It’s common for large organisations to have many projects on the go at a time. Part of getting all of these projects to succeed is through the review of these in relation to each other. We refer to this as a project ‘portfolio’, and our team routinely works with organisations to define and prioritise this list. Through this work we ensure our clients have solid rationale to identify why one project should be higher or lower priority than the next. In this article we will provide just 5 of these reasons.
1. Demands of your key stakeholders change
As much as we’d all like to be able to guarantee what the next year or longer will look like, it’s rare for any organisation to make it to the end without at least one or two big unforeseen changes. Perhaps the business has needed to shift its focus to better compete in the market, or adapt to a societal change. In the public sector, a department may receive a fresh mandate from a minister or chief executive that warrants change across the business.
For any project that’s been live for a meaningful period of time, there’s a better than even chance that the ground has moved underneath it in some way. This doesn’t usually mean the project’s scope needs to change, but it can often mean a particular project is more crucial than another.
When the needs of key stakeholders in the business, be it customers, leaders or otherwise, evolve in a different direction, it makes sense for organisations to ask the hard questions of its portfolio:
- Which projects are currently getting the most attention and budget?
- What do our stakeholders need within the next 3, 6 and 12 months and will our existing initiatives support realising this?
- Are there projects directly working towards outcomes that are now outside of core KPIs for the business and its units?
- Do outcomes of certain projects no longer matter to stakeholders?
- Will our internal sign offs now be slower or unwilling to sign off project milestones with their attention now being placed elsewhere or their confidence in that project being impacted by external factors such as changed KPIs or responses to more pressing issues?
It can be really hard to make the call on reprioritising projects, especially those with a lot of time and money sunk in. The risk of proceeding without reviewing and reprioritising however, could be far more costly; with ineffective deliverables and the aforementioned struggles around sign off just a few examples of costly issues that could follow.
Listen and adapt to the business’ needs and stakeholders feedback. Reprioritising doesn’t mean failure – it could simply mean a reshuffle of immediate resources and due dates.
2. The project’s outcomes are more or less likely to contribute positively to strategic objectives
Does the business’ project portfolio represent the outcomes that the business is driving towards? At some point in time this would have been the case, but a portfolio of projects can, over time, appear out of step with where the business is going.
This is one of the reasons we suggest organisations consider breaking up their projects into smaller duration and budget; the outcomes can be realised quicker, and don’t risk becoming irrelevant or needing significant scope changes.
A strategic vision should ultimately be longer than a single year; typically these extend to 3, 5, 10 or more years with progressively broader levels of definition. While it’s not ideal, it’s also not uncommon for a project to extend into years in length. As projects start at different times, it could be that the needs of the business are better met by certain initiatives than others. Even careful scoping practices can sometimes not be enough to prevent a project from becoming less relevant to the immediate business priorities.
Consider what’s occurred since 2020 – many businesses were in the process of long term digital transformation, with projects like cloud-based systems in progress. But the immediate demand for remote working fast tracked many of these projects, and put other less pressing issues such as those related to premises or fit out on the back burner. These deprioritised projects have not all automatically failed or been stopped, but many have been paused and the budget and timing of them has stretched out longer than perhaps initially planned. On the other hand, many organisations have achieved a practical level of business continuity based on fast-tracked digital transformation in a relatively short period of time.
3. A project needs to be delivered by a certain date to be successful
Whatever the case may be, businesses should routinely review their project portfolio to determine which due dates are most crucial and which of those are by comparison fairly arbitrary. Again, doing such an exercise does not mean those less pressing projects are stopped – rather they can be relieved of unnecessary organisational pressure. This may also help certain projects deliver a better quality result with the benefit of more time.
As much as there may be a perception that ‘everything’s urgent’, a proper portfolio review will typically reveal this to not be the case.
4. Resources are limited and need to be reassigned to more critical projects
There’s no secret as to the sheer number of skills in short supply in a post-COVID world. Even with highly attractive contractor rates for many corporate roles and the availability of external vendors, businesses can struggle to resource all the initiatives at once. It’s common for particular people to receive secondments or simply be shared across two projects at once.
However, there’s many instances where resources are limited and project requirements are such that people need to be pulled off one project and allocated to another more important one. This can be very unsettling to a project that has relied on personnel to progress, but if a project is more critical to the business, these are decisions that need to be made as part of good portfolio management. With this said, businesses need to be highly sensitive and wary of moving people around too much and causing a spike in staff attrition. These decisions should be made in a considered manner and with real strategic understanding and purpose.
5. A project will contribute to longer term objectives so doesn’t need to be the focus in the current financial year
Doing a portfolio shuffle around can bring up those smaller projects that can be completed and deliver value within the year, with these other projects having more time to get underway or to be completed. These longer term projects won’t necessarily stop, but they may not get the additional budget or resources to progress quicker.
Looking for guidance around juggling your portfolio of projects?
Knowing which projects are important to the overall success of the business is down to so many different factors. Having the ability to not only understand which projects are the priority but put actions in place to reprioritise them is something that many businesses find difficult to carry out internally. Many suffer from doing too much at once, or not optimising their investment spend because they don’t have effective prioritisation of their portfolio of work.
By having an external, independent quality assurance partner with no political skin the game helps to ensure the recommendations are as objective as possible – and that’s good for business.
Chat to our team to learn more about how we approach programme assurance.
