For most organizations, growing revenue and managing operational spend are top priorities. With digital disruption occurring in everything from banking, shopping, to healthcare, today’s organizations must focus on new customer-oriented strategies when it comes to planning and execution.
Put simply: managing the customer experience is forcing enterprises to beef up investment in new technology, which then creates its own unique form of chaos. This means the business and the PMO must work together seamlessly to be more responsive – without over-reacting.
PMO leaders are already accustomed to delivering on planned initiatives and expect some unexpected change. But how do you deliver value while balancing governance and technology to build consistent best practices in enterprise portfolio management?
To begin managing the craziness, you must be more responsive to the speed and agility of today’s business climate. This on-demand webinar featuring guest speaker, Margo Visitacion of Forrester Research, provides a great way to get started.
When it comes to Managing the Chaos of Change, she discusses industry trends, best practices, and how portfolio management technology can reduce the chaos of continual change.
She suggests you think of it simply: businesses that focus the most on change are usually the most successful. If you want to compete and thrive, you must invest in technology that supports the changing world. With 60-80% of IT spend still going to MOOSE (Maintain and Operate the Organization, Systems, and Equipment), IT needs to act more quickly – otherwise business units will build their own applications to fill the void.
So the speed of business is getting faster and you need to work differently, but where do you begin? First, CIOs and CFOs need to create new technology budget categories.
Consider these four forces that are driving the limits of today’s current tech budgets:
- Business-led technology initiatives outpace new project budget.
- Business innovation requires technology experimentation so organizations turn to the cloud or new apps to deliver products and services.
- Business applications need updates and enhancements to meet new demand.
- Modern application development requires open-ended funding.
As a result, we are seeing friction as traditional portfolio management tools don’t necessarily have the right capabilities for business needs. What ends up happening is that the projects that get picked don’t have a tangential relationship to your strategy. Here are some startling facts to consider:
- 54 percent of planned projects never get delivered because things change or teams are moved around.
- 30 percent of project funding gets lost or left on the table when projects fail or get canceled.
- All total, this is about $122 million wasted on every $1 billion spent on projects.
How do you put an end to this insanity? Margo suggests you start with mapping strategic themes. This will help you more easily identify needs and goals so you can then better utilize skills and available resources. Some other ideas to consider:
- Using visually appealing models like Kanban boards help keep track of project work and make better decisions on how to prioritize your portfolio by identifying projects based on value, costs, and risk. Understanding capacity is key, and you’ll know if you need to delay or outsource work.
- Use value streams to help prioritize and target better outcomes and identify dependencies when you’re proposing a new capability. By capturing the end-to-end cost of an investment, you can better align your long-term strategy versus a one-off project.
- Use the portfolio as a living road map so your teams can work at the right pace. Centralizing data also allows you to provide management with the visibility they need into your company’s capacity and velocity for new work.
Ultimately, a project portfolio management tool can help you ensure that you complete a project from start to finish and have transparency and visibility throughout the entire process. Not only do you only start projects that are more likely to be seen through to completion, but you will have more accountability along the way. Learn more in the on-demand webinar featuring Margo Visitacion, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research: Managing the Chaos of Change.
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