How do you give senior management a “helicopter view” of all the change that is going on in an organisation, so that they can make informed decisions on how to spend their change budget? Here’s how I tackled it…

What I found…

I came to a new Portfolio Management Office (PfMO) in which status was being reported in various formats. Reports were consolidated but this was based on low-value-add copying and pasting of information into lengthy reports. Pretty much every project proposal was being approved, with no view of the organisation’s capacity to implement them. This resulted in projects getting in each other’s way, competing for resources and overloading Subject Matter Experts (SMEs^*).

The Goal

The COO tasked me with developing an integrated view of the portfolio to enable sensible prioritisation decisions to be made, and with developing a resource view looking up to one year ahead.

There was neither the appetite nor the budget to invest in a software tool, so the solution needed to be home-grown.

What I did

Standardise and integrate

I ensured that project data was being collected in a standardised way to enable automated collation into a portfolio view by developing an integrated “Project Status Workbook”. This is effectively a multi-page spreadsheet combining RAG Status reports, Risk, Issue, Dependency and Change Registers into a single recording and reporting document for each project, with a stakeholder dashboard showing key pieces of information in a simple graphical format.

Then I developed a consolidating spreadsheet, using VBA macros to collate project data in various categories.

Analyse and interpret

I analysed the data to provide management information to the Portfolio Board (e.g. % of Projects Red/Amber/Green; % of projects Delivered on Time/to Budget; Portfolio focus on Run/Grow the Business, etc.).

I charted trends to provide insight into project management effectiveness.

I introduced simple Demand Management, using a simple spreadsheet to compare resource demand (from active and proposed projects, on a FTEs per month basis) with planned supply in various categories (PMs, BAs, Developers, BAU SMEs, etc.) to enable the Portfolio Board (C-Level executives) to assess the viability of the planned project portfolio within the prevailing (tight!) resource constraints.

Whenever a new project request was received, I added in the forecast resource demand to show the effect on the “deliverability” of the portfolio as a whole.

I used a derivative of this approach when carrying out the annual financial planning exercise. This started with the annual portfolio budget figure, and showed how the projects (prioritised by the portfolio board using a weighted scoring approach covering factors such as complexity, benefits, risk, strategic alignment, etc.) chip away at the portfolio budget until it runs out at “The Cut”, beyond which lower priority projects would need to be put on hold, delayed, rejected or stopped.

I overlaid the resource view onto the financial view to see how the scheduling of the chosen projects affected the resource demand.

…and the result?

The Project Portfolio Board received a concise, consistent and informative view of Portfolio Status, and were able to consider project proposals against the context of the organisation’s capacity to implement them. Projects were better prioritised and scheduled so that difficulties related to resource bottlenecks were reduced.

So that’s my approach to generating portfolio insights, learned through the experience of getting it wrong and coming up with a better way. It this approach useful to you? Let me know in the comments.

If you would like to have the benefits of an approach like this but prefer not to have to worry about this sort of techy stuff, why not talk to us about taking care of it all for you?

^*I use the term SMEs to mean people from the operational business who are subject matter experts in the processes or business areas that are to be changed. They do not necessarily contribute to the change itself or form part of the core project team, but their contribution is invaluable in shaping the changes that are made and how they are to be made.