Programme Management

Key issues for organisations having difficulty managing the abundance of their projects are:

Maintaining control and direction

• Schedule slips
• Avoiding costs from funding high risk, poorly aligned, low projected return projects
• Budget overspends in time and money
• Funding high value projects rather than high cost, low return ones
• End results that do not reflect original remits
• Improving resource utilisation with more effective resource planning and schedule optimisation
• Projects that never reach conclusions
• Key projects getting ‘lost’ over time
• Needing to free up capital for new investments

Determining the ‘right’ pecking order of projects

It can be very difficult to determining the relative worth of one project against another, especially when Project Managers fight hard for allocation of resources to ‘their’ project. This can undermine decisions when evaluating proposed additions to the project list.

Turning off under-resourced projects

Often too many projects may exist relative to the capacity of the organisation. The lack of co-ordination and prioritisation between projects leads to failure to recognise some initiatives as strategically valuable projects. This leads to dilution of resources, conflicting projects objectives and ultimately failures.

Managing project politics

Organisations require an adequate and robust PPM process to make fact-based decisions about their portfolio of projects. The most challenging aspect is the ‘people’ side of PPM. Staff who have committed themselves to a project for a significant amount of time, work and intellectual investment will identify themselves as ‘owners’ of the project, and as such, have difficulty in assessing their project’s worth objectively.