TransAccel Group – keep the lights on

Cutting Your Project Portfolio Down to Size

By Greg Scott|July 10th, 2014|Categories: Planning|Tags: alignment, business case, capacity, keep the lights on, Planning, resources, risk|Comments Off on Cutting Your Project Portfolio Down to Size

That big project portfolio of yours is your biggest headache. It’s true. If you are like most companies, your portfolio has grown to an unwieldy size, which means you have way too many projects competing for the same resources. Here’s what to do.

First, inventory ALL projects and activities that require any kind of IT resources, making sure to include non-obvious ones like SMEs and user training time. According to Gartner, 60% of IT’s budget is spent on operational, “keep the light on” activities, so it is important that these are included to ensure correct allocation of project resources. Projects that pull resources from core operations can create business risk.

Second, decide who will comprise a governance committee, i.e., who will make decisions concerning the portfolio. This should be a mix of IT and business leaders with the authority to make decisions for the organization. The governance committee will determine which projects should continue, which should be delayed, and which should be terminated. These decisions will be made based on determining which projects have the potential to create the most value for the company. Each project in the portfolio should align with business goals and be ranked on the strength of its business case outlining benefits, costs and risk. Keep this simple, but also be on the lookout for project interdependencies. You certainly don’t want a critical project bungled because it relied on deliverables from another project that was killed or delayed.

The importance of strong governance in the portfolio process cannot be overstated. Projects that are nice but not essential drain away resources that could be used more productively. Focus on cutting unnecessary demand and don’t start new projects until you know for certain that …
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October: Conscious Planning

October is probably the most grueling month of the IT planning cycle, given the exorbitant amount of time expended in meetings. Each department—Sales, Marketing, R&D and Manufacturing—will meet with its IT counterpart to plan next year’s projects. These meetings should be dialogue-driven events that result in a shared understanding of anticipated business drivers over the next 12-18 months, current market conditions, emerging trends, and specific strategies to capitalize on opportunities. In preparation for these meetings, it would also be helpful for IT to conduct a SWOT analysis (strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats) comparing your company to 3 or 4 competitors. Not only will this assessment point out technical strengths and weaknesses, but it is always wise to know what the competition is up to.

Unfortunately, October is also a time of enormous pressure, as both IT and the Business push hard to achieve MBO deliverables before the end of the year. Too often, the competing time constraints of completing existing projects while planning new ones causes Business to default on the planning side, leaving IT to design new projects on its own. This lack of input from Business leads to “silo” thinking: “We know what they [the Business] really want or need.”

Now, in a perfect world, Business would remain engaged with the IT Account Manager—the one who not only has the best vantage point from which to understand and articulate Business’s needs, but is also well-equipped to offer ideas and solutions to address those needs holistically (end-to-end) rather than piecemeal. But, if Business opts out and IT can’t get it back to the table, or IT believes it actually can do the planning on its own, the next step needs to be the creation of a business case, or …
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