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March 1, 2003

A Straighter Path From Vision to Execution

Align projects to wider enterprise goals

by Reagan Ramsower

For an organization to achieve its vision, its leader must be able to make the right decisions. One particular example of a critical decision is the allocation of staff time and attention. Unfortunately, knowing where the team's effort is being deployed and how effective the allocation will be in achieving mission-derived objectives is a concept that still evades otherwise savvy business leaders — especially if they don't have the tools and processes in place to provide this knowledge.

As managers and leaders, we're charged with developing departmental objectives that are aligned with the enterprise mission, and then instigating and tracking projects designed to meet our objectives. This all-too-obvious process is simply the best method of investing your department's time and money to help the enterprise achieve its mission.

Clustering your department's projects around its objectives produces a project portfolio view that enables you to assess the probability that your department's projects will achieve those objectives. Establishing the correct portfolio, tracking its progress, and measuring the likelihood that the projects will achieve your department's objective is the "organizational intelligence" you need to ensure that you're making the right resource investment decisions and that they're aligned with the strategic goals of the enterprise.

Unlisted

I became the CIO for Baylor University in the fall of 2000. The first week on the job, I asked for a master list of all the IT department's ongoing projects. There wasn't one. The department didn't have a consistent method of tracking projects, and while some project management methodologies were applied to large projects, the smaller projects — those with two- to six-week life cycles — were usually reactions to a client's request and invisible to management.

I realized that it would be impossible to make sound business decisions in this situation, because I didn't know how most of my department's resources were allocated and how we were progressing toward our objectives. To ensure the portfolio was delivering maximum value, I needed visibility into all of our projects that take longer than two weeks to achieve.

Forest for the Trees

To ensure that organizational goals are being realized, project portfolio management (PPM) solutions look at all projects within an organization under one umbrella, rather than looking at projects as individual activities.

PPM is the continuous process of tracking and prioritizing a set of project-oriented initiatives in order to optimize the mix of value and costs. In this flexible environment, you can shift resources and assess overall risks and benefits, freeing you to focus on projects that are both achievable and strategically aligned with business goals. The resulting project portfolio is a dynamic set of projects that you can manage and update to keep step with business and economic changes.

My department has 230 to 250 different projects going at any one time. These projects and their status are now visible to everyone in IT (via the PPM solution from Pacific Edge Software Inc.), creating a departmental awareness of how we're allocating our effort. This PPM system groups projects into folders aligned with the IT department's objectives, which in turn are aligned with the university's strategic goals. We therefore ensure that our projects support the organization's strategies.

For example, in late May we instituted a project to deploy Microsoft systems and software — specifically Exchange services — to all of our 14,000-plus students before the fall semester started in August. It's easy to see how this project mapped to one of our department's objectives: Provide a common communication and collaboration infrastructure for all faculty and students. This objective fed into the department's goal of developing digital information resources that enhance and extend the learning experience for students. Finally, this goal was linked to a corresponding university goal: Establish an environment where learning can flourish.