As you rank the projects, you might find you have points left over.
That’s fine. There’s no rule that says you need to use all your points.
Beware, however, of a lack of high-demand projects. You can think about your projects in this way:
• Projects that keep the lights on—that support the organization
• Projects that grow the business
• Projects that create new opportunities
1. In personal communication
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Are any of them high-demand projects? If you have more projects that keep the organization running and no projects that grow the busi- ness or that create new opportunities, you may not have high-demand projects. Review your mission (Section 11.3,Define an Actionable Mis- sion for the Organization, on page163), or initiate some strategic plan- ning to see how to grow or create new opportunities.
If you have many points remaining, say up to a third of your points, it’s time to review your mission to see whether you should consider other projects. Many points remaining might indicate no one is demanding your projects. How do you provide value to the organization? Consider and propose projects that reflect that value.
Or, if all the projects have a relatively small number of points, other people in the organization don’t care much about these projects. Again, review your mission to see what other projects you might offer to move the organization forward.
A project portfolio with projects that aren’t valuable enough to have peo- ple clamoring for each of them is a sign that your organization is losing sight of its strategy or mission—or that the marketplace doesn’t want what you offer. The more “keep the lights on” projects you have, the less people care about your projects. Reconsider where you’re headed.
I bet you have many more than two projects. As you assign points, make sure each project has some point value—unless a project has no value. In that case, remove the project from your portfolio list now.
That’s why it’s worth asking the question for every project: “Should we do this project at all?” (see Section 4.1, Should We Do This Project at All?, on page51 for more information). Read Section4.5,How to Kill a Project and Keep It Dead, on page58for ways to kill projects and keep them dead. Now, you can rank order the projects you want to consider.
Now that every project has a unique number of points, identify the highest-ranking project, and assign a team to that project. Proceed down the project list, assigning a team to each project, until you have no more teams to assign to a project.2
When you assign teams, assign an entire cross-functional team so that the project is fully staffed. Staffing a project with just developers or just testers doesn’t provide you with a “completed” project—it means
2. If your organization has been agile for a while, let the teams self-assign.
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Project Costs Can Affect Ranking
If you’re trying to decide whether to bid a fixed-price contract or if you have a limited budget for your projects, you may have to estimate the cost or duration of a project when you are mea- suring its value of the project.
First, you can start a project for a short timebox, measure its velocity, and see whether you want to continue it. Second, you can talk to your customer if it’s a fixed-price bid and explain that if you have to guarantee a fixed price, your price will have to be high enough to manage your risks. That’s not a good deal for the customer, so maybe you can do a little, get some feedback, and refine the total price along with the date and the feature set as you proceed. If you have a team that knows about agile and has practice working in timeboxed iter- ations, getting to releasable product, you can show your cus- tomer your progress and explain the cost of a timebox. Then, it’s the customer’s decision about how many timeboxes and how many features. The third alternative is to stop using projects and rank each feature, as in Section9.4.1,Fix the Number of Tasks In- Process, Kanban-in-the-Small, on page133. Here, the customer pays by feature.
You can’t definitively predict any project’s cost before you’ve started it. You can estimate the project’s cost, preferably with some experience delivering a chunk of value. (For other estima- tion approaches, seeManage It! Your Guide to Modern, Prag- matic Project Management [Rot07].) You can work with your customer to bound the project’s cost as you proceed. You can work on pieces of functionality for all of your customers—one at a time—until you’ve finished the work the customer wants to pay for.
But don’t think you can accurately predict project cost. You can’t. No one can. If you think you must, make sure you add plenty of padding, because no matter what you add, it won’t be enough. A better idea is to work feature by feature, reassess- ing and, if necessary, reestimating your project at the end of every feature.
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Joe Asks. . .
Who Should Assign a Value to Each Project?
In an ideal world, there would be a group of people with the responsibility to decide the relative value of each project. These people would meet often enough that you would always know how each project is ranked. In some organizations, a project management office (PMO) does this. In other organizations, product management does this. Some agile organizations ask their product owners to get together and rank. In other organi- zations, your senior managers would do this. But your world may not be ideal.
If you don’t have someone else to rank order the projects, rank order them yourself, using the approaches in this chapter. Even if you’re wrong, you’ve provided the organization information about what’s not first. Use your mission (as in Chapter11,Define Your Mission, on page161) to help guide you. You can always ask for help from your peers to help you assign points.
No matter what, make sure someone decides on the rank ordering. Otherwise, you won’t know which projects to start and finish first.
you have unknown technical debt because the project staff isn’t getting feedback from the other people who help create an entire product.
If you’re a functional manager, you can’t assign a cross-functional team to each project, because you don’t have responsibility or authority for those other people. In that case, make sure your ranking reflects the value of the project to the entire organization, not just your group. And, work with your peer functional managers, as in Chapter6,Collaborate on the Portfolio, on page 86, so you and your peers are all staffing the same projects at the same time for the most value to the organization.
You will probably run out of teams before you run out of projects.
If you have more people available than projects to finish, make sure you’ve staffed the projects with enough people, and revisit your mis- sion, Section 11.3, Define an Actionable Mission for the Organization, on page 163. You might not be considering all the projects you could offer to the organization to add value.
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