Managing the Project Portfolio: An Agile and Lean Approach

Manage Your Project Portfolio: An Agile and Lean Approach

Johanna Rothman New: Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects

www.jrothman.com jr@jrothman.com

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What’s the Problem?

•  Too many simultaneous projects •  Too much interrupting work •  Technical work and multitasking is invisible to management

What Are You Supposed to Do First?

What Some Project Portfolios Look Like

What These Portfolios Are Missing

Combination View: Low and Mid Level

What is the Project Portfolio?

•  Organization of all the projects (and all the work) the organization is attempting to manage –  When they start –  When they end –  Which one is #1

•  Decide when projects are done--or done enough –  Decide when to stop, kill, or cancel projects

So What?

•  The portfolio of work-in-progress tells you what is happening and when you can change it –  Similar to a sprint backlog

Use the Portfolio to Make Decisions, Tradeoffs, and Assignments

•  Move between the strategic view to the tactical view •  Create a rolling wave plan •  Provide transparency into the organization’s work

Consider Lean

•  Think in terms of value. Producers create value, but customers define it.

•  Know how you create value. What is your value stream? •  Create process flow to make problems more transparent. The team

delivers small chunks and fixes problems as they arise. •  Use pull systems to avoid overproduction. •  Level out the workload to eliminate multitasking. •  Stop when there is a quality problem. •  Use visual control so no problems are hidden.

When to Make Decisions

•  When a project finishes (the project cycles) •  When you have enough information about the next version of a

product (the planning cycles) •  When it's time to allocate budget and people to a new project (the

business cycles)

How to Make Decisions

•  Qualitative questions •  Quantitative questions •  Only do work that’s currently valuable

Qualitative Questions

•  Should we do this project at all?

•  How does this project fit in with all the others? •  What is the strategic reason for this project? •  Is there a tactical gain from completing this project? •  To make this project successful, are we ready to adequately fund it? •  To make this project successful, are we ready to adequately staff it? •  Do we know what success looks like for this project? •  Is there waste associated with the lack of this project?

Quantitative Questions

•  When will we see any monetary return from this project? •  What's the expected revenue curve for this project? •  What's the expected customer acquisition curve for this project? •  When will we see retention of current customers from this project? •  What's the expected customer growth curve? •  When will we see reduction in operating costs from this project? •  What's the expected operating cost curve?

•  How will this project move the organization forward?

Doing Work that’s Currently Valuable

•  Rank the products •  Rank the features for a product •  Requires market knowledge to know when the team has done

enough

Collaboration: The Difficult Part

•  Collaboration: to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor

Discussion

•  How have you worked across the organization? How have you been successful?

•  What has been less than successful? •  What have you tried where you can’t tell?

Build Trust: Prerequisites

•  Deliver what you promise to deliver •  Be consistent in your actions and reactions •  Make integrity a cornerstone of your work •  Be willing to discuss, influence, and negotiate. Don't get stuck on

your position •  Trust in yourself and your colleagues •  From Solomon, Building Trust in Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life

Build Trust for Project Portfolio Management

•  Identify your goal •  How will you deliver consistently

Consider How Your Mission Drives Your Portfolio Decisions

•  Your mission, which is what drives you (and your group) to succeed •  Missions guide principles and positions

–  A principle is: a guide to your values that helps you make decisions –  A position is: a decision that you will not change

Portfolio Evaluation Meeting

•  Evaluate each project (should we do it at all?) •  Rank each project •  Commit/kill/transform •  Publish project portfolio

Ways to Rank (Show Value)

•  Points •  Single-elimination •  Double-elimination (a form of pair-wise comparison)

Why Manage the Project Portfolio?

•  Project staff can only work on one project at a time –  Some people can only work on one task at a time –  Many people like to have several related tasks to trade off among –  Multi-project context switching is a huge waste of time

•  Project portfolio makes it clear where the time is being allocated—and where the time is not allocated

•  Managing the portfolio makes it possible to staff the most important work and not staff the least important work

Why Does Agile/Lean Work?

•  Agile helps: –  Finishing running, tested features –  Have release-able product periodically (every timebox)

•  Lean helps –  Creating a culture of not having a lot of work in process

  Instead, finish things and move on to the next one

It’s Not Easy

•  But it’s necessary if you want to be successful

References and Resources

•  Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2009.

•  Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management, Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2007.

•  Rothman, Johanna and Esther Derby. Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management, Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2005.

•  Managing Product Development blog: jrothman.com/blog/mpd •  If you want to me to stay in contact with you, give me your card or

fill out a yellow form to sign up for my email newsletter, The Pragmatic Manager, jrothman.com/pragmaticmanager/

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