Program and Project Portfolio Management
Our practical experience structuring PMOs and driving major organizational initiatives shapes our thinking. Program managers from Actionable Strategies focus on driving a set of projects to successful completion while providing coaching to project managers.
Project portfolio management is an ongoing discipline of managing a portfolio of investments. Portfolios are continuously optimized to maximize returns while considering investments, risks and correlation, both positive and negative. Managing portfolios is highly strategic and requires tough business discipline to make difficult decisions.
Launching a new product is a high-impact initiative with strategic implications.
Product Launches present the most complex project management challenges. In addition to defining product strategies and creating product roadmaps, Actionable Strategies develops and implements products. When called upon to act as Product and Project Managers for Product Launches, we provide these functions in critical situations.
Actionable Strategies has built full product development teams to enable clients to get to market rapidly. We then manage the transition process to allow clients to attain self-sufficiency.
Opportunity
Launching a new product is a high-impact initiative with strategic implications. Many organizations focus only on the product-related activities of a launch, but success is generally the result of well-conceived plans that are effectively executed. Studies have shown that a comprehensive New Product Introduction process delivers meaningful financial and broader business results.
Adoption of Lean and Agile approaches further increases the need for effective Product Launch capabilities. An integrated Lean approach should incorporate Agile development from concept/feasibility to end-of-life.
Challenges
Product Launches present the most complex project management challenges. PMs require cross-domain expertise that may not be available to them internally.
Actionable Strategies has been called upon to act as Product and Project Managers for Product Launches as well as support these functions in critical situations.
Solution Approach
Product Launches are best treated as programs comprised of inter-linked projects. Actionable Strategies embeds into the client organization and acts collaboratively to drive success. Documentation of the process and key decisions enable clients to launch future products with greater success. Actionable Strategies applies a high-level Market Entry Framework proven in a variety of market situations.
Examples of Product Launch activities from past projects include:
- Market assessment / Product strategy
- Confidential competitive analysis
- Financial modeling / lifecycle cost analysis
- Environmental impact and economic assessment
- Regulatory and Industry body engagement
- Iterative product development
- Process design for implementation and operations
- Customer product testing and pre-launch surveys
- Sales, partner and distributor management
- Training and ramp-up of operations and support
- Program management of changing expectations, budgets, timelines and risks
- Post-launch market feedback and recalibration
Engaging a number of expert advisors from Actionable Strategies enables our clients to benefit from extensive industry experience and also apply proven concepts from other markets. The engagement model is significantly more cost effective than using dedicated resources.
Actionable Strategies Value
Actionable Strategies can apply consultants with different expertise and capabilities on an as-needed basis. Experience comes from many global markets and challenging industries including:
¨ Communications ¨ Consumer Goods ¨ Energy and Mining ¨ Financial Services ¨ Healthcare/Pharma | ¨ Manufacturing ¨ Publishing ¨ Real Estate ¨ Retailing ¨ Software |
Project failure rates are notoriously high with only one-third of all project successfully closed while meeting time and budget targets. Change management has been one of the critical factors required for successful project implementation for many years.
Excellent Change Management can improve ROI by a factor of 4 compared to poor Change Management. At the company level, organizations with effective change and communication are 3.5 times as likely to significantly outperform their peers.
Business Need
Project failure rates are notoriously high with only one-third of all project successfully closed while meeting time and budget targets (Standish Group). When examined more closely, project success and failure are directly related to project management discipline. The relative difference in performance is dramatic. High performing organizations are able to successfully close 89% of their projects whereas low performing organizations complete only 36%. (Project Management Institute).
Change Management Drives Success
Change management has been one of the critical factors required for successful project implementation for many years. Deployment of technology, process changes, training and communication are all important foundational elements of a project. More importantly, driving change and fostering adoption to capture targeted gains is essential to measurable success. Change management directly impacts the realization of project benefits.
When measuring returns, widely divergent ROI results were directly attributable to change management practices. Excellent Change Management can improve ROI by a factor of 4 compared to poor Change Management. (McKinsey)
The dramatic improvement in project success and realization of ROI attributable to Change Management creates a management imperative to proactively employ effective practices.
Organizational Best Practice
According to a majority of senior executives, Change Management is an organizational best practice. They directly link organizational performance to the adoption of change. (PWC 4th Global Portfolio and Programme Management Survey) With numerous senior executives reporting visibility into demonstrably large benefits from Change Management, establishing a clear business case is obvious.
Findings and Pitfalls
Experience from our client engagements confirms research on Change Management:
- Organizations with effective change and communication are 3.5 times as likely to significantly outperform their peers (Towers Watson Change and Communication ROI Survey)
- 78% of managers found training in projects ineffective (Towers Watson)
- “The content of change management is reasonably correct, but the managerial capacity to implement it has been woefully underdeveloped” (Harvard Business Review)
- An outside consultant is best suited to develop a change management plan (Quality Beyond Six Sigma, ISBN 978 0 7506 5561 3, 2003)
For large programs and strategic initiatives, financial analysis can be quite complex. Actionable Strategies uses lifecycle cost analysis for account for all costs related to strategic initiatives. These can be country-level in scope and decades in duration. Combined with sensitivity analysis and other financial modeling tools, we help our clients understand the potential financial implications matched to the horizon of the investment.
This presentation to the Project Management Institute addresses the impact of Cloud Computing on project management. After covering Cloud concepts, it dives into effectively incorporating Cloud Computing into the project lifecycle: Initiating, Planning, Executing and Closing.
The presentation covers a broad range of issues outside of technology. These include operations, finance and human capital.
The client is among the top ten banks and asset managers globally. It was unable to accurately report enterprise wide risk and revenue by counterparty and country. The exposure posed an unacceptable business threat visible at the Board of Directors level.
Actionable Strategies managed the program to successful completion: on schedule and within budget. The client was able to understand enterprise risk for the entire customer base.
Client Profile
The client is among the top ten banks and asset managers globally with a presence in 36 countries and over 100 markets. It deals with tens of trillions in assets for institutions and individuals. Services include banking, clearing, custody and asset management.
Situation/Problem
The client was unable to accurately report enterprise wide risk and revenue by counterparty and country because of poor data quality in their central customer database. The exposure posed an unacceptable business threat visible at the Board of Directors level. Regulators from around the world also showed concern.
The underlying technical situation was an enterprise data management problem. The central customer database was actually composed of two legacy systems. After a merger, the combined bank continued to maintain data in both systems. This prevented effective reporting across the two systems. Data quality issues abounded as the databases were neither synchronized nor cleansed.
Multiple Legacy Systems
Information and processes exist in legacy systems confined to the heritage organizations where they were developed. In addition to multiple core banking systems, duplicate data was housed in clearing, asset management and capital markets systems.
Organizational Challenges
Business stakeholders all had their own interests. While the program executive managed the board and senior executives, he required strong support to manage the diverse stakeholders. Actionable Strategies was engaged because of our ability to work with executives, experience in banking and technical knowledge including legacy systems.
In-Flight Re-engineering
A strategic plan was formulated to re-engineer the customer database, while simultaneously remediating the data. Numerous projects were created to execute the plan. The basic categories included:
- Data modeling
- Data quality management
- Process re-engineering
- System renovation
- Vendor management
- Reporting and analytics
Re-engineering in-flight processes and systems is not only exceptionally difficult but requires vision across the organization and into the future.
Program Risks
The plan faced several significant implementation risks.
- Coordination across multiple technology and business teams as well as outside contractors
- Significant reengineering of business processes to enforce data quality at the source
- Remediation of existing data before application controls could be put in place, meaning data could not be maintained in its remediated state
- Solution depended on assumptions about the current and future state that could only be verified as the program proceeded
Approach/Solution
Actionable Strategies identified the critical program deliverables, assessed their current status and schedule, cost and delivery risk as well as their dependencies on other deliverables. These findings were distilled into a program dashboard that provided clear indication as to what aspects of the program presented the greatest risks and what those risks implied for other elements of the program. A streamlined process was then established to refine the program against its objectives on a monthly basis.
The program dashboard identified critical areas of significant risk to enable root cause analysis. This identified the principal contributors to those risks and advised the program sponsor on specific actions to address those sources.
As key assumptions regarding the data remediation approach were found to be sub-optimal, the program was able to re-factor that information to design an alternate approach that could still be implemented without serious impact on the program schedule. Actionable Strategies then took a leadership role in implementing the revised approach to remediation.
Business Results
By focusing on the delivery of key business objectives, the client was able to adapt the technology approach. Adapting to an evolving understanding of data quality and the future state that was required to meet these objectives, the bank met internal and regulatory requirements without incident.
Likewise, by focusing on key dependencies and critical risks, the program was able to proactively address challenges and risks to the project plan. The program came within budget and schedule expectations despite constantly emerging challenges.
Based on this highly visible success, the client executive was assigned another large program. He was subsequently recruited away by a competitor to run a key data initiative.