Portfolio and Programme Management Demystified

Managing Multiple Projects Successfully

Geoff Reiss, Geoff Reiss, Paul Rayner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781138168565
• eBook ISBN: 9781135241513
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

You're now responsible for a programme, or you've got a portfolio to manage? Where do you start? Right here!

Projects are not simply the bread and butter of an organisation. Form them into programmes or portfolios and they can be prioritised and integrated to deliver change to your organization in line with your strategic vision. You will be able to control costs and risks and bring together a complex series of themes effectively.

This overhauled second edition now combines portfolio management as a parallel theme with programme management, and it is brought in line with the current thinking of the Association for Project Management and the Project Management Institute. It is written for managers in both the public and private sectors. This new edition includes half a dozen short case studies (from Belgium's Fortis Bank, a software company, local government, and central government), along with more on cross-functional management.

Together with Project Management Demystified, also from Routledge (third edition, 2007), it provides the tools to manage your projects, your programmes and your portfolio to a very high level.

Let's get these words straight

1.1 Introduction

Welcome to Portfolio and Programme Management Demystified.

This book is designed and written to accompany Project Management Demystified, a book that has been surprisingly successful and long lived. Project Management Demystified tries to do ‘what is says on the tin’; it demystifies project management.

If you have a project to manage or are considering a career in project management, you might find Project Management Demystified a useful and entertaining way of understanding both how to run successful projects and how to have a successful career in project management. The book will also show you how a successful career is only distantly connected to successful projects.

There have been hugely successful projects where the project manager got the old heave-ho, and complete failures ending in doubles all round and promotions for the team. These are the extremes, but it is true to say that having a successful career in project management is not simply a matter of running successful projects. To start with, what does everyone mean by success?

Even if you are really great at running projects and have a successful career, at some point you will become involved in the issues that surround most projects. You may start to hear (or ask) questions like:

• Why are we doing this project?

• What is it supposed to achieve?

• What are benefits?

• How do I manage one project amongst all the others going on at the moment?

• How do I manage one project when it depends on other projects being progressed alongside mine?

• Who has stolen my project team members this time?

• Why did I get out of bed this morning?¹

These and many other questions arise when your career takes you across the sea of project management to the shores of programmes and portfolios.

I have two observations for you if you find yourself at your local pub or party discussing portfolios, projects and programmes with your fellow drinkers.

1 If you have studied this book you will have the advantage of knowing that different people use the same terms in very different ways to mean very different things.

2 You really should get out more and find better topics for evening conversation.

The English-speaking nations cannot even agree on how to spell program(me). We will use programme throughout this book, but you should remember that people more aligned with the USA will use the term program.

This book starts off, in Chapter 1, by explaining the differences between programmes, portfolios and projects. Recognising the fact that these terms are bandied about loosely and mean different things to different people in different industries, this book does try to help clear the air.

Whilst this book will use one very logical meaning of these terms, we will outline the various meanings to be found in the many corners of industry and the public sector throughout the world.

The largest chunk of this book is divided into two parts. In Chapter 2 we discuss Doing the right projects and in Chapter 3, Doing projects right.

In Chapter 2 you will find that for many people either portfolio management and/or programme management is about carefully selecting, testing, defining and authorising the optimal group of projects that will most help an organisation achieve its business goals. Such organisations seek to do the right projects.

In Chapter 2 you can discover the wonderful world of benefits, another term much abused by those who find the idea of a project delivering some kind of benefit too embarrassing for words.

Chapter 2 looks at the way benefits management can help to ensure that programmes and projects actually deliver some improvement to the organisation expecting change. It will put forward the view that benefits can be the measures of success of a change programme and that keeping a focus on benefits is central to successful programme management.

It does seem that many projects start their early lives as a ‘pet project’ or bright idea in someone's mind. This might be the greatest thing since baked wheat divided into flat sheets,² it might be an utter waste of time, or anywhere in between those extremes. Sadly the chances of the project being given the green light and becoming a fully fledged, mature project will depend less on its value to the organisation and more on the adroitness, power and political skills of its backers. We generally hail the messenger, not the message.

For this reason project managers are to be found in most organisations lugging around their ideas for new projects, seeking support, looking for a sponsor whilst trying to ‘justify’ them in terms of their value to the organisation.

The way in which many projects are conceived is often both misguided and economically dangerous.

Chapter 2 outlines best practice for portfolio management: the process for selecting and prioritising change programmes and projects. It suggests that the organisation first set its overall strategy and then define programmes that will best help it achieve that strategy. In other words the directors and other strategists of the organisation create an image or paint a picture of where they see the organisation in a few years’ time. They then consider different ways to deliver that future and select the programmes that will best help. These programmes are mandated to the programme management team, who then subdivide the programmes into projects, safe in the knowledge that the projects do not overlap too much, cover the needs and seem best aligned with the overall strategy. Only then do these projects get the go-ahead.

This top-down approach has been adopted by a wide range of organisations. No longer do projects emerge from the bottom up; in fact in some cases no projects are permitted unless they are the direct results of the top-down, strategic approach.

Regardless of the mechanisms for choosing projects, many people think that programme management means managing a whole plethora of overlapping projects that (a) rain down on them from a mysterious source way above their management level and (b) complete for precious resources and time.

Such people will value Chapter 3.

However well or badly your organisation's portfolio of projects has been selected, you want to make sure that you at least do the projects right – even if they are not the right projects and even if you don't really know if they are the right projects for your organisation. You might be a contractor carrying out a range of projects for a range of clients; if so, the right project is the one that makes the biggest profit.

There is a raft of problems that arise when managing a whole group of projects within a single organisation, many of which are not recognised by the traditional approach to projects. In Chapter 3 you can read about ways of providing your senior management with an overview of a whole range of projects, how some organisations share resources across their projects and some tricks that help to centralise risk, assurance and other techniques.

Governance is a term you will hear a great deal about in any organisation grappling with multiple projects – for one simple reason. If you run one project in your spare time, at home or in your local community, you can use any systems and processes you like to manage that project. If, on the other hand, you run one project amongst many in an organisation where many project managers are running many projects, some standardisation will be very useful. Governance sets some rules and ways of working that support consistency and good practice across all of those projects. This, at last will, give you a chance of taking over a project when a project manager falls under a bus. Chapter 4 therefore deals with the topic of governance.

This book is designed to help you, dear reader, as much as your projects and programmes. You should know about the number of recognised authorities that have published guides and methods on programmes, portfolios and projects. The US-based Project Management Institute (PMI), the UK's Association for Project Management (APM) and the UK's Cabinet Office have all published guides and standards in these topics. Chapter 5 looks at these publications and the range of qualifications that are associated with them. Therefore Chapter 5 deals with methods. These are designed to bring a degree of consistency to the management of a group of projects and have become very popular across the Western world.

Many organisations set up a central operation designed to support, report and police the whole range of programmes, portfolios and projects. These operations have grand titles like Enterprise Programme Office or Project Support Office. Chapter 6 looks at the range of names, titles and functions of these groups.

The many people involved in programmes, portfolios and projects are almost inevitably human beings with personalities, hopes, ambitions, needs and motivations of their own. The relationships between all people in teams are complex, but this is especially so in programme management, where teams, often formed rapidly from both friends and strangers, are expected to get on with a job quickly and smoothly. Chapter 7 suggests some ways of thinking about people, teams and leadership.

Finally, in case you are still determined to know more, the further reading list will lead you to websites, the library and other sources of information on these topics.

1.2 What are portfolio management, programme management and project management?

‘Up close, a mosaic is just another piece of broken glass.’

It is extremely hard to differentiate between projects and programmes. To begin with, it is hard to even find a satisfactory definition of a project. A project is a human concept and the word ‘project’ can mean any number of things to any number of people. One simple definition is ‘a group of people getting together to do something’.

Can you think of a project that does not contain smaller projects and which is itself not part of a larger project? Well done if you can. You probably stretched the meaning of the word ‘project’ to do that. This indicates that we humans draw a fence round a group of tasks and decide to call that a project.

Projects and programmes are on a scale, parts of a spectrum. Some initiatives are clearly projects and some are clearly programmes, but a great number could be regarded as either a project or a programme.

Not only are these definitions hard to find, they do not really help us very much. However, please don't get too despondent, we can do a much better job of defining and differentiating between programme management, project management and portfolio management. That is what we will do next.

Project management, programme management and portfolio management are terms that mean many things to many people. We hope that this book will make a small contribution to the crystallisation of the many terms and the many uses for the terms that exist. At least you, dear reader, will gain an insight into this fast-developing world of projects, programmes and portfolios.

Almost everyone would agree that programme management is about managing a number of projects. In practice this includes most companies that are running a number of projects at the same time, and this therefore involves most decent-sized organisations.

Most would agree that managing a programme means being able to stand back from the detailed problems and get an overview of the objectives as a whole. As well as looking at the individual bits of glass, you need to see the whole mosaic.

Many, but not all, would argue that programmes deliver change rather than products. Such people would argue that whilst each project delivers a product or output, a programme brings together many such products or outputs and delivers an outcome, a change to the organisation.

Most would agree that the portfolio refers to all the initiatives (programmes, projects and so on) within a single organisation.

You will see later that there are numerous, quite reasonable, definitions of these terms: projects, programmes and portfolios. There is some value in discussing these: it will at least let you understand what the person leaning on the same bar as you is rattling on about. And yes, there are some human undertakings that are most definitely projects and others that are certainly programmes. There are, however, middle-ground initiatives which could be thought of as projects, programmes or portfolios.

We believe it is better to focus on the differences between programme management, project...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures, tables, boxes and case studies
• Acknowledgements and dedication
• Foreword
• 1 Let’s get these words straight
• 2 Doing the right programmes and projects
• 3 Doing programmes and projects right
• 4 Governance
• 5 Methodologies and methods
• 6 Programme, portfolio and project offices
• 7 People matter
• Notes
• Further reading
• Index