Portfolio Reports – Portfolio Bubble Charts

This is the third post in a series on portfolio management reports. In the first post, we reviewed introductory portfolio management reports that convey the basic dimensions of the portfolio. In the second post we reviewed treemaps and advanced pareto charts that can help identify outlier projects worthy of more scrutiny. In this post we will look at the most common report for project portfolio management, portfolio bubble charts.

SUMMARY

The risk-value portfolio bubble chart represents a portfolio view of all projects and puts projects into one of four quadrants based on value and risk; this is important for identifying projects that drive overall greater value to the organization compared to other projects as well as highlight projects that should likely be screened out.

BENEFITS OF PORTFOLIO BUBBLE CHARTS

One of the key benefits to a portfolio bubble chart is to quickly show the balance of the current portfolio.  Using portfolio bubble charts with the portfolio governance team can focus conversations to help better manage the portfolio. When reviewing projects that are in the higher-value/ lower-risk quadrant, the portfolio governance team should ask the question, “how can we get more of these types of projects in the portfolio?” Likewise with the lower-value/higher-risk projects, the portfolio governance team should ask how to avoid those types of projects. These discussions will greatly enhance the management of the portfolio and enable the portfolio governance team to “manage the tail” and ensure that only the best projects are selected and executed.

DATA NEEDED

There are four primary data elements needed to build the risk-value bubble chart: value scores for each project, risk scores for each project, categorical data, and the project cost or financial benefits of the project (commonly used for bubble size). In an older post, I wrote in detail on how to build such a chart in Excel and the notion of normalizing the data. A prioritization scoring mechanism is typically required to build the best portfolio bubble charts.

Portfolio Bubble Chart Example
Portfolio Bubble Chart Example

Benefits of Social Collaboration

The Potential for Social Collaboration

Innovation is a hot topic in business right now with an ever growing need for companies to deliver better products and services.  A key ingredient for fostering innovation is enterprise collaboration. Until a few years ago, collaboration was often limited to smaller teams, but this could introduce a higher risk of duplicative efforts occurring simultaneously in larger companies. With the development of enterprise social networks (ESN’s) comes improved collaboration to include all employees across all organizations thus significantly increasing innovation and quality across the company.

The promise of enterprise social collaboration comes from the power of the network with the ability to tap into the collective brain trust of the organization. The potential payoff for corporations is enormous as indicated by a 2012 McKinsey report identifying a potential for over $1 trillion in new business value to be created annually through the use of enterprise social networks (e.g. improved product development, work efficiencies, etc.)

Social Collaboration for Portfolio Management (PPM)

The 4 C’s of Social Project and Portfolio Management

In the context of project and portfolio management, social tools impact employee connection, communication, collaboration, and community (also known as the 4 C’s).

  1. Connection

The power of the network begins with having the right connections in the organization. Social tools enable employees to connect with a broader group of colleagues than would otherwise occur in day to day work. User profiles provide additional detail around work history, education, and other personal information that foster stronger connections on a professional and personal level. Project managers with a larger number of connections have a greater pool of resources to choose from when building out their project team as well as quickly identify subject matter experts to assist in critical phases of work.

A good project portfolio social platform can also alert users of other people who have managed similar risks and issues, or have worked on similar product lines or IT systems. By making these types of connections, project managers can reach out to the right people at the right time for help and leverage proven solutions rather than losing time developing a duplicate solution that already existed.

  1. Communication

Email is still the predominant form of business communication (per Email Statistics Report, Radicati) with over 100 billion business emails sent each day. Tremendous amounts of business knowledge is trapped in the inboxes of employees and is not searchable by other knowledge workers who would benefit from accessing those key conversations. Alternatively, conversations, discussions, and answers to questions within social platforms become searchable content that is continually being enriched by the users of the social platform. Project teams can proactively search for new information to discover other teams that have encountered similar challenges, learn how they solved problems, and re-use successful solutions. This fosters further communication and improves project delivery and quality.

  1. Collaboration

One of the promises of enterprise social networks is the ability for a broader group of people to work collaboratively within and across project teams. At the portfolio level, the quality of new project proposals increases substantially when employees can collaborate (“crowdsource”) on new ideas; great ideas can generate a lot of traction and be improved even before reaching a governance committee. At the project level, team members have greater visibility of work in progress and can comment on deliverables and other project work. These comments are made visible to other team members who can further build upon those comments to improve the overall quality of the work.

  1. Community

In addition to improving communication and collaboration at the project level, social communities can spring up around areas of common interest where participants can ask questions, share ideas and learn from one another. This further strengthens connections, communication, and collaboration. One example is a project management community of practice that can promote project management best practices across an enterprise. This not only uplifts the quality of project management within the company but creates a way for senior project managers to share valuable experience with younger project managers, who in turn, have more opportunities to develop and grow in their profession.

Challenges to Social Collaboration

The top two challenges to successfully establishing social collaboration are developing a collaborative culture and sufficient leadership engagement with social tools. In actuality, senior leadership is responsible for both.

Large scale social collaboration cannot and will not occur without an organizational culture of collaboration. Unless senior leadership fosters a culture of collaboration, most employees will be too focused on their day to day work to devote any attention to collaboration. Without this culture, there won’t be any true incentive to collaborate and any encouragement to use social collaboration tools will feel like a tax on people’s time to switch back and forth between traditional email and new social tools.

Additionally, senior leadership cannot merely sponsor a social collaboration initiative; rather, they need to lead by example to use the tools, which will have a powerful effect on the organization. When senior leadership demonstrates greater transparency and communication through the use of social tools, the rest of the organization will follow suit.

My Perspective

Changing an organization’s culture and the behavior of senior leadership are both very difficult. Only a concerted effort of organizational change management can redirect a company toward collaboration. Such change must be of high enough priority that it affects the daily behavior of senior leadership to embrace enterprise social networks. Based on Dr. John Kotter’s change model, senior leaders need to establish a sense of urgency around social collaboration. There must be a powerful guiding coalition to create a shared vision and communicate it across the organization. Then, both leaders and employees must act on the vision and rally around demonstrative, short-term wins.

The Bottom Line

Enterprise social networks have tremendous potential to improve project and portfolio management effectiveness—but only when the company possesses a culture of collaboration. Senior leadership is uniquely responsible for ensuring that such a culture exists before implementing social collaboration tools and must lead by example to improve adoption. With strong leadership and a collaborative culture, your organization can reap the many benefits of social collaboration in the context of project and portfolio management. This will result in a smarter and healthier company.

Strengthen Talent Management With PPM

Talent Management3Is It Just About Talent Acquisition?

When people refer to the “war for talent” many discussions center on talent acquisition and try to answer the question “how do we hire the best people?” Although talent acquisition is important, talent development and retention are also very important (you want to keep those great people you hired, correct?). Hiring good people is not the most challenging part; because the war for talent is real, retaining talented people is difficult. This is where project portfolio management (or “PPM” for short) strengthens the traditional HR approach to talent management.

In a recent LinkedIn discussion, Emily Smith asked a broad question on how PPM software can impact unemployment rates. My response was that portfolio management as a discipline and PPM software with the right data can significantly improve talent retention and development.  Before we continue down this path, let me quickly summarize project portfolio management. PPM is firstly about doing the right work to accomplish strategic goals, and it is also about focusing resource attention on high priority projects while balancing overall resource capacity. In larger organizations you can imagine how difficult it is just to monitor all of the project work going on and ensure that each project is on track to completion. However, with a little extra focus (and the right software), organizations should also monitor the skills and abilities of the people doing the work and assign people to projects that align with their interests and help them grow professionally. These last points are often after thoughts in project management because of the sheer focus on simply getting work done.

The Value of PPM to Talent Management

Consider for a moment the value to performance management of having an employee report show all of the projects they have been involved with over the last several years with the strategic importance to the organization, the complements given by their project teammates, the skills they have improved and developed, the degree of alignment to professional areas of growth, and even the people mentored during those projects. That would be powerful, and if used correctly, would send a strong message to employees that this company enables them to grow professionally and make a difference through their work. Wow.

Sadly, I don’t know if this system exists. Current HR management systems are not designed as portfolio management systems that would track this level of project detail.  Even having a system that a project manager could use to do a search across the company for people who have particular skills and experience for a new challenging project would be a great enhancement over what we have today—assigning spare bodies just to keep up with the flood of work going on.

Project portfolio management complements and enhances talent management. Do you agree? Tell me how well your talent management processes are going, especially if there is any linkage to project and portfolio management.

 

 

Talent management graphic courtesy of Lean Home Care

Increase the Value of PPM Systems

Today’s Environment

Project portfolio management (PPM) helps organizations make decisions that move the needle toward achieving their strategic objectives. In order to make those decisions, senior leadership needs the right information at the right time. This is where PPM systems come in, providing the quality data helping to inform sound decision making. Unfortunately, many companies assume that merely implementing a PPM system will improve their ability to execute strategy. There’s more to it.

Point B’s Perspective

In order for PPM systems to add value, organizations need to consider five important factors: business drivers, reporting, data, processes and people.

How to increase value from PPM Systems

Read the entire article here

 

Greater Value From Portfolio Management Systems

Portfolio management systems have a very real place in making PPM processes successful. These systems have the potential to drive value in a number of ways, some of which are highlighted below:

1) Enterprise repository (“single source of truth”)—having a single system that contains up-to-date and accurate project and portfolio data is valuable. Gone are the days of maintaining multiple versions of static Excel files that contain the current “authorized” list of projects. This value is magnified the easier it is to access the system and the greater the number of users who access the system.

2) Process enabler—on top of merely storing project and portfolio data, portfolio management systems can better enable portfolio processes through workflow automation. This is particularly useful for stage-gate project reviews that have a number of review steps and need approval by multiple parties.  Portfolio management system can also better enable project management and capacity management processes. Thus the tool reduces the amount of work needed to carry out these processes, reducing lead time and costs.

3) Portfolio tools—portfolio management systems commonly come with tools that make portfolio management easier overall. One clear example is portfolio optimization, which is difficult (if not impossible) with spreadsheets and other databases. Portfolio management systems can make this otherwise difficult job easier by providing the tools needed to effectively get the job done.

4) Reporting and analytics—one of the greatest benefits of utilizing portfolio management systems is to get accurate and up-to-date reports on the status and health of projects, programs, and portfolios. Buying a portfolio management system and not utilizing the reporting capabilities or analytics is like buying a car with only two gears—you’ll make progress but not as quickly as you will by providing decision makers with insightful information and up-to-date reports.

The critical question then is, “how much value are you getting out of your portfolio management system?” If the cost of the system plus the cost of entering data plus the cost of maintaining the system exceeds the value of the information coming out of it, senior leadership either needs to reconsider its ways or change its portfolio management system.

As we discussed in an earlier post, leadership plays a huge part in making sure the right data gets fed into the system at the right time. Yet, leadership plays just as big of a role in making sure the organization gets value from its portfolio management system. Let’s quickly review the four areas where companies can derive value from portfolio management systems and the potential risks.

1) Enterprise repository—if employees and managers do not access the system often, or if there are competing places to get similar project and portfolio data, the system loses value.

2) Process enabler—if project and portfolio processes are not regularly followed, then the effort to load the system with data to enable those processes is a waste of time.

3) Portfolio tools—if the organization does not leverage the tools available in its portfolio management system, then it paid extra money for tools it doesn’t use.

4) Reporting and analytics—if senior management does not pull reports and use the data, then all the effort to ensure that quality data is going into the system is a waste of time. Even worse, if management does not communicate that it uses the data and demonstrate how it uses the data, the organization easily becomes skeptical of the value of portfolio management.

What value do you currently get from your portfolio management systems? Have you encountered any of the problems mentioned above?