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18 05, 2017

Prioritizing Projects: Advanced Portfolio Management II (5 of 5)

By |2017-05-23T15:41:58-08:00May 18th, 2017|Blog|0 Comments

This is the fifth and final post in our series on doing more portfolio management with less project data. You’ll find the whole series here.

Data needed at each level of portfolio management. The only required data are the three items in the orange Beginner box. How much further you go depends on your people, your portfolio, and your goals. See the first post in this series for more information.

Prioritizing Projects: Advanced Portfolio Management II

Once you’ve collected project information and gathered some information about project value, whether through a simple scoring process or in the form of complex financial metrics, you have enough information to build a prioritization (what we call a “bang-for-the-buck curve”)—see below for an example. This analysis is helpful for prioritizing projects in terms of value for money. Our video on project prioritization has all the lurid details on prioritization methods, best practices, and pitfalls. (more…)

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18 05, 2017

Driving Portfolio Value: Advanced Portfolio Management (4 of 5)

By |2017-05-23T15:41:58-08:00May 18th, 2017|Blog|0 Comments

This is the fourth post in our series on doing more portfolio management with less project data. You’ll find the whole series here.

Data needed at each level of portfolio management. The only required data are the three items in the orange Beginner box. How much further you go depends on your people, your portfolio, and your goals. See the first post in this series for more information.

Driving Portfolio Value: Advanced Portfolio Management

At this point, you’ve managed to collect key data about all of your projects and created some visualizations that show how those projects measure up against strategic goals and budgets. In other words, you have a good idea of what you are doing. But how do you figure out what you should be doing? That’s advanced portfolio management, and it begins with a clear picture of the value of your projects.

Not everything you work on will be of highest value, and therefore not everything you work on will be highest priority. Valuing your projects will help you prioritize projects and (perhaps more importantly) provide teams with a common understanding of the value each initiative is expected to deliver. The key word here is expected—at least initially, you don’t know if every project will live up to your expectations. For this post, we’ll put aside methods for estimating risk and focus on a few methods for calculating a best guess at likely value. There are a large number of approaches for estimating project value, so many that they represent a continuum of approaches, from simplest and broadest to most sophisticated and detailed, rather than a list. Here, I’ve highlighted a few points on that continuum. (more…)

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18 05, 2017

It’s Going to Cost You: Intermediate Portfolio Management (3 of 5)

By |2017-05-23T15:41:58-08:00May 18th, 2017|Blog|0 Comments

This is the third post in our series on doing more portfolio management with less project data. You’ll find the whole series here.

Data needed at each level of portfolio management. The only required data are the three items in the orange Beginner box. How much further you go depends on your people, your portfolio, and your goals. See the first post in this series for more information.

It’s Going to Cost You: Intermediate Portfolio Management

Beginning portfolio management is all about finding out what you have. Cost is the next frontier; after all, portfolio management is tricky (and necessary) because you have more to do than your people, facilities, and funds allow. Determining cost is not just about collecting receipts and purchase orders; it’s a complex set of questions about what’s currently being spent and what’s likely to be spent based on the forecasted needs of projects in progress and projects the company would like to take on. At this stage, portfolio management can help answer a range of questions about cost:

  • How much are you spending on each project in the current budget cycle?
  • What is the spending forecast by budget cycle through the life of each project, up to and including launch/completion?
  • What are the skills (or specific people) needed for each project? When will they be needed and for how long?

Answering these questions requires a variety of data sets, from relatively easy-to-acquire data about current spending to complex forecasts about project needs. All of it is valuable. Even the first level—a simple estimate of current spending for each project—will help you assess the alignment of resources with strategic goals and better understand where your people, funds, and attention are focused. (more…)

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18 05, 2017

Getting Started: Beginning Portfolio Management (2 of 5)

By |2017-05-23T15:41:58-08:00May 18th, 2017|Blog|0 Comments

This is the second post in our series on doing more portfolio management with less project data. You’ll find the whole series here.


Data needed at each level of portfolio management. The only required data are the three items in the orange Beginner box. How much further you go depends on your people, your portfolio, and your goals. See the first post in this series for more information.

Getting Started: Beginning Portfolio Management

If you’re just starting out in portfolio management, the first step is compiling a list of your company’s active projects. This foundation will get you on the right track for basic portfolio management. Simply compiling this master list will lead to portfolio-enhancing conversations with your management team as you identify projects that can be combined, deferred, or shut down altogether.

But building a master list for the first time will require persistence. Don’t send out a spreadsheet and expect a crystal-clear list of all initiatives to arrive in your inbox. Ferreting out every project is deceptively difficult. Some projects are higher profile than others; many companies have a large number of under-the-radar, skunkworks projects, and even zombie projects that have been formally canceled—sometimes more than once—yet somehow refuse to die. You might also encounter more than a few redundant projects. Getting to all this information generally requires a combination of top-down assessments (where you ask each division or department to list its ongoing initiatives) and bottom-up investigative work (where you canvass teams to find out what they are working on day to day). Taken together, the dossiers you build from these two sources will produce a complete picture of what is ongoing at your firm. (more…)

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15 05, 2017

Portfolio Management for Everyone: Getting Value and Building Capability (1 of 5)

By |2017-05-23T15:41:58-08:00May 15th, 2017|Blog|0 Comments

It’s a familiar refrain from the project and portfolio managers we talk to: “These portfolio views are amazing, but there is no way we have the data to use Enrich Analytics.” We LOVE hearing this, because we can respond with good news: You probably have enough information to leverage our tools and gain big insights into your portfolio’s alignment with strategy, and you might even have enough to prioritize your initiatives. In fact, you can get some value from Enrich’s powerful cloud-based platforms no matter what data you have. This post is the first in a series that summarizes the data you need for basic, intermediate, and advanced portfolio management. The figure below captures the key data sets as you build maturity in using Enrich’s platform and in developing your portfolio analysis process.

Data needed at each level of portfolio management. The only requirements to get started are the three items in the orange Beginner box. How much further you go depends on your people, your portfolio, and your goals.

Everything in the orange Beginner box is essential. You can’t get your portfolio initiative off the ground without those pieces, so start there. Within the Intermediate and Advanced sections, you can pick and choose what suits your needs; the left-most options are the easiest to collect—those on the right are progressively more difficult (but also likely to pay deeper dividends). The Advanced section is divided into two groups, capturing two different kinds of value-based criteria: scores and market/financial metrics. I’ve separated them because some companies are metric-averse, preferring a scoring model, and others rely almost exclusively on metrics. The right answer for a given portfolio depends on the company’s culture, portfolio content, and strategic objectives.

We developed this series of posts as an alternative to the other “how-to-PPM” guides available on the interwebs today, which tend to suggest that all or nothing is the only way. Our goal is to make portfolio management more accessible to more companies by demystifying it—and showing just how little information is really needed to get substantial value from a simple portfolio process. This series focuses on the data required at each step because so much of the resistance we’ve seen to portfolio management involves data acquisition. We hear, over and over again, “Nobody has time to provide it and nobody believes what we’ve compiled.” We think our stepwise approach, by making the process manageable, can help a lot of companies get started. (more…)

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9 03, 2016

From Data Scapegoat to Data Shepherd

By |2017-05-23T15:41:59-08:00March 9th, 2016|Blog|0 Comments

cartoon goatIn most R&D organizations, the portfolio management team walks a narrow line between the project teams and the executives. The portfolio staff polls the project teams for information about each new and ongoing initiative, builds portfolio views, and shares the updated state of the portfolio with executives. In an ideal world, the portfolio team members are like data shepherds, ensuring that critical R&D information stays up-to-date and ever-available for executive needs.
But when all is not well in the portfolio pasture, portfolio teams hear comments like this from the project teams and the executives:

  • The review is tomorrow at 11? Oh, I’ll send you a project update tomorrow morning. Okay?
  • Project A must have a bigger market than that. Your numbers are incorrect.
  • We updated our project forecast yesterday–you aren’t using the latest information.
  • We are using a different cost of capital so your numbers don’t tie out with our spreadsheet.
  • I can’t use these data when over half the projects haven’t been updated since the last review.
  • Who changed these schedule estimates? Nobody asked the operations committee if a six-month slip in deliverables was acceptable!

(more…)

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15 08, 2015

Your First Portfolio Review Won’t Go As Planned

By |2017-05-23T15:42:00-08:00August 15th, 2015|Blog|0 Comments

It doesn’t matter how much you think you’ve prepared, how many run-throughs you’ve done, how many assurances you have from your project teams that all the data will be there, and be correct. Something will go wrong: a critical piece of data will be missing, the slides will be wrong, an unanswerable question will derail the discussion. Like an opening night on Broadway or the first docking attempt between two orbiting spaceships, there is simply no way to anticipate what might go wrong—there are no substitutes for the lessons you learn during your inaugural attempt at a portfolio review.

So what can you do about it? In advance of that first review, less than you would like. Data will arrive late, incomplete, or not at all, and the review will happen anyway, warts and all. But you can embrace this opportunity to learn from the experience and make the next portfolio review better.
(more…)

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