Sabotaging Success: 10 Things to Avoid for a

Successful Strategic Project Portfolio Management Process

By Simon Moore, author of Strategic Project Portfolio Management:

Enabling a Productive Organization (Wiley, 2009, ISBN: 978-0-470-48195-0, $45.00)

1. The Speed Racer. A sense of urgency is a helpful thing when you’re trying to achieve a full project portfolio management system; however, full-on haste is not. In order to ensure implementation is smooth, be sure all of the required changes are completely understood before making them. When broad adoption across a large group of people is required, a phased approach can make the required process more manageable.

 2. The Information Overload. If your portfolio management system consumes more time than the benefit it provides, your process needs to change. The key to a successful system is to make data capture easy, and if possible, automated. Focus on collecting a comprehensive range of data, but only that which you will need, not extraneous data that might be useful in the future. From a focused base, you can expand the process incrementally.

 3. The False Start. No matter how excited you are about your system or how much executive support you have, parachuting it into your organization without first testing it out with a pilot group will most likely lead to failure. It’s important that you learn about and analyze the existing competencies your organization has, and then build on them using a phased and structured approach.

 4. The Ambiguous Report. Any reporting process must link through to actionable decisions. Without this, reports have no meaning and discussion around them lacks focus. Reports should be tied into a decision-making process. Also, be wary of adding more exploratory reports to your core set, because this can dilute focus and reduce the efficiency of the process.

 5. The Mercy-Save. It can be tempting for portfolio managers to allow underperforming projects to persist, but not killing them can deprive stronger projects of funding and cause performance to stagnate. Another issue to contend with is not killing projects fast enough, so make sure that monitoring processes are as real-time as you need your decisions to be.

 6. The Overambitious Estimate. Estimation can be a tricky and potentially dangerous tool, because without checks on the process, misleading estimates can divert funding from projects that would ultimately provide a more reliable ROI. Your process should utilize a feedback loop (not just postmortems) that tends toward self-correction and greater accuracy over time.

 7. The Unintentional Oversight. It can be difficult to determine if a project is truly meeting scope requirements. Therefore, scope should be monitored just as carefully as budget and duration. By using more subjective metrics when a single metric can’t define scope or quality and by structuring projects into milestones that require customer or end-user acceptance before milestones are complete, project scope can be better evaluated.

 8. The Keep-Away. Locking down information or making it hard to access prevents organizations from acting as a single entity. Creating a web-based strategy for sharing project and portfolio documents is key. It ensures information is provided in a transparent manner, necessitates less managerial policing, and creates an open and easy-to-use system for all.

 9. The Resource Ration. Simply put, projects can be completed only if they get the resources they need, so ensure beforehand that all projects have a resource plan in place. This should include an estimate of the tools and raw materials necessary for the project’s success, as well as an infrastructure that includes communication tools, an intuitive and rich collaboration platform, and business intelligence tools.

 10. The Flash in the Pan. Planning is the key to success, because it ensures that all bases are covered before work on a project begins. Ironically, a rapid and rushed start to project work is likely to accelerate the project’s failure. Effective planning can be supported by appropriate governance on the portfolio level, and it also enables the team size to remain relatively constant. Finally, planning provides time to work with and define appropriate stakeholders.