Those of you who know me will recognize that I’m not always one to play by the rules. So, when Planview invited me to collaborate with them on a webinar focused on going rogue, well, they didn’t need to ask twice!
Now, no matter how rebellious I thought I was, I still had to make sure that organizations could implement my rogue ideas. And to have any credibility, they needed to actually improve on the standard processes that so often frustrate me.
Fortunately, for this discussion, I had the chance to work with Planview’s Gareth Bradley, Vice President of Product Management—Adaptive Work. With his experience working with different organizations and my background in helping organizations implement creative solutions to unique problems, we came up with several rogue approaches that we felt would help businesses succeed.
While this post only captures a few of the highlights from our discussion, you can learn all the ideas that Gareth and I discussed by clicking below.
Watch On Demand: Rogue Portfolio Management
When breaking the rules is precisely what you need to surpass your competition.
Approve more than you can do
I’ve had many conversations with executives over the years, trying to help them accept that their inability to deliver all of their approved projects isn’t a problem of bad execution; it’s bad planning—approving more initiatives than they have the resources to deliver. But now, to go rogue, I say approve more work than you can possibly complete in any given business cycle.
What’s changed? Well, change has changed.
Today’s world is highly dynamic and uncertain. Operating environments shift due to advancing technologies, changing customer expectations, the actions of competitors, suppliers, and regulators, and a thousand other factors.
Organizations must be able to adapt and adjust their strategies, goals, and investments to respond to and hopefully anticipate these changes.
To do that requires not just a willingness and capability to cancel or modify existing initiatives, but also the launch of other initiatives to take their place. And that’s where the idea of approving more work than you can deliver comes in.
Organizations should develop a prioritized backlog of projects. These are initiatives that have been reviewed, costed, and approved but have not yet been given the green light to launch. Instead, they are ready to go as soon as resources—people and financial—are freed up from other areas of the portfolio due to the need for change.
This is the best way to optimize enterprise agility—the ability to respond quickly and with minimal disruption when necessary. It requires constantly reviewing and updating the backlog, but that’s OK. Planning should be continuous and adaptive anyway, and this is merely an extension of that.
For the same reason, allocate more funds than you actually have available. Don’t spend it, but tie funding to the key initiatives in that prioritized backlog so that if you need to shift an investment into the delivery column, you already know how much it will cost, what the cash flow requirements look like, etc. That further speeds up performance, reducing time to value.
But do less than you theoretically can
However, for all this approving and funding more than you can do, another critical aspect of going rogue requires you to do less than you can, at least in theory. That’s the area of resource allocation.
There is nothing rogue about the first part; it is just a reminder that people can’t be allocated to tasks for every hour they nominally work. They have non-project accountabilities and expectations in their roles, and it takes time to transition between work items. This is a reminder that many organizations seem to need as they continue to overallocate their people and then complain that they aren’t delivering what was expected.
The rogue part comes in how work is allocated, even after allowing for that unassignable time.
As a rough rule of thumb, you can likely allocate full-time project resources for around 75-80% of their available hours. But you shouldn’t.
If you allocate 75-80% you reduce your flexibility and then:
- All those approved and funded backlog items can’t be ramped up quickly because you have no flex in your resource pool.
- Moving people to support these new projects is going to have a negative impact on other projects.
- You will create bottlenecks and single points of expertise that slow down progress and frustrate individuals.
Instead, deliberately build in resource reserves. Avoid assigning all of your people to project tasks all the time, allowing you to move people much more easily and with far less disruption. The benefits far outweigh the slight reduction in short-term delivery capacity, and that doesn’t even consider the reduced stress on employees and teams.
Going rogue drives success
Sticking to the standard business practices and processes will deliver the same type of results you are already achieving. If that’s good enough, great.
However, if there is room for improvement, rethink how you operate, breaking a few rules as you go.
For more ideas on how to go rogue, listen to my conversation with Gareth here, and contact Planview to see how they can help you on your journey.
