Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects
242
Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects
242eBook
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Overview
You have too many projects, and firefighting and multitasking are keeping you from finishing any of them. You need to manage your project portfolio. This fully updated and expanded bestseller arms you with agile and lean ways to collect all your work and decide which projects you should do first, second, and never. See how to tie your work to your organization's mission and show your managers, your board, and your staff what you can accomplish and when. Picture the work you have, and make those difficult decisions, ensuring that all your strength is focused where it needs to be.
All your projects and programs make up your portfolio. But how much time do you actually spend on your projects, and how much time do you spend on emergency fire drills or waste through multitasking? This book gives you insightful ways to rank all the projects you're working on and figure out the right staffing and schedule so projects get finished faster.
The trick is adopting lean and agile approaches to projects, whether they're software projects, projects that include hardware, or projects that depend on chunks of functionality from other suppliers. Find out how to define the mission of your team, group, or department, with none of the buzzwords that normally accompany a mission statement. Armed with the work and the mission, you'll manage your portfolio better and make those decisions that define the true leaders in the organization.
With this expanded second edition, discover how to scale project portfolio management from one team to the entire enterprise, and integrate Cost of Delay when ranking projects. Additional Kanban views provide even more ways to visualize your portfolio.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781680503906 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pragmatic Bookshelf |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 242 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
known as the "Pragmatic Manager," provides frank advice for your tough problems. She's the author of ten books about management and project management, ranging from hiring and the job search to the project portfolio. See her site, http://www.jrothman.com for articles, and her email newsletter, the Pragmatic Manager.
Table of Contents
Foreword Ron Jeffries xiii
Foreword Tim Lister xv
Preface xvii
1 Meet Your Project Portfolio 1
1.1 What a Project Portfolio is 2
1.2 See the High-and Low-Level Views 4
1.3 Now Try This 7
2 See Your Future 9
2.1 Managing with a Project Portfolio 9
2.2 Managing Without a Project Portfolio 10
2.3 What Are Your Emergency Projects? 13
2.4 Learn Approaches to the Project Portfolio 14
2.5 Why You Should Care About the Project Portfolio 15
2.6 Your Portfolio Reflects Your Influence Level 18
2.7 Now Try This 19
3 Create the First Draft of Your Portfolio 21
3.1 Know What Work to Collect 21
3.2 Is the Work a Project or a Program? 24
3.3 Organize Your Projects into Programs As Necessary 25
3.4 Organize the Portfolio 29
3.5 Using Tools to Manage a Portfolio 30
3.6 Now Try This 31
4 Evaluate Your Projects 33
4.1 Should We Do This Project at All? 33
4.2 Decide to Commit, Kill, or Transform the Project 34
4.3 Commit to a Project 35
4.4 Kill a Project 38
4.5 How to Kill a Project and Keep It Dead 40
4.6 Killing a Senior Manager's Pet Project 41
4.7 Kill Doomed Projects 42
4.8 Transform a Project 44
4.9 Now Try This 46
5 Rank the Portfolio 47
5.1 Never Rank Alone 47
5.2 Rank Order the Projects in the Portfolio Using Points 48
5.3 Leftover Points Provide Metadata 51
5.4 Rank the Projects by Risk 55
5.5 Use Your Organization's Context to Rank Projects 56
5.6 Who's Waiting for Your Projects to Be Completed? 58
5.7 Rank the Work by Your Products' Position in the Marketplace 59
5.8 Use Other Comparison Methods to Rank Your Projects 60
5.9 Don't Use ROI to Rank 63
5.10 Your Project Portfolio is an Indicator of Your Organization'sOverall Health 65
5.11 Publish the Portfolio Ranking 65
5.12 Now Try This 67
6 Collaborate on the Portfolio 69
6.1 Organize to Commit 69
6.2 Build Trust 70
6.3 Prepare for Collaboration 72
6.4 Set the Stage for Collaboration 73
6.5 Facilitate the Portfolio Evaluation Meeting 74
6.6 How to Say No to More Work 76
6.7 Fund Projects Incrementally 78
6.8 Never Make a Big Commitment 79
6.9 Discover Barriers to Collaboration 81
6.10 Who Needs to Collaborate on the Portfolio? 88
6.11 Now Try This 89
7 Iterate on the Portfolio 91
7.1 Decide When to Review the Portfolio 91
7.2 Select an Iteration Length for Your Review Cycles 93
7.3 Defend the Portfolio from Attack 99
7.4 How to Decide If You Can't Change Life Cycles, Road Maps, or Budgets 99
7.5 Make Decisions as Late as Possible 101
7.6 Now Try This 102
8 Make Portfolio Decisions 103
8.1 Keep a Parking Lot of Projects 103
8.2 Conduct a Portfolio Evaluation Meeting 104
8.3 Conduct a Portfolio Evaluation at Least Quarterly to Start 109
8.4 Review Your Decisions 111
8.5 Now Try This 111
9 Evolve Your Portfolio 113
9.1 Lean Helps Your Evolve Your Portfolio Approach 113
9.2 Choose What to Stabilize 114
9.3 Stabilize the Timebox 115
9.4 Stabilize the Number of Work Items in Progress 117
9.5 Fix the Queue Length for a Team 121
9.6 When You Need to Fix Cost 123
9.7 Management Changes When You Stabilize Something About Your Projects 123
9.8 Now Try This 124
10 Measure the Essentials 125
10.1 Measure Value 125
10.2 What You Need to Measure About Your Projects 127
10.3 Measure Project Velocity: Current and Historical 129
10.4 Measure Cumulative Flow for the Project 132
10.5 Measure Obstacles Preventing the Team's Progress 134
10.6 Measure the Product Backlog Burndown Chart 138
10.7 Measure Run Rate and Other Cost Data, If Necessary 138
10.8 Don't Even Try to Measure Individual Productivity 139
10.9 What You Need to Measure About the Portfolio 140
10.10 Measure Capacity by Team, Not by Individual 143
10.11 People Finish More with Lean and Agile 144
10.12 Now Try This 145
11 Define Your Mission 147
11.1 Define the Business You are In 147
11.2 What Good is a Mission, Anyway? 148
11.3 Define an Actionable Mission for the Organization 149
11.4 Draft a Mission from Scratch 151
11.5 Brainstorm the Essentials of a Mission 152
11.6 Refine the Mission 154
11.7 Derive Your Mission from Your Work 155
11.8 How to Define a Mission When No One Else Will 156
11.9 Beware of the Mission Statement Traps 157
11.10 Test Your Mission 159
11.11 Make the Mission Real for Everyone 159
11.12 Now Try This 160
12 Start Somewhere...But Start 161
13 Glossary 163
Bibliography 167
Index 171