What is Portfolio Management?

You’ve mastered project management and program management.  The next thing to get to grips with is portfolio management.  “A Portfolio gets its name from a case used for carrying documents such as maps, photographs, or drawings,” write Pat Durbin and Terry Doerscher in their book Taming Change with Portfolio Management.  “In a business management context, a portfolio allows you to group a set of common subjects, like products, projects, or resources, so they can be collectively managed.”

Being able to group projects and programs together means you can then make decisions about them – decisions that can affect budgets or staffing levels for the work required, as well as which areas to focus effort on to meet the company’s strategic objectives.

Portfolio management is the way in which you manage and make decisions about groups of projects and programs.  It’s a strategic role – but if you don’t think your project sponsors have got their heads around it, ask the PMO to get them a copy of An Executive Guide to Portfolio Management, which has just been released by the OGC. Read more »

The MOST Model

A while back, I looked at the SIO model. This month, I have another acronym to share: MOST.  MOST is a bit like SIO, in that it is a way of creating granular levels within an organisation so that you focus on the right type of information for the right type of task.  You can use it within a project to ensure that everything is aligned, and it is also useful at Portfolio or corporate level.

MOST stands for:

• Mission
• Objectives
• Strategies
• Tactics.

As you can imagine, this can apply to pretty much anything and it lends itself very well to setting project structure.
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The SIO Model

Have you heard of the SIO model?  It’s a way to ensure that you are always operating at the right level for your project, and in fact it is an approach that sits within wider business management theory, not just project management.

SIO stands for:

• Strategise
• Implement
• Operate

These are the three levels of activity that all organisations should do.  Project and programme managers can operate at all of these, and as someone leading a project, it is likely that you will get involved with tasks at each of these levels throughout the lifecycle of the project.  Together, the three levels ensure the translation of strategic thinking into sustainable action.
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Scoping the Project for Better Requirements

Good scope before requirements

The earlier you define scope, the more efficient your requirement definition process will be. Work done before scope definition is usually wasted effort. An early scope definition keeps requirements writers from diverging, reduces requirement inconsistencies, and keeps the big picture in view. It also shortens the time required for requirement writing and rewriting and reduces debates.

If you do not give everyone writing or reviewing requirements your scope definition, they are likely to create their own. Imagine listening to a movie without watching it – as I have done many times on trips in the SUV listening to a movie several times but never seeing it as it’s playing in the DVD player behind my head. I have a vision – my own vision – of what’s going on and what the characters look like and what the set looks like, but if no one describes it to me in detail or I don’t see it for myself then that’s all it is … my own vision. And it likely differs greatly from the actual film itself. Read more »

Communicating Project Scope

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The Scope Document

Once the project scope is defined, it must be documented to ensure that everyone assigned to the project will address the right tasks and work toward the same project goals. A formal scope document is essential to keeping a project on track. The order that these scope items are covered and the amount of space devoted to each in this document will depend on the type and size of the project and the number of scope items that need to be covered. On small projects, needs, goals, objectives, and missions will often be the same thing – easily described in a few statements. Distinguishing between these things is not that important, but establishing a flow from less measurable statements of need to more measurable ones truly is important. Read more »