Project Portfolio Management at PMI

Last Thursday I gave a presentation titled Project Portfolio Management and Business Value at the northwest outreach meeting for the Minnesota chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI).  In this presentation I focused on shifting the project manager's operational perspective of projects to a more strategic perspective and used the term value to represent a strategic metric.

My concern is that project management is too focused on defining project success as meeting the functional, budgetary, and schedule goals.  These goals or project variables are often used to determine the project's success.  However, these goals represent success at the operational level of the organization.  This simply means the project was executed as planned and does not imply the affect the project had on the organization.

My argument is that a more strategic approach should be used to evaluate a project's success.  The value created as a result of the project is more important than the completion of the project.  I used the example of a new information systems project that was operationally successful although the new system resulted in a 21% decrease in operating capacity; the organization now processes 21% less than before the system project.  This is a decrease in value even though the project would be considered a success.  Is it really a success for the organization?

While we cannot ignore the operational project metrics we must do a better job of evaluating and measuring value in our projects.  As project managers we should want to make sure our projects are both successfully executed and also generates new value for the organization.

Focus Group

Last week I conducted a focus group to evaluate the Master of Arts in IT Leadership program curriculum.  We also determined the skills and knowledge our graduates need to be prepared for leadership positions within the IT organization or as enterprising functional managers applying IT to their business units.  The focus group consisted of alumni, current students, and members of the IT profession.  I was very impressed with the results of this focus group.

Together our group identified the types of individuals that this graduate program would serve and revised the program's mission to match the purpose of our degree.  All of this set the groundwork for our most important activity: to identify the desired outcomes for the program.  These items were not the official program outcomes but rather the knowledge areas and skills our students should have developed when graduating from the program.  Our group identified many great areas that we need to address in the curriculum and while quickly arriving at a consensus on these knowledge and skill topics.

I found this focus group activity very enlightening and am so pleased with the results.  It was a great experience to hear from IT practitioners on their needs and have them participate in the process of designing the curriculum for our program.  Our new curriculum will make the program even more relevant and will provide greater value for our graduates.  What a great success!