Many companies end up having an inflated project portfolio because they don’t treat projects as financial investments and they execute inadequate project approval processes. Many of the projects in the portfolio, consequently, end up lingering in ‘open’ or ‘green’ status for extended periods of time and end up draining valuable resources. It’s critical for companies to get a handle on all of the projects within their portfolios.

In analyzing these inflated project portfolios, most of the projects have little or no linkages to the strategic intent or the corporate objectives of the firm. Additionally, the status for these projects is usually reported as ‘in-progress’ or ‘on target,’ even though the project completion dates have been pushed back several times. When companies take the time to capture a snapshot of all of their projects, they are usually quite surprised with what they find:

• Project redundancies
• Misalignment with strategic objectives
• Incomplete business cases
• Little of no business value
• Incomplete project charters
• No management support
• Missed completion dates
• Little or no activity
• No tracking or reporting of value metrics

In many cases, the more projects that are in the portfolio end up having fewer resources to support them, resulting in fewer projects being completed successfully. Quite often it makes good business sense to cut the project portfolio in half. It may sound counter-intuitive, but by having less projects, an organization can actually complete more of them in a more efficient and cost-effective manner.

If project benefits aren’t directly related to the corporate strategic goals and objectives, they really aren’t benefits, or at least not as beneficial as they should be. True project benefits are ones that contribute directly to the overall strategic intent of the firm, the big picture. Unfortunately, many projects are aimed at alleviating immediate distress and often do not incorporate strategies that are aligned to th e corporate vision. This mindset has to change as businesses are becoming more project-driven in their approach to achieving their strategic objectives.

Resch Group provides expertise and knowledge to quickly identify process and change improvements and to develop relationships with the appropriate business units to ensure the change initiatives are supported and lasting. Some of the key services that we offer include the following:

• Establish and deploy a common set of project management processes, methodologies and templates
• Facilitate improved project team communications by defining and implementing common processes, deliverables, and terminology
• Establish and support a central repository to store project management material, to include deliverables, processes status reports and other key project material
• Develop reports and dashboards to track organization-wide metrics on the state of project management, project delivery and the value being provided to the business by the numerous project investments
• Provide training to build core project management and business competencies
• Deliver project management coaching and mentoring support to keep projects from getting into trouble and support at risk projects
• Perform the role of corporate change agent within the organization and educate management and project teams on the value gained through the use of consistent project management processes
• Develop processes to evaluate and justify projects for approval, to include business case ROI analysis, risk analysis and business alignment

Give us a call at 201-803-4653 to find out how we can help you with your PMO or Portfolio Management challenges or simply fill out our online form and we will be in touch with you.