Manage Your Project Portfolio, 2nd Edition

Manage Your Project Portfolio, 2nd Edition

by Johanna Rothman
Released August 2016
Publisher(s): Pragmatic Bookshelf
ISBN: 9781680503906

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Book description

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.

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Table of contents

  1.  Foreword by Ron Jeffries
  2.  Foreword by Tim Lister
  3.  Preface
  4. 1. Meet Your Project Portfolio
    1. How I Started to Manage My Project Portfolio
    2. The Project Portfolio Flows Work Through Teams
    3. What a Project Portfolio Is
    4. See the High- and Low-Level Views
    5. Now Try This
  5. 2. See Your Future
    1. Managing with a Project Portfolio
    2. Signs You Need to Manage the Project Portfolio
    3. Managing Without a Project Portfolio
    4. What Are Your Emergency Projects?
    5. Lean Approaches to the Project Portfolio
    6. Why You Should Care About the Project Portfolio
    7. Now Try This
  6. 3. Create the First Draft of Your Portfolio
    1. Know What Work to Collect
    2. Is the Work a Project or a Program?
    3. Organize Your Projects into Programs as Necessary
    4. Organize the Portfolio
    5. Using Tools to Manage a Portfolio
    6. Now Try This
  7. 4. Evaluate Your Projects
    1. Should We Do This Project at All?
    2. Decide to Commit, Kill, or Transform the Project
    3. Commit to a Project
    4. Kill a Project
    5. How to Kill a Project and Keep It Dead
    6. Killing a Senior Manager’s Pet Project
    7. Kill Doomed Projects
    8. Transform a Project
    9. Now Try This
  8. 5. Rank the Portfolio
    1. Never Rank Alone
    2. Rank with Cost of Delay
    3. Rank with Business Value Points
    4. Remaining Points Provide Metadata
    5. Rank the Projects by Risk
    6. Use Your Organization’s Context to Rank Projects
    7. Who’s Waiting for Your Projects to Be Completed?
    8. Rank the Work by Your Products’ Position in the Marketplace
    9. Use Other Comparison Methods to Rank Your Projects
    10. Beware of Ranking Traps
    11. Your Project Portfolio Is an Indicator of Your Organization’s Overall Health
    12. Publish the Portfolio Ranking
    13. Now Try This
  9. 6. Collaborate on the Portfolio
    1. Organize to Commit
    2. Build Trust
    3. Define Your Principle so You Can Collaborate
    4. Articulate Your Mission to Prepare for Collaboration
    5. Facilitate the Portfolio Evaluation Meeting
    6. How to Say No to More Work
    7. Fund Projects Incrementally
    8. Never Make a Big Commitment
    9. Discover Barriers to Collaboration
    10. Who Needs to Collaborate on the Portfolio?
    11. Now Try This
  10. 7. Iterate on the Portfolio
    1. Decide When to Review the Portfolio
    2. Select an Iteration Length for Your Review Cycles
    3. Defend the Portfolio from Attack
    4. How to Decide If You Can’t Change Life Cycles, Roadmaps, or Budgets
    5. Make Decisions as Late as Possible
    6. Now Try This
  11. 8. Make Portfolio Decisions
    1. Keep a Parking Lot of Projects
    2. Decide How Often to Review the Parking Lot
    3. Decide How to Manage Advanced Projects
    4. Conduct a Portfolio Evaluation Meeting
    5. Conduct a Portfolio Evaluation Meeting at Least Quarterly to Start
    6. Review Your Decisions
    7. Now Try This
  12. 9. Visualize Your Project Portfolio
    1. Who Needs to See What?
    2. See the Calendar View
    3. See the Variety of Work
    4. See the Work in Progress for Many Projects
    5. Now Try This
  13. 10. Scaling Portfolio Management to an Enterprise
    1. Understand How You Work Together Now
    2. Does Your Organization Suffer from Resource Efficiency Thinking?
    3. Create a Holistic Perspective of All the Work
    4. Define Strategy at Your Level
    5. Ask These Questions for Each Business Unit
    6. Beware of the Sunk Cost Fallacy
    7. Start with Strategy and Paper
    8. Start Here with an Agenda for a Corporate Project Portfolio Meeting
    9. Scale with Care
    10. Now Try This
  14. 11. Evolve Your Portfolio
    1. Lean Helps You Evolve Your Portfolio Approach
    2. Choose What to Stabilize
    3. Stabilize the Timebox
    4. Stabilize the Number of Work Items in Progress
    5. Fix the Queue Length for a Team
    6. When You Need to Fix Cost
    7. Management Changes When You Stabilize Something About Your Projects
    8. Now Try This
  15. 12. Measure the Essentials
    1. Measure Value
    2. What You Need to Measure About Your Projects
    3. Measure Project Velocity: Current and Historical
    4. Measure Project Cycle and Lead Time
    5. Measure Cumulative Flow for the Project
    6. Measure Obstacles Preventing the Team’s Progress
    7. Measure the Product Backlog Burnup Chart
    8. Measure Run Rate and Other Cost Data, if Necessary
    9. Don’t Even Try to Measure Individual Productivity
    10. What You Need to Measure About the Portfolio
    11. Measure Capacity by Team, Not by Individual
    12. People Finish More with Lean and Agile
    13. Now Try This
  16. 13. Define Your Mission
    1. Define the Business You Are In
    2. What Good Is a Mission, Anyway?
    3. Define an Actionable Mission for the Organization
    4. Managers: Do Management Work
    5. Draft a Mission from Scratch
    6. Brainstorm the Essentials of a Mission
    7. Refine the Mission
    8. Derive Your Mission from Your Work
    9. How to Define a Mission When No One Else Will
    10. Beware of the Mission Statement Traps
    11. Test Your Mission
    12. Make the Mission Real for Everyone
    13. Now Try This
  17. 14. Start Somewhere…But Start
    1. You’re the Only One Managing the Project Portfolio
    2. Can I Really Do This?
  18. A1. Glossary
  19.  Bibliography

Product information

  • Title: Manage Your Project Portfolio, 2nd Edition
  • Author(s): Johanna Rothman
  • Release date: August 2016
  • Publisher(s): Pragmatic Bookshelf
  • ISBN: 9781680503906