When all you have is a (PPM) hammer…

A distressing concept I encounter occasionally at clients is the desire to use their Project Portfolio Management (PPM) solution as their main information system.  I work for a PPM solution provider and am always flattered by this pre-Copernican theory, however it goes against my mantra of using the right tool for the right job.

Here are a few examples of this tool abuse:

a) A procurement management system.  Most PPM tools can track financial inflows and outflows on projects but the reporting and workflow requirements that most procurement processes mandate are rarely to be found in these tools.  I have no issue if you wish to use your PPM tool as a project-centric reporting front-end to your procurement or general ledger system, but don’t use it as your official financial system of record!

b) A service desk system.  Most service desk solutions won’t make good PPM solutions (e.g. the lack of ability to evaluate benefits or track risks or the limitation in managing detailed schedules or financials) and similarly the lack of automated escalation workflow or case & solution record flexibility that is required by most service desk processes cannot be satisfied by a PPM tool.  Does this mean that the two should never meet?  Of course not!  As I wrote in an earlier article, a good service desk process & tool will be the “front door” for work intake and one of the queues from the service desk tool could lead to your PPM tool.

c) An enterprise document management system (EDMS) or knowledge base.  Most PPM tools  provide you with the ability to store documents or to capture project knowledge, but few (if any) provide the flexibility of a true EDMS (e.g. approval workflow, document revision control, archival capabilities) or true knowledge base (e.g. ranking/scoring of items, rich meta-tags to search for items).  Certainly a PPM tool is better than nothing, but should not be the long term repository for such content.

d) A skills database.  Although a number of PPM tools can track and report skills or competencies for resources within their resource pools (usually for the purpose of searching for appropriate resources to fit a project need), the lack of career ladder or professional development guides will limit overall value.

Organizations should seek to maximize the return on all of their technology investments, but even though PPM solutions can seem like Swiss Army knives, don’t bring a knife to a gun fight!

To score or not to score projects?

On paper the practice of scoring projects as a means of objective evaluation or prioritization is very compelling.

One envisions a complex system that distills the wisdom of governance committees into a set of consistent business rules such that project requests input in one end generate a legally defensible number at the other end for selection and ranking purposes.

Alas, this (like so many other PPM or PM best practices) remains as elusive as the Loch Ness Monster.

You can certainly create a scoring model that is based on multiple dimensions to achieve a balanced evaluation of each project – unfortunately, you can’t force a governance body to accept the results of this scoring.  Beyond that, very few such dimensions are likely to be truly objective – I challenge you to make objectify strategic alignment, risk profile or even “business value” (especially for non-revenue generating projects).  Finally, what guarantee do you have that there will be consistent scoring across each project  request, especially if multiple analysts are involved in the process.

Does this mean that you should abandon any attempt to develop a scoring model for projects – of course not!  If nothing else, a good scoring model can provide a foundation for principled negotiation around project priorities.  If someone insists on arguing with you that their (low scoring) project is infinitely more critical than your (calculated) number one project, you can defuse this debate by asking them to review your scoring model and help you understand what might be missing.

Here are a few tips to improve the quality of scoring models:

1. Once you have a first draft ready, score your current slate of active projects against it and confirm if the relative rankings of each project makes sense.  If not, use that feedback to fine tune the scoring model.

2. While it is useful to score risk and value/reward independently to support graphical evaluation of your portfolio’s balance, consider a single score approach that incorporates risk such that the higher the risk profile of a given project, the lower its score.  Given the lip service given to risk management in many organizations, this ensures that risk scores are “baked in” and not cast aside.

3. Allow negative and positive scores for each criterion – for example, many scoring models incorporate financial metrics as a key component.  If you only permit a scoring range from 0 to N, how can you account for projects that reduce your organization’s profitability – by allowing negative values you can effectively penalize projects that negatively impact a given criterion.

4. Remember that your work of art is just a model – it cannot replace good people and consistent practices.  Effort expended in developing and using a scoring model needs to be weighed against the benefits gained through its use.  Don’t develop a convoluted approach that forces analysts to have a PhD to know how to use it – always remember “garbage in, garbage out”.

I’ll conclude by quoting the Architect from The Matrix Reloaded: “The first matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equaled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is as apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being.”

Enterprise vs departmental PPM deployments

Project Portfolio Management is a strategic approach to optimizing the return on an organization’s project investments.

Given this strategic focus, one could naturally assume that these initiatives are driven from a top-down perspective across an enterprise – after all, strategic planning happens  at the executive level and initiatives or programs linked to strategic objectives span the whole organization.

This is true, but trying to introduce consistent PPM practices across a reasonable sized company is a lot like herding cats.  There are too many chiefs and too much politicking to work through to be able to demonstrate tangible results.

As with any other organization change initiative, while the greatest benefit might be achieved by improving the content and balance at the enterprise level, a safer approach is to take baby steps by focusing on a sub-portfolio – often this is done by introducing PPM practices at the departmental level (e.g. IT, facilities).

This complies with good change management practices – demonstrate success at the micro-level before tackling the enterprise.  It also limits sunk cost into practices to the minimum required to get them up and running within that one department.  Finally, it does not force executives to change their behavior across the board – only for those projects that make up that one portfolio.

All is not well however – there are two fundamental issues with departmental PPM initiatives:

1. Strategic or transformational initiatives often span multiple jurisdictions – departmental PPM works well for those projects that are isolated to the resources (financial & human) from within a single department, but once you get into resource arbitration and prioritization discussions from without, things get murkier.  Cross-project dependencies across portfolios can also muddy the waters.

2. PPM is about behavior change at all levels of an organization – especially at the executive level.  It is difficult to take a grass-roots approach to PPM and merely delays the inevitable struggles, coaching and evolution that the senior management team will have to go through.

The answer to these two issues is good communication & training – even if you focus on a single department, ensure that the executive team is aware that this is the first phase in an enterprise roll out of the practices and ensure that their PPM coaching & training becomes part of the first phase.