Our Growth International

Our Growth International Making difference and impacting knowledge

OGI supports 20 national nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to provide capacity-building assistance to education and health agencies, community-based organizations, institutions of higher education, and other organizations to improve health and educational outcomes among children and adolescents.

11/01/2020

The Ultimate Guide to…
Project Portfolio Management
Projects are hard enough to manage, now try a portfolio of them. It’s exponentially more complex and requires an exponentially more robust project portfolio software. But before you run away and find a dark corner to hide in, there’s help. Project portfolio management isn’t new, but the tools that make it possible to control are ever-evolving.
Before getting into all that, though, let’s first take a deep dive into the topic of project portfolio management and get a good look at what we’re dealing with.
What is Project Portfolio Management?
Project portfolio management (PPM) is the management of many projects, which is called a portfolio. This includes the processes, methods and technologies used by the project managers and or project management offices leading these individual projects. PPM analyzes the portfolio to have the portfolio be as productive as possible, while remaining on schedule and within budget.
Many different perspectives are at play with project portfolio management. As noted, the various schedules, scope and costs of the portfolio must be maintained. But there are also the constraints imposed by customers, the strategic objectives of the larger organization and the impact of external real-world factors that require attention as well.
Managing an organization’s portfolio of projects requires prioritizing projects, allocating resources, tracking performances and much more. Also, data from individual projects is collected, reviewed and analyzed to make sure it’s aligned with the overall strategy of the organization.
In the hierarchy of business management, project portfolio management is the link between project management and enterprise management. Project management being project teams working on assessment, proposals and project deliverables; portfolio management overseeing the resource allocation, project prioritization and tracking performance of those projects; and enterprise management dealing with the overriding vision, mission and strategy of the organization.
Project Portfolio Management vs Project Management
To further understand where project portfolio management and project management differ, it’s important to define each and expose the areas where they diverge.
Project management is defined by its name: it’s the management of a project. A project is a temporary endeavor that results in a product or service. It has a beginning and an end, which is planned and monitored through a series of processes, which is project management.
Project management can include the following:
• Defining project goals
• Managing project requirements
• Breaking down tasks into a schedule
• Managing cost and budget
• Assigning resources
• Monitoring, tracking and reporting on project progress
• Communicating to teams and stakeholders
Project portfolio management is a formal approach to orchestrating, prioritizing and analyzing the potential value of many projects, called a portfolio, or many portfolios. The goal is to manage and leverage the life cycle of investments, initiatives, programs, projects and outcomes to best reach the overall goals and objectives of an organization.
What project portfolio management is concerned with is a high-level view and how the many projects under its wing can rise to meet the larger strategic objectives of the organization. Unlike project management, which is dealing with aligning one project to business strategy, project portfolio management is looking to make portfolios act as one in their ability to achieve the goals of the organization.
Therefore, project management is a subset of portfolio management. It leads to the overriding objective, which is meeting the strategic goals of the organization. Often there is a step between project management and portfolio management, known as program management, which is a related group of projects. Project portfolio management doesn’t have to be comprised of similar projects.
Project Portfolio Management Roles & Hierarchy
The person in an organization who is responsible for the management of the project portfolio is called a project portfolio manager. They can be in charge of one or more portfolios. They work with different financial algorithms and models to help guide their decisions in keeping the portfolio within the organization’s strategic objectives. They supervise and manage a small team of project management staff and project managers, who report back to the project portfolio manager on project reporting, methodology, application and financials.
The project portfolio manager reports to the program delivery manager or a similar high-level C-suite executive. In big organizations⁠—especially those that are structured, vertical operations⁠—portfolios managers might work for a project management office (PMO) within the larger organization. In some cases, the PMO is managing the portfolio, not a specific portfolio manager.
Again, the portfolio manager is in charge of a portfolio or group of portfolios. The structure of a portfolio is that it’s made up of a number of projects. These projects can be related, as in a program, or not.
Each project is broken down into phases, which are managed by a series of processes. These phases, also called the life cycle of a project, are the initiation, planning, ex*****on and closure. Each of these phases is made up of a number of tasks with the objective of moving the project forward and creating deliverables. The final deliverable being the project product or service.
Project portfolio management doesn’t dig deep into the mechanics of each project, but must manage the overall goals and objectives of each of the projects in the portfolio in order to ensure that they’re all aligned with the overall goals and objectives of the organization.
5 Project Portfolio Processes
Project portfolio management requires a balance of time, skills, budgets, risk mitigation and finding ways to run the projects in the portfolio cheaply and quickly without losing quality. They do this through the use of five key capabilities.
1. Change Control Management: Identifies and prioritizes change requests. These can be feature requests, operational constraints, regulatory, etc., based on demand, financial and operational constraints.
2. Risk Management: Identifies risks in projects that make up the portfolio, and develops contingency and risk response plans in order to rein in the uncertainties of managing the portfolio.
3. Financial Management: Manages financial resources related to the projects in the portfolio and demonstrates financial value of the portfolio as it pertains to the organizational strategy, goals and objectives.
4. Pipeline Management: Gets enough project proposals in the pipeline and determines if they’re worth executing and will assist in the goals and objectives of the organization.
5. Resource Management: Efficient and effective use of organization’s resources, from materials and equipment to people and technical skills.
Project Portfolio Management Software
Project portfolio management started as a broad brush in which to paint the selecting major strategic initiatives. It was mostly based around cost, risk and return. These were the decision mechanisms that drove portfolio managers.
Capacity planning then was crowned king of project portfolio management, but it was also too narrow to act as an overall process to control portfolio management. The need for a wider lens on which to view project portfolio management was clear as more senior-level management and executives wanted greater detail and focus on improving process.
While simple software has been in play for years, it wasn’t until the advent of the internet and the personal computer revolution of the mid-to-late 1990s that software solutions were able to offer the breadth of features that gave portfolio managers the tools they needed to manage every part of the project portfolio management process.
With software moving from the desktop to the cloud, project portfolio management grew more efficient and effective. Some of the features that serve portfolio managers are the following:
• Online Gantt Charts
• Real-Time Dashboards
• Shared Calendars
• Time Tracking and Timesheets
• Dynamic Reporting
• Collaborate with Remote Teams
Project Portfolio Management Tools
If you’re thinking that to run a project portfolio requires a collection of different software solutions that hopefully work together, it’s understandable. The features that are needed to manage a portfolio are broad and powerful, but they’re all under one roof in ProjectManager.com.
Online Gantt Chart
Planning a portfolio of projects is exponentially more complicated than scheduling one project, which is no small task itself. However, with ProjectManager.com’s online Gantt chart, which is fully online, it’s easy to prioritize and link tasks across all the projects in your portfolio and track their progress.
Not only can it hold thousands of tasks, but data from Excel or MS Project can be fully integrated into our system, which is a more flexible, less expensive tool. Gantt charts can be created for a portfolio to serve a PMO or shared with teams. Now everyone has visibility over the full project portfolio in one global Gantt chart.
Better still, the online Gantt chart is a great collaborative platform. Files, images and documents, can be attached, as well as comments, so everyone is connected and communicating in real-time. Also, the online Gantt chart is interactive. Due dates, status updates and tasks can all be edited with a simple drag and drop.
Resource Management
This can also help with balancing resources across a portfolio of projects. Workloads can be tracked with timesheets and resource allocation features, which can be customized to include global holidays and working hours or reflect sick and personal days across all projects.
Real-Time Dashboard
Another important tool that’s part of the extensive ProjectManager.com toolbox is the real-time dashboard. Because our software is online, data from the progress of the portfolio is delivered instantly. Projects and portfolio metrics are being collected as they’re reported.
Information can be filtered to show broad strokes or get deep data dives on performance, workload, budgets, tasks and more. This is for one project or across a whole portfolio. These are displayed in colorful graphs and charts that make the data clear.
Reports
Reports can be generated with one click, whether that’s historical data or custom reports. Reports are automated and produce reports for status, timesheets, workload, issues and expenses, project variance and more.
Project Groups
ProjectManager.com also allows you to make groups of projects for a portfolio or portfolios within portfolios. When you create a group, they have their own unique real-time dashboard, reports and online Gantt charts.
This allows users to organize by teams or regions, schedule or portfolio manager. Analysis is now able to collect only those data points that are related to the group you need to assess.
Which Industries and Organizations Benefit from PPM?
Any industry that is working on multiple projects at the same time, which collects those works in a portfolio that requires management, benefits from the discipline of project portfolio management. Obviously, that’s a lot of industries and organizations.
Some of the industries and organizations that are reaping the rewards from using project portfolio management include IT, computer software, hospitals and healthcare, construction, automotive, nonprofit, financial services and banking, service and staffing recruiting, insurance, telecommunications, government administration and more.
Anyone can benefit by looking at their projects from a higher perspective, which is what using project portfolio management offers as its perspective. PPM leads to better decision-making, helps with risk management and creates a faster turnaround time for projects by streamlining processes and getting more on investments.
But it’s not only that projects move faster and cheaper. Project portfolio management also increases product delivery success. PPM streamlines data and that makes for a more efficient collaboration.
All these factors and more make it clear that project portfolio management is a methodology that can serve any organization with a portfolio of projects. And, with ProjectManager.com, you have the best PPM tool in the market to fully take advantage of all these business benefits.
Project Portfolio Management Key Terms
The following is a mini-glossary of project portfolio terms that have been used in this guide.
• Portfolio Management: Controlling a portfolio of projects to make sure they align with the overall strategic goals and objectives of an organization.
• Program Management: Managing a portfolio of projects with the same aim as portfolio management, only the projects in the portfolio are all similar or related.
• Project Management: Planning, executing, monitoring and reporting on one project, from start to finish, including controlling scope, costs and schedule.
• Project Management Office (PMO): Group within organization that’s tasked with maintaining standards for project management within that organization, often oversells portfolio and program management.
• Portfolio Manager: Individual who manages a project portfolio or portfolio of portfolios.
• Program Manager: Individual responsible for managing a program.
• Project Manager: Individual tasked with managing a single project and project team through all project phases: planning, ex*****on, monitoring and closure.
• Change Control Management: Process to identify and successfully respond to change in a project or portfolio.
• Portfolio Reporting: Creating charts, graphs and other reporting documentation to communicate progress and other portfolio metrics.
• Risk Management: Identifying and resolving risk before it happens and after.
• Resource Management: The process of allocating resources throughout the life cycle of the portfolio.
• Pipeline Management: Making decisions for estimating and selecting which projects to fund that align with an organization’s strategy.
• Financial Management: Understanding each project’s unique risk and using this knowledge to make decisions across the entire portfolio.

07/01/2020

The foundation of a project

Developing Effective Work Breakdown Structures
The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is an often misunderstood and underappreciated tool of project management. I would argue that it is a critical piece of the foundation of any project management methodology. Many misconceptions exist about what a WBS is, how it is used and why it is such an important part of the project management process.
A WBS is a deliverable-oriented, hierarchical grouping of the work to be executed by the project team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverables. It organizes and defines the total scope of the project. Each descending level represents an increasingly detailed definition of the project work (ie decomposition).
What should it NOT include?
• No reference to WHO is doing the work
• No reference to WHEN the work is being done
• No reference to HOW the work is being done
Rules for WBS attributes:
• Use NOUNS and ADJECTIVES to describe the work
• No dependencies, durations, resource assignments
The WBS addresses the WHAT of a project. The next step in determining the HOW is the job of the Network Diagram. And finally, the Project Schedule will be used to determine WHEN and WHO will do the work.
A good WBS will keep you on track for delivering the full 100% scope and prevent you from scope creep.
Once you establish the 1st Level of the WBS -- the real project management process begins at Level 2 and below.
How many levels do you need? Every project varies -- so it should be decomposed to a sufficient level where there is a clear understanding of what the deliverable is. Or as someone very wise once said to me "Stop when it starts to get "silly"...

19/12/2019

Seven Tips to Attack a Team Morale Problem

Morale problems do not happen overnight and they cannot be resolved overnight. These problems cannot be solved using regular project management processes. They need people management techniques. Typically, the complete causes and remedies are out of your control. However, as the project manager, there are some things that are within your control. Regardless of how much you can do, if the group sees you trying to help, they will feel better about their situation.

You need some feedback from the group to determine the cause of the morale problems. Once you understand the cause, there are usually multiple ways to help. Here are some examples.

Be a good listener. You will find that the simple act of listening will help morale. Being sympathetic and empathetic are key responses from the project manager. It shows that you at least recognize the problems and are concerned.

Say thank you. This is similar to being a good listener. If team members feel that the project manager recognizes their contributions, it will go a long way toward helping them feel better about their situation.

Assign more challenging work. This is a tough one because, in most cases, your work is your work and you cannot change the basic nature of that work. However, there are some things you can do to introduce new challenges. For instance, you can rotate people into new roles. If two people have done the same job for a long time, switch them. This gives each person an opportunity to learn new skills and new areas of expertise, while also giving you more backup coverage. You can also give people more responsibility. This might include letting new people manage the budget for the team, putting people in charge of subteams and assigning new people to manage the work of contractors.

Provide opportunities to learn new skills. You can try to rotate people into new areas of responsibilities, switch responsibilities to allow people to learn new skills, and increase the training opportunities.

Make sure people know what is expected of them. You should make sure people are clear on what their job responsibilities are, what their current work activities are, and how their contributions help the entire project to be successful.

Look for opportunities to have fun. Look for an opportunity for social events, pizza parties, birthday cakes, etc. This is not the silver bullet but it helps.

Solicit opinions and ideas from employees. The project manager should encourage team members to become involved and offer their insights on assignments. If team members feel like their opinions and ideas are valuable, they will feel better about their situation.

There are many reasons for bad morale. Based on the reasons, there are also many ways to try to improve morale. You need to recognize that the team will not perform as well if morale is bad. So, project managers should keep their eyes open for morale problems and look for ways to keep morale up. Regardless of the limitations of your role, there are always some things such as listening and saying thank you that are within your control. There may be many other responses in your control as well.

11/11/2019

Understanding the Objectives of a PPM (Project and Portfolio Management) Initiative
Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) is a discipline that includes processes, technologies, methods, and tools to align programs and projects with an organization’s strategy and to maximize the value and benefits related to projects and programs. This article reviews the objectives behind the implementation of a PPM initiative in an organization.
PPM is about two things – (1) Selecting the “right” projects that are aligned to the objectives and goals of the organization and (2) doing those projects “right” in the sense that the organization gets its ROI.
Selecting the “right” projects means the following:
• A proper project intake process that ensures inclusion of all types of projects that are required to be evaluated.
• Preparing a proper business case for each of the projects and initiatives before they can be evaluated for potential selection.
• Ensuring the existence of a capacity management framework where resource allocation is visible and managed. This helps toward resource allocation decisions and prioritization of projects.
• Project selection is one activity where the organization ensures that selected projects are aligned with an organization’s goals and objectives. However, to ensure successful alignment in the later phases of the project, a project is continuously scrutinized for its viability to ensure that it’s still useful for the organization. This ongoing evaluation can be done during stage gate reviews or through other similar controlled processes.
• Instituting the right governance processes to do the above.
Doing projects “right” means the following:
• Mature PM practices are in place that ensures projects are delivered within their constraints of quality, cost, and schedule.
• The PMO is able to handle the delivery all types of projects adequately including Mode 1 and Mode 2 types of projects.
Depending on the organization size, and the PPM and PM maturity of an organization, a PPM initiative can take months and even years to fully implement before an organization can start to reap the fruits of its efforts. Before embarking on a PPM it’s therefore quite vital that an organization evaluate its goals and objectives and chart out an appropriate implementation roadmap. Some of the objectives behind a PPM approach can be the following:
• Strategy Ex*****on – A good strategy without an effective ex*****on framework is of little use. As projects and programs are the vehicles that an organization uses to execute its strategy, a PPM process provides that overall framework for ex*****on that addresses alignment of projects and benefits realization. A PPM process provides an overall framework to measure the value of strategy.
• Project Alignment with Business Objectives – This can serve multiple purposes the primary of which is that with numerous requests for projects and initiatives in an organization, a PPM process ensures that projects are evaluated in the context of an organization’s overall goals and objectives before the right projects are selected for delivery. Achieving this requires streamlining of all the functions from project intake to project selection and funding. The PPM process therefore links strategic imperatives and priorities to the capital allocation process.
• Looking to increase the ROI of the Portfolio and Projects – For some organizations, a PPM initiative becomes important because of their need to effectively measure the ROI of their funded projects and initiatives. As projects are grouped into various portfolios (e.g. IT infrastructure projects, new development projects, maintenance projects, and so on), an organization wants to get more visibility into their performance as they fund those initiatives and monitor those initiatives.
• Demand and Resource management – After an organization evaluates and selects its projects, it should then prioritize the projects to ensure assignment of available resources. This is because it’s possible to have more projects that have passed the evaluation and selection criteria than available resources to work on them.
• End to end visibility of projects from intake to delivery – A PPM process provides a holistic view of all the projects within an organization. This ensures getting complete control of the process. This enables better decision making throughout the PPM process. Decisions taken include project selection, resource assignment, and so on.
These are some of the objectives of a PPM approach. An organization may have different motivations to implement such an initiative. It is therefore important to be clear on the objectives and the expected ROI before proceeding with the overall implementation of the initiative.

25/10/2019

Implement One of the Five PMO Types in Your Organization

Over the last 20 years, Project Management Offices (PMOs) have become a common sight in most medium to large organizations. In many organizations there are even multiple PMOs, each responsible for a functional department. In general, there are five types of PMOs.

Type I. Project Reporting.

This type of PMO has visibility to all the projects, and provides consolidated reporting of project status, budget, duration, issues, etc. They receive this information from project status reports. They may also keep certain metrics on how all of the projects are performing - for instance, the percentage of projects that are successful.

Type II. Project Management Infrastructure.

This type gets the PMO more formally involved with how projects are managed. The PMO establishes project management standards and guidelines. They create common templates and processes. They can also create project repositories for storing project and project management information.

Type III. Project Management Services.

In addition to creating infrastructure, these PMOs provide services to projects and project managers. This includes training and coaching for project managers and team members, sponsoring project managers for certification, performing project assessments and more.

Type IV. The Strategic PMO.

These PMOs provide reporting, infrastructure and services as described previously. They also have hands-on project managers that manage projects. However, the PMO only has a few very strong project managers that are assigned to the larger strategic projects.

Type 5. Center of Excellence.

This PMO is similar to the Type IV except that the PMO is home to all project managers. The PMO is responsible for managing all projects in the organization. There still may be people that perform the role of an ad-hoc project manager on smaller projects, but all of the formal project managers report into the PMO. The head of the PMO has responsibility for these project management resources, and assigns the project managers to projects as needed.

A PMO supports the project environment generally and project managers specifically. There is no right way or wrong way to set up a PMO. Each organization chooses the right model that makes sense to them, given the needs, focus and available resources.

At TenStep, we specialize in helping organizations set up and run a Value-Add PMO that meets your needs. Contact us to discuss how we can help your organization.

25/10/2019

Seven Ways to Show Leadership on Challenging Projects

Project managers need to be leaders. Leadership can be easy when things are going well; everyone will follow you then. However, when times are tough, leadership can be hard, but it is also more vital than ever. Here are some things to keep in mind to lead your team through the difficulty.

Keep your eyes on the big picture. When things get tough, everybody's temptation is to become acutely focused on the problems. A leader stays focused on the vision of completing the project objectives.

Keep positive. When circumstances get tough, even the most loyal team members can be tempted to start blaming each other. They begin to question each other and find many faults with one another. A leader must keep positive and act rationally and objectively.

Be the first to sacrifice. When there is pain to share, leaders should do just that - lead. If the team needs to work overtime, the project manager should work overtime as well. If the project team needs to come in on a weekend day, the project manager needs to be in as well.

Remain calm. Panic is a common human emotion and no one is immune to it. A leader, however, thinks the problems through and remains calm. Being calm will enable the leader to make the right decisions for the entire team. Panic only leads to disaster, while calm leads to success.

Motivate. In tough and challenging times, people are naturally down. They tend to be pessimistic. They can't see how it is all going to work out. The project manager should focus on motivating the team and painting a vision for project completion and success on some level.

Create small wins. One of the ways to motivate is to create small wins. When things are bad, the team starts to wonder how they can win. The project manager should look for ways to win – even small, interim victories. With each small win, the leader will build a positive attitude.

Keep a sense of humor. Hardly anything in life can't be a source of laughter. As the project manager you need to look for opportunities to instill fun, and laugh at yourself and the situations that present themselves.

A weak project manager is usually unable to get the team out of a large hole because he does not have the ability to lead the way out. When project managers show leadership, the team will follow – maybe not immediately, but eventually. The project manager is in the right position to lead the charge and get the entire project back on sound footing again.

16/08/2019

How much project structure is too much?
Right-Sizing your Project Methodology

Striking the Right Balance
One of the most frequently debated questions we have seen in today's PMO environment is that of "How much is enough process, governance and oversight"?
Business managers want to be nimble and responsive and sometimes have little appetite for what they perceive as the bureaucracy of the PMO office. Project team members and SMEs may likewise feel like they are being slowed down by complying with the methodology of the PMO.
To all sides of this argument we say "Yes! You can make reasonable compromises to reduce project overhead." It all comes down to Risk management and how much tolerance you have for it.
We had devised a Risk Analysis Spreadsheet that takes into account only 24 questions and score cards them into 3 distinct project buckets - Small / Medium / Large. This shirt-sizing approach then let us manages each bucket according to a tailored methodology and governance plan. The small projects used a light-weight methodology and proceeded through a limited number of stage gates and approvals. Conversely, the large high risk projects utilized the most rigorous methodology and governance tract.

Address

Lagos
2341

Telephone

234-802-274-8946

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Our Growth International posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Organization

Send a message to Our Growth International:

Shortcuts

Share

Category