools. Excel was not designed for building project plans, and whiteboards certainly don’t provide the data trail to map project evolution.
All of this makes it nearly impossible for project managers to adapt to changes in the project plan. It’s impossible to respond quickly to threats as they arise and replan the whole program plan to accommodate this new threat. And, by the way, that program is comprised of over 100 individual projects, 15,000 tasks, and hundreds of resources. PMs are somehow expected to, with 100% confidence, submit to their executive management that the team has a “well thought out plan” that keeps us on track of the original goals with seemingly infinite dependencies and moving parts. Impossible!
By the time the ink dries on schedule version ‘xx.xx’, it’s already outdated. With current tools, it’s not realistically possible to adjust to current known risks and re-baseline the schedule, let alone devote time to “what if” scenario planning in order to stay ahead of tomorrow’s inevitable bombshell. Instead, the Project Manager’s main responsibility has become to protect the schedule from internal and external threats—which we all know is difficult.
Adaptive Strategic Management is the name of the game in today’s modern fast-paced business. This requires a dynamic tool with all the previous traditional capabilities plus a visually powerful interface that allows a project manager to facilitate both risk sensitivity analysis and risk threat avoidance by dynamically creating multiple “what if” scenario options. The goal is to identify the one best solution path from these options that reflects near zero risk to schedule critical path, avoids budget overrun, does not burn out your resources, nor degrades the quality of the end product.
To achieve this requires a strategy that is well positioned to help with these challenges based on the fundamentals of being more agile and adaptive. A modern PPM strategy should prepare the organization for the future, enable adaptive operations and support end-to-end digitalization.
With that in mind, here are 9 strategies that can overcome PPM stagnation and enable the dynamic, agile operations your organization needs to be more competitive, and your project managers need to avoid losing their minds.
It must be future proof.
- The best PPM strategy is one that supports multiple methods, including waterfall, Kanban, lean, agile, etc. Using solutions that force your team to work in one specific methodology not only hinders productivity, but these are not one-size-fits-all options. Various projects and scenarios may call for a different approach, so make sure your strategy is inclusive.
- It also needs to be scalable. This is one of the key shortcomings of spreadsheets: they quickly become ginormous, unwieldy, and hard to decipher by anyone but the creator. Whatever technological platform you choose, it must be able to support any size project, and scale to accommodate any number of projects and users.
- Finally, your PPM strategy must be user-friendly. It must be built on a foundation of clear business goals, allowing you to align project objectives and outcomes to those overarching KPIs. The best strategy includes a workflow for identifying how projects fit into the company’s overall business strategy.
It must include adaptive enablement.
- Project prioritization is a huge challenge and a primary cause of staff burnout. Your PPM strategy must include a means to support adaptive project prioritization, so that when hurdles or new opportunities arise, resources and workloads can shift accordingly.
- Visualization is key for clarity. With most PPM tools it can be quite difficult to clearly grasp timelines and understand dependencies—the way the data is displayed is simply not intuitive. Transitioning to a visually-driven strategy can bring clarity to complex project plans for both project managers and executive stakeholders. Using graphics to communicate timelines and resource allocation can help those who don’t fully understand the details of dependencies (nor need to), see how changes in scope or priorities impact the entire portfolio.
- Realtime responsiveness is essential. How many times have you sat in a meeting where a decision is made to shift project plans or priorities, and everyone has to go back to their desks, revise the plan and re-huddle again later to get approval? It’s an incredible waste of time. Build a responsive strategy that allows you to provide real-time assessment of how changes will impact the current project and the entire portfolio.
It must support digitalization.
- Establish a single source of truth. Discrete files and data silos create a breeding ground for chaos, errors and overwhelm when dependencies and resource allocation aren’t accounted for because they live in separate systems. A modern PPM strategy requires that all project information lives on one, cohesive platform so that everyone is working with the same data.
- Move from local to online. In today’s global and hybrid/remote work environment, whiteboards and local spreadsheets are hardly sufficient. Effective collaboration requires ubiquitous access to project plans so that progress doesn’t slow down due to time zones or work-from-home days. Adopting a cloud-based platform transcends time and location and keeps projects moving forward.
- Say goodbye to static reports. Snapshots are great for capturing memories, but not for capturing progress. Static reports can’t keep pace with today’s fast-paced business environment—they’re outdated before they’re delivered or even completed, not to mention time-consuming to compile. Move to a PPM strategy that supports real-time data reporting to provide fast, accurate and easy status updates.
In today’s modern environment, people tend to engage with information, browse through it, respond to it, and navigate in and out of it at will—whether it’s through a mobile banking app or an ERP solution. This interactivity is essential for end-user engagement, and any approach that fails to provide this experience is antiquated and irrelevant. Managing highly complex, integrated project and program schedules is no different. Executing a modern PPM strategy is a strategic imperative for both the Project Manage Office and the entire organization.
