In the first edition of Tipoffs for 2011, we take a deep look at a current matter that will have repercussions on project professionals throughout the UK - the upcoming introduction of the OGC's best practice guidance on Portfolio Management. This month, readers will walk away with a better core of understanding about how strong their portfolio management is to date, and how strong it should be. We couldn't think of a better person to ask about it than Craig Kilford, co-Author of the new guidance that will available available at a yet undisclosed date. Craig also served as the lead reviewer/mentor for the best practice guidance on P3O,  and wrote Think P3O, so the expertise he brings to this latest best practice guidance is strong.

You can't have solid house without a trustworthy foundation, though, as portfolio management tries to strengthen the alignment of its structure with the release of the guidance. The foundation lies in the project practitioners who affect and are affected by its proper and improper practice, and we wanted their perspective on PfM to date as we head forward.

Adrian Quinney joins our growing stable of book reviewers with his musings on J.A. Flynn's "The Success Healthcheck for IT Projects" in the first Book of the Month installment for the year. And our own Gary Holmes takes a crack at answering one reader's questions about reconciling her difficulties in finding a PMO job whilst pointing to experience focused primarily on a portfolio-related function.

With the 2011 Project Management Benchmark Survey now awaiting both your views and your box ticking skills, we are now in the process of urging you to get involved in the UK's largest, most reliable survey of project professionals. But time is running short: you have today and tomorrow, 21st January, to get your voice heard and be in with a chance to win a free iPad.

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Words: Craig Kilford

What is Portfolio Management?

You can read the formal definitions in the MoP guidance but fundamentally, as I explained it to my mum, Portfolio Management is an overarching state of being that people and organisations are rushing to adopt because:

1. It will help you make the right investment decisions with regards to what projects and programmes (change initiatives) you should buy for your organisation, i.e. those that will contribute most to your strategy;
2. It will help you make sure those investments actually deliver the bang you were promised for the buck you invested.

What is management of portfolios?

Management of Portfolios is the new kid on the block in the OGC’s suite of Best Practice publications. Its evolved from the incredibly popular (I would say that) 2008 consultation draft that the OGC gave away as a free PDF download, to a fully fledged, grown up, bells and whistles, fully-loaded Best Practice OGC publication.

You will notice that the principles, cycles and practices from the consultation draft still exist in the 2011 full version. Actually, I look at the 2008 version now as the Calvin Klein underwear model of Portfolio Management, in that it looked very sexy, was in pretty good shape and really got the message out there. However the 2011 version has been working very hard in the gym for two years and now looks likes Arnold Schwarzenegger, bigger, bolder and much more powerful although it has a very well-to-do British accent!

Growing these bigger Portfolio Management muscles was due to two key things in my opinion. Firstly, we’ve all been using Portfolio Management for a couple more years now and so there’s lots more experience and lessons learned out there to include. Secondly, and whilst I’ll probably never live this down, I have to say that Steve Jenner’s involvement was absolutely critical because his experience, outlook and personality added something very special to the equation and I feel extremely fortunate to have worked with him.

Why should a PM, Programme Manager or PMO care about MoP?

Projects, Programmes and PMOs only exist because someone somewhere made the decision to invest in their change initiative and the reason the decision was made is because they felt the benefits of doing this change added value to the organisational strategy.

Therefore, it is the duty of all involved to ensure that value is realised by the organisation. I know I’m having an analogy day but if we are focused simply on changing the spark plugs and exhaust system without being concerned that it will make us go faster more economically, what’s the point in doing it?

As a final note, I’m pretty sure if Shakespeare were alive today he would say "To invest or not to invest, that is the question". This question is top of the pops in many public and private organisations at the moment and will be for a long time to come. People are much more cautious about spending these days. Fundamentally, Portfolio Management helps organisations invest in the right changes for their business, it helps them deliver those changes in the right way and in so doing puts the energy of its people smack-bang in the middle of it all. I can't think of anything more important in today’s organisation.

Words: Dan Strayer

It matters little to simply know where portfolio management is going and wait with fascination for the future of its very practice without first knowing where it has been. Efforts to establish a firm source of guidance and best practice normality is an unmoveable train of momentum for the key elements within the PPM landscape - risk, agile project management, programmes and change have all been given accreditation for practice across a variety of legislators (including APM Group, APM, PMI and ISEB). With the launch of the Portfolio Management Guidance on 8th February, portfolios are next in line.

Other than what Craig Kilford has told us in the previous article, very little has been released with regard to the portfolio management guidance going forward, save for these nuggets:

• The Guidance on Portfolio Management's public consultation draft is still available for your own cursory glance (PDF), though its mostly unlikely the email address given for feedback submissions will be taking on much more input at such a late date.
• An Executive Summary version of Portfolio Management is also available for perusal (PDF).
• Spokesmen for the OGC have revealed that there will be a Foundation Exam made available upon the launch of the guidance later this year. In keeping with standardised methods, the Portfolio Management Foundation Exam is expected to be similar in layout & scale to the PRINCE2 Foundation in that it is a closed-book exam populated with multiple-choice questions.

Now that we have a stronger idea of where we’re going, we at Project Management Tipoffs needed to know more about where we’ve been with regards to portfolio management. The people affected by portfolio management include folks across the PPM spectrum: project managers, programme managers, PMOs and so on. We wanted to know two things specifically:

1. What does portfolio management mean to you in your profession as a Programme/Project Manager/PMO? How does it impact what you do?
2. What will the new guidance on portfolio management mean to you, if anything?

Pierre Jr Beaudry is principal manager for a telecom company in Canada, managing both IT portfolios and projects. Follow him on Twitter (@Pbeaudry) and LinkedIn:

1. "Portfolio management makes the link between the strategic decisions from the board and the execution of projects. It then impacts everything, for it initiates and controls which project will be selected, started or stopped. The major impact is that the project manager has to conduct the project in order to stay aligned with the portfolio objectives and not only the project objectives. The perspective is different."
2. "I think it is important for the profession. Guidance will help new practitioners and it may help experienced managers to evaluate their work. I definitely value the availability of best practices guidance."

Jon Hyde is a public sector project, programme and portfolio management professional, and lead member of The Collective Voice. He blogs regularly at Public Sector PM and can be found on Twitter @publicsectorpm:

1. "For me portfolio management asks two questions:  i) Are you doing your projects right?  and more excitingly; ii) Are you doing the right projects? I'm currently rolling out a lightweight portfolio management approach for Cheltenham Borough Council which has led to some interesting board room discussions, particularly around the second question. Our new resource management process has highlighted areas where demand for expertise significantly outweighs supply.  This leads to questions like: Should we stop or defer certain projects? Are we focussing our limited resources on the right projects i.e. those that will deliver the biggest benefits? I think that these are very healthy discussions to be having, and so in summary portfolio management is having a huge and extremely valuable impact."
2. "Provided that it is concise and contains pragmatic advice as to how to roll out portfolio management rapidly to deliver early business benefit, then it will be a useful reference."

Stuart Dixon is the Programme Office and Resourcing Manager for AXA / PPP healthcare:

1. "Within my current company (AXA PPP healthcare), we have 2 PMOs who are interested in the Management of Portfolios. We have a business PMO, who are responsible for the correct initiation of projects, and perform a secretariat function for the prioritisation board who approve all new projects in the company. They set the framework under which projects are prioritised, and the templates that are used to raise business cases. They then report back on a regular basis to the prioritisation board on the delivery of those projects that have been successfully approved.

   "We have a second PMO within the IT department who also manage a portfolio of projects, however they are more concerned with the day to day running of those projects, ensuring that they are initiated correctly, reported on regularly, and ensure compliance with the agreed project management standards. They also look at resource management, ensuring projects get the correct people assigned, and dependency management, looking at dependencies between projects currently being delivered. Depending on which of the two PMOs you were to ask, it is either ‘delivering the right projects’ or ‘delivering the projects right’. I personally think that portfolio management covers both of these aspects, and you can’t really do this successfully if you have one without the other."

2. "From a PMO perspective my hope is that MoP will further develop what P3O started, in getting PMOs out of the IT sphere, and into the business sphere. To recognise that PMO can stand for Portfolio Management Office, and that you cannot hope to successfully run your portfolio without the support of a good Portfolio Management Office.

   "I am also hoping that this will kick start companies into creating lots of Portfolio Management Office positions, which will increase the scope for individuals to move up within the PMO community. Just as Project Managers aspire to become Portfolio Managers, so can Project Office staff aspire to become Portfolio Management staff. And at last PMO becomes a profession in it own right, and not a stepping stone to somewhere else."

Image courtesy of [holyshirt]johncatignas, reused with permission.

In the first of many over the months to come, Project Management Tipoffs this month introduce you to some of the Frequently Asked Questions we get on a cold call.

This month's Frequently Asked Question:

Author: J.A. Flinn
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Size: 312 pages

Reviewed by Adrian Quinney

As a successful international project manager J.A. Flinn has pioneered results risk management as the heart of delivering business transformation and benefits for domestic and international businesses. Her research conducted at Oxford University and the HEC into project success provides a robust foundation for this book. "The 8-Fold Path", developed for executives and project managers offers a diagnostic framework of the positive and negative factors that affect a projects delivery of business results.

Aimed at those who manage, sponsor, own or deliver IT projects "The Success Healthcheck for IT Projects" should help managers identify and address those projects which consume resources and yet don't produce results for the business. Case studies and questions are used throughout the book to help the reader better understand the real world elements of assessing and managing it project success or failure rate. The book is split into five distinct sections.

Part 1 is particularly relevant to business executives and CIOs. Since it examines both benchmarking a project and the productivity of projects. The reader is shown how to how to measure project results in the form of yield and how to evaluate portfolio results. In Chapter 3 predictability is identified as a key element of achieving "Predictable Accountable Results" (PAR) for business projects. A project Portfolio Health Check diagnoses the historical health of project results in chapter 5.

Probability is the theme for Part 2 and it's the place to start if you are a project sponsor or project manager. The main premise being that the performance of organisations projects in the past predicts the performance of future projects. The higher the maturity, the more reliable the project delivery process is going to be and leads to higher probability of project success. Here Results Risk Management ^_TM is introduced as the overarching process where firstly the health of a project is assessed and secondly, action is taken to "Keep, Kill, or Reconsider" the project. Within this process "The 8-Fold Path" is the tool used to diagnose the historic and current risk factors and identify probable success.

It is not a surprise therefore that, part 3 and 4 of this book work through each of the 8 elements or folds in the 8-Fold Path, illustrating the use and value of the diagnostic within a typical project.

1. Intent is clear
2. Business case is robust
3. Results delivery process is robust
4. Motivation is energized
5. Project alignment to current strategic position
6. Operations support the project
7. Flow of history supports the project
8. Balance of change and stability is sustainable.

Each of the chapters concludes with a short takeaway section, a checklist and associated warning signs allowing the reader to informally assess the effect each of the 8 elements has on project results. Finally Part 5 looks at the leadership challenges and next steps on the road to improved results from projects.

So is this book just another book on project risk management? Well yes it is, but where it differs is that it brings a fresh and pragmatic approach to the topic. The mainstay is the 8-Fold Path framework which is a useful technique to diagnose and lift project results. The strength of the book is that whilst it uses IT projects to emphasise key learning, this book is just as relevant to all projects in any industry sector.

Would I recommend this book? Yes, particularly to those executives and project managers looking for a fresh approach to delivering improved results from projects.

ABOUT OUR REVIEWER: Adrian Quinney is Account Director and executive consultant for Magic Milestones Ltd., a Project Management Consultancy that provides a refreshing approach to project management using a combination of Agile and traditional project management methods. Adrian spent much of his career globe-trotting the world delivering large scale supply chain technology projects and having seen the light, has in recent years been engaged in complex IT-based, public sector, utility and media projects. He is currently working alongside one of the UK’s most prestigious television companies delivering a large scale multi platform digital media programme.

DO YOU WANT TO REVIEW A BOOK FOR TIPOFFS? Contact us today.

"I am currently working for an established financial services provider within the project team and am looking for a fresh challenge. The problem I am facing is that of targeting my CV for the market as the vast majority of work that I carry out is in support of a Portfolio as opposed to a Programme, yet the roles I am coming across are primarily in traditional PMOs. Can you help?" - Tasmin, Bristol

Gary Holmes of Arras People says: Thanks for your question – the first thing I should say is that it sounds like you are working within a very mature project organisation which is certainly not something that should faze you in terms of looking for new opportunities.

We have seen over the past couple of years and are continuing to see, a growth in the demand for Portfolio Offices and an altogether more strategic view of Programmes and Projects that are carried out within an organisation.

My guess is that if you are working within a Portfolio environment you will be carrying out some or more of the following activities; helping to establish frameworks for projects / programmes in line with financial and strategic requirements, helping to establish gate reviews for potential projects / programmes, following on from this taking an active role in the decision process in relation to activating new projects / programmes, creating mechanisms for areas such as capacity planning and resource planning across the wider portfolio?

These skills are in some ways one step up from those found in a Programme Management Office or Project Office but they are still part of the whole PMO umbrella when all is said and done. I’m also going to assume that you still have duties that fall into the traditional PMO camp too – areas like reporting, planning, risk, change, issues?

The other thing about job hunting for PMO positions is that the term PMO often means different things to different organisations – increasingly there are lots of organisations out there embracing the idea of a Portfolio Office but are still a “traditional PMO” now. It is quite difficult to seek out these opportunities because often the organisation’s plans for the future are not outlined in a job description!

My advice to you would be to focus on and get a good understanding of your strengths – across portfolios, programmes and projects and only then start to work on a CV that embraces all of the P’s.

A good first step would be to take a look at the OGC’s P3O guidance on this matter. It would also be worth having a look at the website for the PMOSIG, an organisation heavily involved in the promotion of and development of Portfolio Offices.

Hope this helps!

If you would like to put a question to Gary or any of our other project management consultants, contact us and it could end up in a future edition of the Tipoffs Q&A. Also, be sure to check out our Careers clinic / JobSearch Support Services / Careers Advice pages for more advice related to project management careers.

Got a question for us? Contact us today.