Portfolio Management

Browse our posts by category or by author. Subscribe to RSS feeds by author, category, or all posts. We love comments, so let us know what you think.

“Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood”

2 November 2011 - POSTED by Kristyn Gunderson

I recently had a discussion with a friend from college about a leadership seminar we attended together about a year ago. The seminar highlighted “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Steven Covey. The fifth habit particularly stuck out to me, “seek first to understand, then to be understood”.

Described by Steven Covey, the fifth habit is to “use empathetic listening to be genuinely influenced by a person, which compels them to reciprocate the listening and take an open mind to being influenced by you.” I thought about different ways we gather information: books, the Internet, seminars, colleagues, etc. There are so many ways, especially with the help of technology that we can continue to learn and grow.

I had the opportunity to talk with Krystal Guerra, Event Marketing Specialist at AtTask, about the new AtTask webinar series, another way to gather information to expand our learning.

Kristyn: What sets the new AtTask webinar series apart?

Krystal: We take a little bit of a different approach with the AtTask webinars. There is a three part series to help us identify with all audiences: the PPM (project and portfolio management), TalkingWork, the popular podcast hosted by Ty Kiisel and Raechel Logan, and thought leadership, which will typically be an analyst.

Kristyn: Please give a description and goal of each series.

Krystal: With the PPM and TalkingWork series, the goal is to be able to talk about common work place problems, concerns or issues in a neutral environment. And the nice thing about the TalkingWork webinar series is it is a different format so it adds a little bit of uniqueness to a typical webinar format and attracts a different audience. The PPM webinar is geared towards best practices and tips directed towards product managers. The third series is geared towards thought leadership with analyst. This gives us the opportunity to see where the industry is going as a whole and to see how things are aligning in the industry with best practices in software.

Kristyn: Where can we look for information on upcoming webinars and how often will they be held?

Krystal: Right now they are once a month. November’s webinar will be our first thought leadership webinar with Forrester Analyst Tim Harmon on the 30^th. All information on upcoming webinars as well past webinars can be found at www.AtTask.com/events.

I anticipate seeing these grow. The webinars are more educational and fun with the Q & A pieces. It’s an opportunity for attendees to give feedback and it becomes a realistic scenario. It allows for people to actively participate and have an opportunity to be an engaged audience member to get some of their concerns off their mind and have questions answered.

Upcoming Webinar:
November 30^th with Tim Harmon, Forrester Analyst

0 Comments »

Four Simple Questions

2 June 2011 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

I came across an article yesterday with some interesting insight that is worth thinking about. SmartBusiness (sbnonline.com) published an article titled, How Employee Engagement Can Add Dollars to Your Company’s Bottom Line.

The article asserts, "A landmark study of Performance Management Effectiveness by Hewitt Associates demonstrated a 35 percent employee productivity benefit from utilizing employee performance management systems as a result of staff working on projects and tasks that they should be working on. With clearer visibility of goals and how they will be monitored, employees work harder and focus their efforts on appropriate tasks. A conservative 5 percent increase in overall productivity results in a weekly gain of two hours per employee."

I have long been a believer that small and incremental gains in productivity will have the greatest impact on project success, however this is not the only benefit of engaging the team. "According to Gallup (2008 and 2010), engaged employees average 37 percent less absenteeism. Employees with preset, time-sensitive objectives are less likely to take unscheduled time off, unless truly necessary. If each staff member understands they are part of a larger team and their performance is crucial to overall success, unnecessary/unscheduled time off will be reduced." I’ve observed this to be true. When everyone understands the importance of what they’re doing and how their roles are interconnected, nobody wants to drop the ball and let down the rest of the team.

Details of Engagement What’s more, I don’t think there’s anyone who would disagree that employee turnover is an expensive problem. "In the same study, engaged work groups show 25 percent less turnover in high turnover organizations, and 49 percent less turnover in low turnover organizations. Replacing those departed employees has a negative impact on a company’s financial resources. Engaged employees are loyal employees and loyal employees are less likely to leave. Continuous feedback through performance tools helps employees improve, succeed and feel valued."

If I told you that team members who know the answers to four simple questions create these results, would you ask your team the questions? And, more importantly, would you take action once you know the answers?

Here are the questions:

What is your job?
What components of your job are most relevant?
How well are you doing?
What part to you play in the company’s overall success?

Pretty simple questions aren’t they? If you ask these questions of your project team, you might be surprised at the responses you get. Some studies suggest that only 20 percent of managers and employees can answer these questions with any confidence.

The difference So what does that mean to you? As important as project management tools or project and portfolio management software may be, the tools and methodologies we use to manage the process aren’t as important to the bottom line as ensuring that everyone on the team knows with certainty the answers to these four simple questions. What’s more, I’m convinced that ensuring that the team understands their role and how it relates to the overall success of any endeavor needs to be a continual focus as we lead the people on our project teams.

Do you know the answers to those four questions in regards to your role?

6 Comments »

“One-Size-Fits-All” Doesn’t Fit

1 March 2011 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

One-Size-Fits-All It doesn’t really matter if it’s music, clothing or even religion, we can get exactly what we want without compromises—you can download the songs from your favorite album (excluding that one song you don’t like), watch the television programs you like whenever you want to watch them and buy jeans made specifically for your personal style, size and body type. And, don’t forget fantasy-league football, baseball and basketball teams with fan-picked rosters.

It would appear that the era of one-size-fits-all has come and gone.

Nowhere is this more true than in how we approach managing projects and other work. I attended a recent webinar hosted by Gartner Managing Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, Audrey Apfel, titled: Be Prepared for the Future of Program and Portfolio Management, in which Apfel argues that over the next few years organizations will invest 30% less time and money in what we would traditionally consider project management. This is not to say that project leaders won’t have plenty to do, in fact, I think they will be busier than ever—they will just be busy doing different things.

Apfel suggests that there is a growing understanding that project management practices don’t always work in the real world. The linear nature of projects doesn’t always fit with the way work gets done. I must agree. It’s no secret that most people don’t exclusively work on projects—they also do a lot of other work unrelated to formalized project work.

Apfel describes how we approach four basic types of work, which resonate with my personal opinions:

Simple: This is what we would define as non-project work. For many people, this is where they spend the majority of their time. This type of work is often managed with simple "to do" lists or other tools. The simple nature of the work doesn’t diminish the value of the work (or the need for visibility into the work), only the way in which it is managed.
Complicated: This is the work we would traditionally associate with projects. We can analyze cause and effect to create a reasonable plan to approach the work.
Complex: This work would be defined as program work. The work is different from project (or complicated) work because the only way to really understand the cause and effect relationship is through retrospective. And often, it’s necessary to nudge the outcome to get the desired effect.
Chaotic: This is not the type of work most of us deal with on a regular basis from a project investment point of view. This work describes the work driven by the "squeaking wheel." We act because someone’s told us to do so. I call this the "drive-by" work we all deal with on an unfortunately regular basis.

I don’t think anything about the above is earth-shaking, but is the face of what we will more than likely be dealing with as the role of project leader evolves. With this in mind, one of the first questions we need to ask is, "What is the type of work we’re doing?" and "How can I produce value as quickly as possible?"

Over the coming weeks, we’ll talk more about this "evolution" and what it means to us and our role as project leaders. Needless to say, I’d be interested to learn more about how your organizations are dealing with the death of a "one-size-fits-all" methodology.

0 Comments »

Welcome to WorkOut 2011: What is Work Management Anyway?

8 February 2011 - POSTED by AtTask Newsletter

WorkOut Logo As the AtTask Work Management Conference, WorkOut 2011, gets under way today, I thought it might be a good idea to talk about how I define "work" management and how it relates to traditional project management—and why it should matter to all of us. I personally think this is a really big deal—maybe even a game changing shift in how we look at work and interact with the management process.

Work Management represents an evolution of project portfolio management (PPM) and is a paradigm that recognizes that a person’s work day consists of more than structured activities related to formal projects. It includes ad-hoc requests that come from colleagues, personal tasks, goals, objectives, and repetitive duties that must be understood and prioritized. In a nutshell, Work Management encompasses all the work done by project teams, not just formalized projects.

The goal of taking a Work Management approach is to provide a 360-degree view of all work, including a space to collect, prioritize and manage work with tools that help teams work collaboratively on the things that matter most to an organization. It provides people tools to better understand and organize their work life while providing business analysts and leaders the tools they need to validate and inform business decisions.

This sounds like project management, what’s different?

I would consider traditional project management to be a sub-set of Work Management. The Work Management paradigm is an on-ramp to all the work done by teams (including traditional projects), enabling project leaders and other managers to evaluate potential and current projects, set the right strategic and tactical objectives, validate corporate initiatives and promote and execute on those projects that provide the greatest business value (within the context of all the work done within an organization).

How is this going to impact the way I interact with my team—the workplace culture?

I’ve spoken about this before. As workplace culture changes (generation X and Y are accustomed to having more control over what they do and when they do it than any other generation of workers before them), a people-centric Work Management approach doesn’t treat the workforce as resources to be put into productivity buckets, but rather as the linchpin to business success. Assigning work has evolved into a collaborative process between organizational layers and peers.

This democratization of how work is understood and organized represents a paradigm shift recognizing that those closest to the work understand it the best, and should have the ability to help set timelines and milestones for deliverables. Today’s leaders are expected to look ahead and plan to overcome obstacles through better communication, not increased micromanagement.

The arcane management concepts of top-down command-and-control, which are still at the heart of traditional project management methodologies, must change if organizations want to maximize the value provided by the workforce.

How does the Work Management paradigm accommodate structured project-based work?

Looking at projects from the perspective of Work Management frees us from dependence upon any single execution methodology like Agile/Scrum, NPD or waterfall; which are all accommodated within a successful Work Management Approach.

The traditional project management paradigm teaches a top-down planning approach, which attempts to align people, skills, time and activities. Unlike this approach, which relies on a centrally owned and managed process with people reporting status against a plan, a Work Management approach seeks to democratize the project plan and invites feedback regarding time-lines and deliverables. Enabling individual project team members to make commitments regarding project delivery dates facilitates a more accurate picture of project status and provides managers with a forward-looking view of the schedule.

Empowering everyone throughout the organization involves people in the execution of structured work and delivers a rich stream of contextual information into status and activity.

How does this accommodate unstructured work?

Most of a person’s workday is spent managing unstructured work (requests from peers, colleagues and work that is not associated with formal projects). Work Management provides a workspace to capture unstructured work from various sources to facilitate collaboration including: wikis, blogs, document sharing, meetings, chat and group resource scheduling. It also provides visibility into what others are working on, enabling comments and updates around projects and tasks.

In my opinion, the biggest change associated with a successful Work Management platform is a shift from methodologies oriented around work governance to an orientation around optimization.

Feel free to share your thoughts here, speak with me personally (I’ll be at the conference all week), or tweet your comments with hashtag #workout11. I hope you enjoy the conference!

0 Comments »

Project Management’s Dirty Little Secret

21 December 2010 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

Most of the project management methodologies utilized today in traditional project management practice evolved from creating and managing the processes used in developing the assembly lines of the early industrial revolution. The next big push in project management thought, in my opinion, came with NASA and the race into space. The list of benefits from the space race is long and varied, Tang and titanium being two of them. You might even be able to include project management software on that list, although I believe it is more likely directly attributable to independent aerospace contractors than NASA (although sometimes I get carried away and could be writing revisionist history here).

That being said, you might be interested to know that next to accounting software, project management software is the oldest software product. It’s been around, in a very similar form to what it is now, for a very long time. What’s more, although project management software has improved and accommodated things like resource management, stage gates, portfolio management and other needed tools for project managers, it isn’t all a bed of roses for organizations doing project-based work.

secret The dirty little secret of project management is that after all these years of software development, the tools have become so complicated that end users don’t use them. If you’re like me, there were times when I had to spend (waste) time reminding, cajoling, even begging my team members to update their status information in the project management tools we were using at the time. Or worse, I had to guess as to what real project status was.

Project management software has come a long way, but the way the end users interact with the process has largely been ignored. Why? Because they are not a real buying influence and their needs are considered unimportant to those who do influence purchasing decisions. This is a mistake in my opinion.

Capturing information at the source (the end user) is the best way to collect accurate and timely information for informing project decisions. When team members have an easy, and dare I suggest intuitive, way to contribute project data; project managers, line of business managers, and other business leaders will have the timely information they need to make decisions that could increase competitiveness and profitability (which is what CEOs want to see their projects do).

Team members shouldn’t have to be project management experts to update their status.

As project leaders, it’s our job to find the solutions that will make the process simple for the members of our teams so that we have visibility into projects, can identify and eliminate bottlenecks and encourage collaboration. Once we expose the dirty little secret for what it is, we will start to see project management software vendors make tools that will make it easy for end users to engage in the process and facilitate work management for businesses of all types.

0 Comments »

How’s My Portfolio?

6 December 2010 - POSTED by Doug Den Hoed

TSN Turning Point

Our local sportscaster uses the phrase "TSN Turning Point" to highlight the pivotal play that enabled the win. In my Project Based Work, I use it to refer to that pivotal event when someone I’ve been coaching thinks of their own solution in a way I wouldn’t have. I always like to make a big deal of it, both to encourage them for taking ownership, and to celebrate their progress.

Chris Connoly, one of my @task clients, sent me just such a TSN Turning Point, and has given me permission to share it here.

My My My

@task has many "My" features built in to help users with Work Managment, such as My Tasks, My Reports, and My Issues. However, where Chris works, the emphasis is on the PORTFOLIO portion of the Project Portfolio Management Software, which doesn’t really mesh with the "My" concept. Here’s his story, and his solution:

We have all of our projects grouped into Programs and then Portfolios, and we have Program Managers and Portfolio Managers. It’s very easy to create project reports based on the Portfolio Manager or Program Manager since they are only one level up. However, it seems pretty much impossible to pull out task information based on those managers.

Since most of the information that we want to report on is generated in task reports, not being able to have a "My Program" or "My Portfolio" on task reports is actually a huge problem. And it annoys me that I can see who the Managers are in the view, and group by them, but not include them in a filter.

[One option would be to] create a filter that uses project IDs with an "IN", and then just include all the project IDs that you want. Not exactly useful for a large number of projects, and still doesn’t take care of the "My" part.

So what I ended up doing was creating calculated custom data fields at the project level (in my ever expanding "For System Use Only" section) for "Program Manager ID" and "Portfolio Manager ID", and using "Program.Owner.ID" and "Portfolio.Owner.ID" as the formulae.

I can now just use DE:project:Progam Owner ID=$$USER.ID for my filter, and I have the My Program filter, [without] even having to use text mode.

An Elegant Solution

In short, Chris was able to use @task’s Custom Parameters feature to point "up" to the data that he wanted, effectively extending the data model to suit his needs. I’ve always admired AtTask’s stance that (I’ll paraphrase) "We can’t think of everything, so we’ve included Custom Data so you can tailor @task to what you need". That’s a collabrative invitation that works.

0 Comments »

Get Some Professional Help!

18 November 2010 - POSTED by Doug Den Hoed

Logo Loco

If you’ve been using @task as your Project Portfolio Management Software for a while, you might remember the old layout, where you could put your own company’s logo in the top left corner. As the administrator, I used to keep a couple of versions of my logo handy. I’d set the regular one for normal operations, but set a black and white one when I was doing maintenance. It was a way of broadcasting to my team.

Although the top left logo is no longer an option — to be fair, that really is the primest location of them all — I’ve figured out a slicker way to broadcast announcements. And share Help Files. And get my logo back.

Click Help

There are lots of steps in this one, but if you scroll down to the screenshot, I hope you’ll agree that the end justifies the means.

Write your own help manual (e.g. in Powerpoint; you’re on your own for this one)
Create a new Project (e.g. Help Docs)
Attachments > New Document > upload your help manual
Attachments > View Documents > Click help manual > Hover on Preview for ID (e.g. 816046)
Paste Link into Helpdoc.HTML (e.g. see Internal Help Manual href)
Repeat previous 3 steps for Company logo (e.g. see img src)
Test Helpdoc.HTML (e.g. layout, links should work)
Attachments > New Documents > upload Helpdoc.html
Attachments > View Documents > Click Helpdoc.html > Hover on Preview for ID (e.g. 816117)
Create > External Page > Help Page, with defaults, plus URL (e.g. https://lumina.attask-ondemand.com/attask/documentDownload.cmd?boolean%28viewinline%29=true&ID=816117)
Create > Dashboard > Help Dashboard, with Help Page as the only report
Note ID of Dashboard from URL (e.g. 118321)
System Settings > Preferences > General Preferences > Help URL (e.g. https://lumina.attask-ondemand.com/attask/dashboardRun.cmd?ID=118321)
Click the Help link within @task to view your new Help Dashboard/External Page/Document

Download Details

You are welcome to download the simple Helpdoc.html file from this article and modify it for your own purposes. You could share status updates, broadcast upgrades and outages, link to a training video, or even make a virtual team bulletin board. Just remember that each time you upload a new version of Helpdoc.html, you’ll need to update the ID in your Help External Page. It took me six versions to get this one just right <grin>.

0 Comments »

Three Fundamentals of Project-Based Work

5 November 2010 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

During the first 85 years of the Tour de France, no American had ever won.

In 1986, Greg LeMond was the first American cyclist to win the Tour de France. He won again in 1989, and again in 1990. This makes LeMond one of only nine cyclists to have won the Tour three or more times. A powerful competitor and fantastic racer, LeMond has said, "Perhaps the single most important element in mastering the techniques and tactics of racing is experience. But once you have the fundamentals, acquiring the experience is a matter of time."

I think the same can be said of successful work management. Experience comes after fundamentals. Let me suggest a few of the fundamentals I think apply to successfully managing projects and project teams:

Make sure the project has a clearly defined business objective—and that everyone involved in the project understands what it is: It’s important for stakeholders and project teams to understand the business value of what they’re doing. Keeping the project vision visible and accessible enables everyone involved in the project to stay focused on what’s important.
Make sure the project has executive commitment to see it through: One of the quickest ways to kill a project is to pull the funding out from under it. A committed executive can also help promote the merits of the project to others within the organization to build a broader base of stakeholder support.
Make sure there is a shared sense of determination to finish the project: If the only member of the team committed to finish is the project manager, it’s not likely the project will ever be completed. Individual team members and executive stakeholders need to have the same determination. Without a shared sense of determination to finish, projects languish and eventually fail.

Mastering (and practicing) the fundamentals isn’t very exciting, but it’s often the difference between someone who is successful and someone who isn’t.

Project and portfolio management software, along with other project management tools, offer both experienced and new project leaders a number of valuable tools to help them establish work management best practices and methodologies. That being said, nothing can substitute for establishing a good work management foundation.

Do you have any fundamental skills you would add to the list?

0 Comments »

Project Prioritization and Project Management Tools

1 November 2010 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

I call them "drive-by" projects.

Basically, "drive-by" projects are all those ad-hoc tasks or initiatives that get dropped in your lap at random intervals every day. They suck up time, they suck up resources, they distract project teams, and have the potential to push active projects behind schedule. Often they are emergency projects that have no strategic initiative attached to them, which is critical for organizations that rely on project-based work to keep teams focused on the right projects.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that they are of no value. In fact, it’s not always about separating the good projects from the bad projects. It’s usually a matter of choosing the best projects, the projects that will provide the most business value from a list of good potential projects. Unfortunately, when project teams are faced with dealing with a "drive-by" project, all the work to keep teams focused on those initiatives that drive the most business value gets thrown out the window.

I believe that’s why the "get’er done" or "drive-by" project is such a problem. They may be worthy, but if they don’t measure up to the "does this provide the most value" test, they ultimately limit an organization’s capacity to work on the things that do. And that negatively impacts productivity—and ultimately profitability.

In theory, everyone agrees with this, however, practice is something different. In the heat of the moment, it’s difficult for decision-makers to step back and ask the question, "Will this "drive-by" project provide enough value that someone should drop what he or she is doing to work on it?" Sometimes the answer is definitely yes, but there are times when the answer should be NO. If nobody asks the question, project teams can be chasing around working on projects of minimal value (at least projects that haven’t be vetted to make sure they are the best projects for teams to be working on).

Project and portfolio management best practices revolve around the concept of identifying those projects that meet certain criteria, creating a plan, and then executing on the plan. Project management software does a pretty good job of helping do that. However, sometimes we need to ask ourselves, "How does my work management methodology address ‘drive-by’ tasks and projects that come up every day?"

It doesn’t have to be a catastrophic failure that causes an organization to falter. Sometimes it’s the accumulated weight of a thousand insignificant inefficiencies that cause the most damage. How does your work management methodology address the "drive-by" project? Even if your software doesn’t, feel free to share what you do to keep your project teams focused on the right projects.

1 Comment »

What Can Project Leaders Learn From How Financial Planners Manage Risk?

11 October 2010 - POSTED by Ty Kiisel

A balanced investment strategy has proven to be the most successful approach for maximizing return while reducing risk in an investment portfolio. Does the same approach apply to the successful management of an organizations project portfolio?

An experienced financial adviser will tell you that a balanced investment strategy is the most successful approach for maximizing return while reducing risk in your investment portfolio. The investor works to balance return and risk by diversifying investments in both high risk/high return and low risk/low return opportunities. Understanding each investor’s overall risk tolerance is crucial to crafting a meaningful investment strategy.

Successfully managing an organization’s project portfolio to maximize return while reducing risk requires the same approach—an understanding of the organization’s risk tolerance, and investment strategy that takes that tolerance into account, and an execution that aligns with the organization’s strategic and financial goals.

Although there are many organizations that believe it’s better to be safe than sorry, that might not be the case. Value-driven risk management acknowledges that some risks are positive opportunities to be pursued, while others aren’t worth worrying too much about, given the likelihood of occurring.

The first step to evaluating the viability of any project is to determine it’s potential value, based upon pre-determined metrics that reflect:

The project goals
The project costs
Th project’s alignment to the mission and vision of the organization
The organization’s risk tolerance
The project risks and any mitigation plans

Pre-determined metrics for evaluating project objectives, risks, business value, and alignment to organizational strategic and financial goals enable project decision-makers to manage technology and implement systems in a disciplined way that balances the need for positive return from investments with the costs associated with maintaining an innovative and productive line of business.

Maximizing project investments from the ground up depends on how successfully we can manage and lead project teams. I don’t believe that keeping people busy is the challenge—however, choosing the right projects is sometimes problematic for business leaders.

Poor decision-making leads to bad project investments. Much like how a skilled investment adviser makes decisions, the key to making good project decisions lies with pre-determined metrics for evaluating potential projects to validate initiatives from the ground up.

Project portfolio management software and work management methodologies that facilitate and encourage this type of evaluation before a project even starts will make the process easier to implement—however balancing risk and return is more than plugging numbers into a software program. It requires an organizational commitment to not only doing projects right, but doing the right projects.

How do you balance risk and reward?

1 Comment »