How-To

Many companies struggle with justifying the need to maintain a project management office after it is established. But the onus is on the PMO itself. Here are five key performance indicators that PMOs should use to measure effectiveness and ensure alignment with the needs of the organization.

How many projects is your organization going to deliver next year? “As many as we can” is not a helpful or meaningful answer. In lieu of an established portfolio planning process, there are some techniques that can help a company calculate the number of projects and programs it can realistically handle in the coming year.

Would you describe the culture at your organization as casual, chaotic or compliant. How about committed? High-performance companies like Google and Southwest Airlines leverage workforce commitment to drive goal alignment and engagement. The key is fostering an environment of positive accountability.

Project portfolio planning efforts often stumble on seven common pitfalls, including outdated evaluation criteria and prioritization based on emotion. To avoid these missteps and produce better business outcomes, here is a best-practice framework that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of your organization.

Does your organization have the right processes in place to support the next great idea? Once an evaluation and selection framework is in place, aligning an “idea pipeline” with the project portfolio is crucial. Otherwise, your next star project might not even get a chance to soar doomed or less-promising initiatives drain resources.

Every organization has squeaky wheels — individuals who are certain that their immediate needs outweigh everyone else’s. They often disrupt project portfolio execution, distracting project teams and making it difficult to know who is working on what. A queue to collect, prioritize and manage inbound requests is the first step in dealing with this pervasive problem.

Shortsightedness can shortchange your organization on the benefits of project portfolio management. A top PPM analyst shares best practices on how to embrace the big picture and how evolving PPM tools can help.

How quickly does your organization respond to new critical needs? Does it cancel projects or move resources from others, causing delays? Optimizing the portfolio based on when projects end as opposed to when they start allows for a more agile response to change.

ROI analysis can be an enormously valuable tool for directing project investments, but it requires an open mind, reasonable assumptions and accurate numbers. Even then, the numbers that tell the whole story usually don’t appear on silver platters and rarely lend themselves to cookie-cutter templates. Here are five pragmatic rules for constructing useful, believable ROI analyses.

How do you measure the success of projects in your portfolio? Cost and schedule, of course — but other criteria should be included to gain a more holistic perspective. And the concept of tolerances should be understood and applied to any evaluation of success (or failure).