Thought Leadership

Projects are the key vehicle for implementing change,

project management is increasingly recognized as an

essential business skill, and successful delivery of an

organization’s portfolio is critical to achieving its strategic

objectives and ensuring its ongoing health.

Projects might be the method that organizations deliver

new products or services, internal business changes and

improvement initiatives, technology or IT upgrades and

new functionality – or everything they do (because their

business is about delivering assignments for clients).

The primary improvement objectives of organizations we

have assisted recently may be characterized as one or

more of the following:

Strategic alignment – focusing effort on more

of the ‘right things’ and aligning better with

strategic business objectives

•

Delivery capacity – enhancing the capacity to

deliver more projects, without increasing cost

Benefits realization – achieving tangible

business results regularly and reliably

throughout the planning horizon

Delivery reliability – meeting expectations

reliably and ensuring you can deliver on

promises every time

Delivery quality – ensuring fitness for purpose

and attaining a better result every time

Delivery speed – delivering results faster

(and hence more efficiently at lower cost).

•

•

•

•

•

Understanding successful project portfolio delivery

Businesses must transform themselves to adapt and survive in the long-term. Today’s ever quickening pace of change is forcing businesses to remake themselves more frequently to become stronger competitors.

Do you recognize any of the following symptoms?

o There’s a tendency to start everything,

but you can’t deliver it all

o It’s accepted that projects frequently run late

or deliver short of original intentions

o Accountability for delivery is unclear

o It’s difficult to balance resources between

business as usual and project work

o You are perpetually short of skilled people; so

you employ a large proportion of contract staff

o It’s not clear how many projects are on the go,

or what effort they absorb

o The link between strategy and what the projects

are delivering is unclear

o Accurate estimating is difficult

o You don’t know what capacity or capability exists

o Effort is often duplicated

o You find it difficult to deliver multi-discipline projects

through the functional structure

o Processes suit business as usual activity

but not projects

o Project managers are often regarded as an

unnecessary overhead.

If you checked two or more of these boxes you might

want to take our diagnostic.

�

PA research into portfolio management practices and

their resulting effectiveness has confirmed that firms

which systematically plan for success are more likely

to achieve it. A comparison of survey respondents’

performance is illustrated in Figure 1. In other words,

the more an organization puts in to managing its portfolio

of projects, and the means of delivery, the more its gets

out. While this was to be expected, there were a number

of surprising findings:

Outliers, very large organizations with apparently

mature processes, reported unsatisfactory outcomes

Similarly, outliers (generally smaller organizations) with

ad-hoc processes, reported more favorable outcomes

In addition, while one might expect that the nature and

scale of an investment program (ie what is at stake)

should drive the need for more mature processes,

the survey indicated that this was not always the

case. Certainly the most developed practitioners

had substantial project portfolios; however, the two

organizations with the largest portfolios had the least

effective approaches.

•

•

•

Research demonstrates a clear correlation between maturity and overall effectiveness – with some caveatsClearly certain organizational characteristics, relating to

size, complexity and culture, are also significant factors.

This suggested, to us, the following categorization:

Entrepreneurial – Success characterized by the

extraordinary efforts of talented individuals applying

ad-hoc processes and tools – generally in smaller,

more ‘agile’ organizations.

Planned – Success was planned for by developing

and inserting the right processes, technologies

and people.

Informal – Ad-hoc approach to portfolio development

and management has not resulted in effective delivery.

Bureaucratic – Significant investment in standards,

tools and processes is not supported by the necessary

behaviors to deliver success.

•

•

•

•

Figure 1: Maturity correlates well with effectivenessE

ffect

iven

ess

Maturity

‘Entrepreneurial’ ‘Planned’

‘Informal’ ‘Bureaucratic’

least mature

most mature

�

More successful organizations demonstrate capability across all key dimensionsWhen comparing the performance of the most and

least developed practitioners, the best performers rated

themselves consistently across the range of measures;

in other words, they do all aspects well.

In contrast, the poorer performers rated themselves

poorly in a number of fundamental areas, most obviously

in the quality and consistency of business cases. This

indicates a number of significant discontinuities in what is

essentially an end-to-end process – or perhaps a highly

integrated meta-process - but which is not treated as

such. Hence, overall effectiveness is vulnerable to the

weakest link in the chain. This is illustrated in figure 2.

The ‘most developed’ firms exhibit capability in all

dimensions and are most differentiated by the:

Strength of linkages between projects and strategies

(portfolio management)

Quality of their business cases (the front end of

project management)

Proactive considerations of project constraints

(resource and workforce management).

•

•

•

�

Some features initially thought to be essential

appear less so:

Use of technology-based support systems (tools)

to facilitate the process was found to be necessary,

but not sufficient to improve effectiveness at most

levels of maturity

Similarly, the presence of project management

standards does not directly correlate with delivery

effectiveness

The formality of the process and the prioritization

technique applied were not found to significantly

impact the effectiveness of project delivery.

On the surface, some of these seem to be contradictory

findings. However, at early stages of the maturity curve,

technology may be largely irrelevant – more important

are defining the strategies to guide project identification

and the quality of project definition. At the mid point

of the maturity curve where standardization and

consistency is required, often technology takes the place

of solid governance and often distracts the focus of

work towards checklist completion, rather than excellent

delivery. At the mature end of the curve, technology is a

critical enabler for larger scale, complex environments

(ie with multiple projects, or distributed teams and

geographic dispersion of activities).

•

•

•

The issue of project management standards is

interesting in that, while it is not possible to have highly

effective processes without such standards, having

them is no guarantee of delivery effectiveness. More

important are the values, attitudes and behaviors of

those responsible for delivery.

Figure �: End-to-end consistency is key to maturity

Ambivalent

Least matureMost mature

Stronglyagree

Stronglydisagree

Busine

ss o

bjecti

ves c

lear

Strong

links

bet

ween

objec

tives

and

selec

tion

Quality

bus

iness

case

s

Objecti

ve a

nd cr

edibl

e

selec

tion

proc

ess

Scena

rios r

apidl

y

evalu

ated

Consid

er a

ll sign

ifican

t

cont

raint

s

Flexibl

e ap

proa

ch

resil

ient t

o ch

ange

Busine

ss im

pact

of

portf

olio

unde

rsto

od

Efficien

t in u

se o

f

man

agem

ent t

ime

�

Negotiating your way through the delivery minefieldIn organizations that deliver many projects, there is

perpetual pressure to do it better. This might be because

their customers want to focus effort on more of the ‘right

things’, do more with the same (or less) or improve

speed and reliability of delivery.

It is clear that there are many drivers that can contribute

to, or impede, overall delivery performance, spanning

the fields of governance, portfolio, project, workforce,

resource and financial management.

Many emerging maturity models are predicated on

the assumption that “best practice” is an absolute,

and if sufficient of the many prescribed practices are

documented and complied with, an organization’s

outcomes will be better. While this might be true in some

cases, it is rather undiscriminating and might imply a

huge and expensive challenge for an organization to

contemplate (particularly a relatively immature one).

We have observed that there usually isn’t much

guidance on the prioritization of prescribed practices

and usually no direct matching on how those practices

can help deliver an organization’s specific improvement

goals. Equally, the focus of the practices is generally

on the ‘harder’ elements (organization, process and

standards), with insufficient emphasis on the ‘softer’,

people aspects (the really difficult stuff – accountability,

team work, careers, learning and development).

We contend that a more succinct definition of best

practice in this arena (as others) would be a set of

practices that are ‘supremely fit for purpose’. There are

a lot of things organizations could do; the real question is

what they should do.

To answer this question, we have established a new

diagnostic survey as a quick way to find out where to

focus your attention. It has been tried and tested in

organizations in a variety of industries and geographies.

�

It examines three areas:

Objectives: What you want to improve

Practices: How you measure up against key elements

of practice that have been observed to contribute to

tangible success

Outcomes: What results you currently experience.

By understanding the dynamics of how these three

aspects interact, we can help you understand how to

chart a course to remove key bottlenecks and build a

sustainable delivery capability.

The survey takes no longer than 20 minutes to complete

and once submitted a draft report can be turned around in

a matter of days and respondents will have a reasonably

robust assessment of their capability and the beginnings

of a plan to focus their improvement efforts. You can

access the survey at www.portfoliodiagnostic.com.

•

•

•

Figure �: Our diagnostic focuses on key dynamics for improvement

Adapt

Mea

surePlan

Objectives‘what you want’

Outcomes‘what you get’

Practices‘what you do’

�

Corporate headquarters123 Buckingham Palace Road

London SW1W 9SR

United Kingdom

Tel: +44 20 7730 9000

Fax: +44 20 7333 5050

E-mail: info@paconsulting.com

United States headquarters4601 N Fairfax Drive

Suite 600

Arlington, VA 22203

Tel: +1 571 227 9000

Fax: +1 571 227 9001

E-mail: info-us@paconsulting.com

United States offices in:Boston, MATel: +1 617 225 2700Fax: +1 617 225 2631

Chicago, ILTel: +1 312 566 9752Fax: +1 312 566 9753

Denver, COTel: +1 720 566 9920Fax: +1 720 566 9680

Houston, TXTel: +1 713 353 3976Fax: +1 713 353 8887

Los Angeles, CATel: +1 213 689 1515Fax: +1 213 621 3082

Madison, WITel: +1 608 443 2700Fax: +1 608 661 5181

New York, NYTel: +1 212 973 5900Fax: +1 212 973 5959

Princeton, NJTel: +1 609 806 0800Fax: +1 609 936 8811

San Francisco, CATel: +1 415 955 2619Fax: +1 415 397 6309

Washington, DCTel: +1 571 227 9000Fax: +1 571 227 9001

www.paconsulting.com/us

PA Consulting Group is a

leading management, systems

and technology consulting firm,

operating worldwide in more than

35 countries.

Principal national offices inArgentina, China, Denmark,

Germany, India, Ireland,

Malaysia, Netherlands,

New Zealand, Norway,

Sweden, United Arab Emirates,

United Kingdom, United States

© PA Knowledge Limited �008. All rights reserved.

00632-3