Manage Your Project Portfolio by Johanna Rothman

Author:Johanna Rothman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Pragmatic Bookshelf
Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf

You might wonder if allowing someone who believes in zero-sum games to manage the project portfolio—even if it’s just for one quarter. In this case, the VP’s gamble worked. It depends on how entrenched the idea of zero-sum games is in your organization.

Someone Believes in Information Hiding

Portfolio management can succeed when project teams are transparent with their progress and with what they have left on their backlog. If teams, including product owners, attempt to hide their velocity or demos or their backlog, the people who need to collaborate don’t have enough information to make good decisions.

We Need All the Information to Make Good Portfolio Decisions

by Vince, PMO Director

Vince We’ve been trying to manage the project portfolio for years. We’d run into trouble with project teams not telling us the whole story—mostly because they didn’t know but partly because the project managers didn’t provide us with all the information.

We had a project manager who refused to give us status, except for “The project is on track.” I finally asked, “How do you know?” The project manager answered, “I have faith in my team.”

Since we’d been working in more of a serial life cycle, that was just about all the answer the project manager could give. So, we instituted a few things: a quarterly review of each project and a demand that each project show us progress in the form of a demo. In addition, we asked to see what was left to do.

Those few requests first had the project managers up in arms, especially those who were planning to leave all the integration and testing until the end. We explained we didn’t care how they organized the project, as long as they could show us a demo so we could see what was complete and what they had remaining to do.

A number of the project teams struggled, but once they decided to show us their progress and what they had remaining, the project managers reported an interesting side effect: the teams seemed to be finishing work faster.

Now, because the teams show us completed work, they are willing to move on to other projects when we say, “OK, that’s enough for that project. Please release it.” We have very few projects that take as long as we anticipate they will. Yeah, it took us about a year to get here. But everyone can see what everyone else has done and what’s left. The project teams can see as well as we can when a project is done enough and when it’s time to move on.

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