Prospective Partner Profile - Program Management

We anticipate that this pack will appeal to large organisations or service providers who manage large, complex and expensive project portfolios. The ‘sweet spot’ for this market offering is within portfolios where the interdependencies between projects within the portfolio are complex and difficult to identify. In these environments it is common for potentially small and less visible projects to hold resources that are critical to a suite of larger more expensive projects in the portfolio.

Using ONA techniques we survey project managers to build a ‘picture’ of the interdependencies within the portfolio to enable program managers to direct their attention to those projects that are potentially having the biggest impact on the performance of the portfolio as a whole.

A collateral benefit from the analysis is to identify the ‘community’ of project managers who need to co-ordinate together to achieve the optimal program output.

Case Study - Defence Organisation

Context
Large defence organisation with multi-billion project portfolio looking for better ways to manage this.

The Problem
Existing portfolio management processes and tools did not provide a view into how projects in the portfolio were relying on each other to deliver outcomes. Therefore the executive management team was not confident that it understood underlying implications for the overall portfolio of individual projects running behind schedule.

Solution
Application of a network perspective of the projects and their inter-dependencies. Project Managers' view of their project's interdependencies were compared to the views of the Program Management office. Network visualisation was used to inform the executive team about the interdependencies in the project portfolio.

Benefits
The visualisation of the project interdependencies allows executive to make fast decision. It provides a truly unique view into the make-up of the portfolio and strategic decisions can be made based on a full understanding of the implications of decisions made.

Example Project Interdependency Map.

Deliverables

This service has been developed in conjunction with our research partner University of Technology Sydney based on the original concept developed by Graham Durant Law. The methodology for conducting a Project Interdependencies analysis is to use our on-line survey and visualisation tools to develop the picture of what the project interdependencies within the portfolio look like from the perspective of the project managers that run them.

The service includes access to Optimice’s ONA Survey tools with a pre-defined template for project interdependencies questions provided. Partners are able to add additional questions as they see fit, but as a minimum, the template questions are required.

Some example tools and outputs are shown here:

The above representation shows how a project dashboard can be developed to identify the level of criticality a particular project may or may not have on the overall portfolio.