PMO and project delivery prioritisation schemes give assurance to management that the project selections made give maximum value to the organisation for the resource allocated. Most organisations have more opportunities available and problems to solve than they are able to resource or afford.
A project portfolio often represents the largest investment an organisation makes on a yearly basis. Failure to invest wisely, either because money is spent on the wrong things or the investment fails to deliver the intended return is a major source of concern to Boards. Prioritising – investing in the most optimum way – is a critical discipline for an organisation.
Why is it worthwhile?
Prioritisation approaches and ways to manage the competition for resource that are based on criteria that compares costs (adjusted for risk) against benefits (value – also adjusted for risk) have been proven to provide maximum return with optimum resource utilisation. A common difficulty faced by project portfolio selection committees is coping with the combinatorial effect. i.e. As numbers of candidate projects rises the number of possible combinations rises very steeply. With just 12 projects there are 4096 while with 25 the number is in the billions. It is therefore unsurprising that without good prioritisation schemes and tools mistakes are made when considering best combinations of projects in a portfolio.
What will you experience
The Board can determine what is intentional and what accidental. A transparent and maintainable set of criteria is put in place to control entry on to the portfolio list and inclusion into the portfolio itself.
With this, senior management is assured and confident that the best options have been selected and that throughput has been maximised against priority.
How you might start
The known stakeholder environment will be described and populated by named individuals. The information required for analysing the needs (WIIFM) is identified and individuals are assigned to collect the necessary data. Additionally, a series of structured discussions will take place with known individuals to confirm details necessary for planning their optimal engagement.
Our approach to business case studies would typically involve the use of the following tools and models:
