If you’re a senior or middle manager, you care about the project port- folio, because that’s how you predict whether the organization can get enough value out of its projects to remain on track—or, even better, to grow. The more projects your organization can complete, the more value you can realize from the work (assuming you’re evaluating the projects in a way that makes sense), and the more valueyou provide to the larger organization.
As a middle manager, you are trying to finish and then start more proj- ects. Without real data about project progress, or without the ability to make a reasonable prediction of how long a project might take, you can’t be successful with all of your responsibilities.
As a technical lead or first-level manager, you care about finishing projects, but you likely have a more immediate problem—how to get enough people to finish the projects your management wants you to finish. The portfolio helps you show your managers when you need more people and what types of people they are.
2.5.1 Why Technical Leads Care About Portfolio Management
If you’re a technical lead, do you still need to care about the project portfolio? Yes. If you have responsibility for a product, you are a tech- nical lead and need to make sure you and your team are working on the highest-value work and that your work is transparent to the rest of the organization.
2. Another idea that’s key to learn is continuous improvement. You’ll see throughout this book that your portfolio is not a static document. You will continue to work to improve it to meet your current needs.
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Do You Always Need to Manage the Project Portfolio?
A senior manager asked me, “Hey, life is good. We’re making money hand over fist. Why do we need to keep managing the portfolio?”
In a great economy, you don’t have enough people for all the projects you want to do. So, ranking the projects by value and making sure you finish the most valuable projects buys you enough time and money to find the people to do the work and to keep you profitable.
A down economy is the ideal time to choose the projects with the highest value to the organization. This keeps the organiza- tion going through the hard times. And, in a really tough econ- omy, you need the portfolio with a lean and agile approach to take on the risky projects that might make the difference between your organization thriving and going under.
If you can predict the future, quit your management job, and make a killing on the stock market. But if you’re like the rest of us, you’ll need to keep evaluating and reviewing the portfolio so you can deliver the highest value to the organization. It’s a tough job, and you’ll be great at it.
Keeping Up with All My Projects by John, Technical Lead
I haven’t been here long, but I’ve already accumulated projects that onlyI have worked on. One of the projects encompasses the financial reports for the CFO out of our site. It was supposed to be a short, small project two years ago. It was, then. Since then, I’ve added at least twenty new features and fixed a bunch of cosmetic problems.
It’s not hard work, but every time I got heads-down on something else, the CFO called my manager and asked me to do something else. I finally got tired of it and created a portfolio for my boss and me and a product backlog for the CFO. Now when he calls, I can show my manager what I’m doing, and we can schedule his changes in a way that make sense for everyone.
Sure, I had to do a quick fix last week when we got a new request from our auditors. That was an interruption—it didn’t go on the backlog. But that’s just one problem out of the last few where I’ve had to interrupt myself. The portfolio helps me organize my work. And, the backlog helps my customers know when I’ll get to their problem and in which order.
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Managing the Project Portfolio Reduces Schedule Games Until you set your priorities, you are susceptible to various sched- ule games. If you can’t decide which project is the number-one project for you or your team to work on, you might be suffering from the Pants on Fire schedule game. Or, if you are attempting to work on more than one project at a time, you are suffering from the Split Focus schedule game.
If you have a project portfolio where the organization’s priori- ties are set, these schedule games become irrelevant, you get more work done, and you finish more projects.
Project portfolios make your work visible. Without them, no one realizes all the little pieces of work you’re doing. You have to make that visible, and a portfolio is an ideal tool.
2.5.2 Why Some Managers Don’t Like Project Portfolios
Some managers are concerned that project portfolios restrict their op- tions. They do. You are committed to honor these restrictions until the next time you evaluate the portfolio. Several managers have said, “But I won’t get to move people around day by day to where I need them.”
Exactly. I assume you want your staff to complete projects. Moving people around frequently—and incurring the costs of multitasking—
is the wrong action. The books Quality Software Management: Volume 1, Systems Thinking [Wei92]; Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency [DeM01]; andMultiprojecting: The Illu- sion of Progress [Rot04b] all discuss this. To see a collection of arti- cles that discuss the costs of multitasking, see http://www.umich.edu/
~bcalab/multitasking.html.
Project portfolios don’t restrict your options as a manager. In fact, if you use a project portfolio, you will find you have more choices of when to start and finish which work, assuming you use lean and agile approaches to your product development; see Chapter 9, Evolve Your Portfolio, on page128.
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Avoid Using the Portfolio as Wishful Artifact
A colleague told me about their project portfolio. “We plan and faithfully reevaluate the project portfolio every quarter. We make a nice spreadsheet. And then, the next day—or at least the next week—we change who’s working on what. Our portfo- lios look like our project Gantt charts: they look nice until reality sets in, and then the next day or week they are wrong.”
Although the portfolio is a living document, if you change your mind more often than you change the portfolio, you’re wast- ing your time attempting to rank the portfolio and explain what people need to work on and not work on.
The project portfolio is most valuable when the decision makers agree that for the next month (or two or three) the technical staff will work on these projects in this order. Then the techni- cal staff do the work. At the end of the evaluation period, the decision makers decide the ranking for the next period.