Manage Your Project Portfolio

by Rothman, Johanna

• ISBN13: 9781934356296
• ISBN10: 1934356298
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-08-28
• Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf

Summary

Too many projects. Not enough time. There's an avalanche of requests and requirements coming your way, and you need help.

Author Biography

Johanna Rothman helps leaders solve problems and seize opportunities. She consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. She is the author of several books including Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management and Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby).

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. xiii
Foreword	p. xv
Preface	p. xvii
Meet Your Project Portfolio	p. 1
What a Project Portfolio is	p. 2
See the High-and Low-Level Views	p. 4
Now Try This	p. 7
See Your Future	p. 9
Managing with a Project Portfolio	p. 9
Managing Without a Project Portfolio	p. 10
What Are Your Emergency Projects?	p. 13
Learn Approaches to the Project Portfolio	p. 14
Why You Should Care About the Project Portfolio	p. 15
Your Portfolio Reflects Your Influence Level	p. 18
Now Try This	p. 19
Create the First Draft of Your Portfolio	p. 21
Know What Work to Collect	p. 21
Is the Work a Project or a Program?	p. 24
Organize Your Projects into Programs As Necessary	p. 25
Organize the Portfolio	p. 29
Using Tools to Manage a Portfolio	p. 30
Now Try This	p. 31
Evaluate Your Projects	p. 33
Should We Do This Project at All?	p. 33
Decide to Commit, Kill, or Transform the Project	p. 34
Commit to a Project	p. 35
Kill a Project	p. 38
How to Kill a Project and Keep It Dead	p. 40
Killing a Senior Manager's Pet Project	p. 41
Kill Doomed Projects	p. 42
Transform a Project	p. 44
Now Try This	p. 46
Rank the Portfolio	p. 47
Never Rank Alone	p. 47
Rank Order the Projects in the Portfolio Using Points	p. 48
Leftover Points Provide Metadata	p. 51
Rank the Projects by Risk	p. 55
Use Your Organization's Context to Rank Projects	p. 56
Who's Waiting for Your Projects to Be Completed?	p. 58
Rank the Work by Your Products' Position in the Marketplace	p. 59
Use Other Comparison Methods to Rank Your Projects	p. 60
Don't Use ROI to Rank	p. 63
Your Project Portfolio is an Indicator of Your Organization's Overall Health	p. 65
Publish the Portfolio Ranking	p. 65
Now Try This	p. 67
Collaborate on the Portfolio	p. 69
Organize to Commit	p. 69
Build Trust	p. 70
Prepare for Collaboration	p. 72
Set the Stage for Collaboration	p. 73
Facilitate the Portfolio Evaluation Meeting	p. 74
How to Say No to More Work	p. 76
Fund Projects Incrementally	p. 78
Never Make a Big Commitment	p. 79
Discover Barriers to Collaboration	p. 81
Who Needs to Collaborate on the Portfolio?	p. 88
Now Try This	p. 89
Iterate on the Portfolio	p. 91
Decide When to Review the Portfolio	p. 91
Select an Iteration Length for Your Review Cycles	p. 93
Defend the Portfolio from Attack	p. 99
How to Decide If You Can't Change Life Cycles, Road Maps, or Budgets	p. 99
Make Decisions as Late as Possible	p. 101
Now Try This	p. 102
Make Portfolio Decisions	p. 103
Keep a Parking Lot of Projects	p. 103
Conduct a Portfolio Evaluation Meeting	p. 104
Conduct a Portfolio Evaluation at Least Quarterly to Start	p. 109
Review Your Decisions	p. 111
Now Try This	p. 111
Evolve Your Portfolio	p. 113
Lean Helps Your Evolve Your Portfolio Approach	p. 113
Choose What to Stabilize	p. 114
Stabilize the Timebox	p. 115
Stabilize the Number of Work Items in Progress	p. 117
Fix the Queue Length for a Team	p. 121
When You Need to Fix Cost	p. 123
Management Changes When You Stabilize Something About Your Projects	p. 123
Now Try This	p. 124
Measure the Essentials	p. 125
Measure Value	p. 125
What You Need to Measure About Your Projects	p. 127
Measure Project Velocity: Current and Historical	p. 129
Measure Cumulative Flow for the Project	p. 132
Measure Obstacles Preventing the Team's Progress	p. 134
Measure the Product Backlog Burndown Chart	p. 138
Measure Run Rate and Other Cost Data, If Necessary	p. 138
Don't Even Try to Measure Individual Productivity	p. 139
What You Need to Measure About the Portfolio	p. 140
Measure Capacity by Team, Not by Individual	p. 143
People Finish More with Lean and Agile	p. 144
Now Try This	p. 145
Define Your Mission	p. 147
Define the Business You are In	p. 147
What Good is a Mission, Anyway?	p. 148
Define an Actionable Mission for the Organization	p. 149
Draft a Mission from Scratch	p. 151
Brainstorm the Essentials of a Mission	p. 152
Refine the Mission	p. 154
Derive Your Mission from Your Work	p. 155
How to Define a Mission When No One Else Will	p. 156
Beware of the Mission Statement Traps	p. 157
Test Your Mission	p. 159
Make the Mission Real for Everyone	p. 159
Now Try This	p. 160
Start Somewhere...But Start	p. 161
Glossary	p. 163
Bibliography	p. 167
Index	p. 171
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