breakout session overview
There’s a lot of great theory out there about how to properly plan, monitor, and measure the results of project portfolios. Most project portfolio management ideas start with a corporate strategic plan. This leads to portfolio planning and project selection based on those strategies. Once the projects are started, a robust monitoring process is required to ensure execution and delivery against the stated goals. Finally, tangible results should be measured post-project to compare the original targets with actual results. There are also metric driven theories to drive this analysis such as Efficient Frontier.
Sounds simple enough. But we’ve worked with well over 100 leading PMOs and the number that embrace all the major components of PPM theory is precisely zero. And they have some good reasons, starting with the lack of a real corporate strategy to the difficulties of measuring the business benefits of projects that only indirectly contribute to actual corporate results.
In this session we will review several common PPM
practices. We’ll draw on the experience of the practitioners in the room, as
well as the presenter, to explore which practices work, and which don’t, for
different types of PMOs. These will include portfolio planning and
organization based on strategic goals, investment classes, business units,
etc. We’ll look at how project performance is monitored and aggregated into
portfolio performance. And we’ll look at the difficult topic of measuring
tangible benefits at both the project and portfolio levels.
Dave Blumhorst is the VP of Professional Services for Daptiv, the
leading PPM SaaS provider. Over the last 10 years, Dave has provided advice
and consulting in IT and PMO management to many Fortune 1000 companies and
was the Seniorr Director for the IT-PMO at PeopleSoft. He is a seasoned
executive that has run IT, professional services, and finance departments,
including stints as CIO at mid-size companies and as controller and CFO at
small to mid-sized companies. Throughout his 30+ year career he has always
found innovative ways to use technology to create business value.
