Book Review: Advanced Project Portfolio Management and the PMO
I recently slogged through an underrated little number called, ‘Advanced Project Portfolio Management and the PMO: Multiplying ROI at Warp Speed‘ by Kendall & Rollins. Despite the fact that it reads (and sounds) like a whitepaper, it’s a good book which makes two points incredibly well:
1) Too many organizations try to save money on projects (cost efficiency) when the benefits of completing the project earlier far outweigh the potential cost savings.
You might, for example, be able to complete project X with perfect resource management (all staff are perfectly busy!) in 100 days for $1 million. Alternatively, you could hire some extra people and have them sitting around occasionally at a total cost of $1.3 million, but the project would be completed in only 60 days.
What’s that 40 day difference worth? Well, if the project is strategic in nature, it could be worth everything. It could mean being first to market with a new product or possessing a required capability for an upcoming bid which you don’t even know about yet. It could mean impressing the heck out of some skeptical new client or being prepared for a surprise audit. Sometimes the benefits outweigh the cost savings.
2) Project management exists only to better deliver benefits and capabilities. It doesn’t exist for its own sake, it’s not some kind of innately useful, primordial thing. If it isn’t helping deliver benefits and capabilities, then you can send the whole rattling project management caravan off the side of a tall cliff.
This is where so many organizations get themselves into trouble. They hire a bunch of project managers and demand they follow this or that methodology. But why? Is it because — well — this is what everybody else is doing? Or is it because this methodology will deliver 15% more projects with the same resources? Or this methodology will reduce project cycles by 20 days? Is anybody even measuring these things before/after implementing all these processes?
If you’re going to go down the project management road (and you should!), you need to understand why you’re doing it, and how you’re going to measure your success (hint: throughput!).
434 pp. Recommended.
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