So, um, good afternoon everyone. Uh,
welcome to today's virtual Meetup session on Intelligent Portfolio Management.
Uh, my name is s and I work in the marketing department here at qa. Uh,
just a reminder that this session is recorded and how will have a duration of
one hour, uh, the Watching Demand webinar, uh,
video webinar will be made available afterwards, and you are well,
very welcome to pop in your questions throughout the session,
and our speakers will be available to address them from time to time as
well. Uh, a bit of background for those who don't know, uh, qa,
we are a leading, uh, tech talent and training organization. Uh,
our training programs, including projects, program management,
help businesses to upskill and re-skill their existing workforce. And, uh,
so what is expected from today's session, um, I have the pleasure to, uh,
introduce you, our speakers as Stuart Art Choice,
and, um, uh, very key ways, uh, Jackie, um, here as well.
Um, today's, uh,
objective outcome from today is really to help you gain insights on how to make,
uh, more informed decisions to maximize the value of your, uh,
project management investments. So, with no further ado, can I ask you,
Stuart and Jackie to, um, introduce yourselves, your company,
and then kick off with, uh, today's topic.
Thank you. Excellent. Thank you, Serge. Um, I, do you want to share the,
uh, slides, Stuart, just so that, let's do that.
People can have a bit of visuals.
They don't necessarily want to just look at us, do they? Of course they
Do. What else is it to look at?
Well, there you go. Um, right, okay. So, yes, I'm Jackie Hewitt.
I'm a solutions consultant at qa,
so I don't need to say too much about qa.
Surge has already very capably done that for us. Um, I've spent, gosh,
15 or so years teaching project management,
change management programs, portfolios, all that sort of good stuff.
And before that worked in projects, um, and programs, um,
for quite a number of years. And for the last couple of months, say I've been,
I've moved across to really work on bespoke solutions for our corporate clients
and hosting events like this, um, that kind of stuff.
So that's a little bit about me. Now,
why I've asked Stuart to join us today is I first came across
Stuart month, six weeks ago, time flies at Project Challenge in London.
And, uh, Stuart gave a very quirky, or I might say cracky, uh,
presentation about pmo. Uh, it was certainly eye catching,
and not just because of the sort of duck theme,
but also the content of what he said. It was great fun,
and it was interesting and a slightly different take.
So I'll let Stuart introduce himself and his company,
which are Transparent Choice.
Brilliant. Thanks, Jackie. Um, so, so Transparent Choice, uh,
is a software company. We, we do software that that's really focused on,
um, uh, the portfolio management piece of things. So it's not ppm,
it's not the managing projects or any of that kinda stuff.
It's really focused at this strategic level. I, I also, you know,
as Jackie said, I, I speak at conferences, you know, just got back from,
from Saudi where we had a very interesting few days at
the, um, global project management forum. Um, and,
uh, that, that was kind of humbling when they,
they put me on a stage roughly the size of Wembley Stadium, um, you know,
the three people sitting at the back. So that was interesting. That was good.
That's a win. Um, but, uh, but I also, you know, kind of guest lecture,
give, uh, give talks at universities, you know, occasionally Oxford, uh,
university of some ca, uh, California and places like that. So, um,
so, you know, this is,
this is this area of portfolio management and intelligent portfolio
management as well. You know, Jackie added the intelligent piece, and I thought,
yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll own that one. Um,
so this idea of intelligent portfolio management, I think is,
is for a P M O probably the most important
skill that you can develop, right? And, and, uh, and,
and we'll, will, I'm, I'm kind of gonna jump, jump here and, and that, you know,
my, my hope today is that, that we're gonna melt your brain completely,
right? And change the way that you think about portfolios and how to deliver,
how to deliver performance for your organization,
how to deliver value for your organization. So you go, that's, that's,
that's who I am, and that's what, what I hope to do today. So, get ready,
put a plastic sheet under yourself, just so when your brain meets out your ears,
it'll be caught on something nice.
Well, uh, hopefully it's not gonna be, uh,
raining and we're gonna have to be like duck inside our offices or wherever
we're, uh, dialing in from. Okay,
so I thought we'd first just set the scene a bits about, you know, intelligent.
We, uh, we've put in the term intelligence, if we go to the next or slide,
we've got a couple of definitions of, you know,
what intelligent means. Um,
and I think trying to maybe translate that or applying that to
portfolio management. One of the key things is, you know, it's about decisions,
isn't it? It's about using judgment.
It's about getting a grasp of the situation, uh,
understanding where you are and making those good judgements. All organizations,
I don't care how big or small you are, have to make choices. Yeah. Um,
you know, it's about managing your wishlist. We,
we've all got a wishlist that's bigger than, you know, our pot of money.
So that's what we have to do,
is spend it wisely and never more so today with the pace of change and
everything that's, that's going on there. So we need to have, you know,
good judgment to, um,
spend our money wisely for our shareholders, for ourselves, you know,
all of that. So on the next slide, there's a,
there's a great quote from Einstein, and it relates exactly to,
to one of the things I, I'm off always saying is, you know,
if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got. Uh,
you know, I think, you know, sometimes we need to do things a bit differently.
So we don't just want to keep repeat, sort potentially mistakes and, you know,
learn from things and improve the way we're doing things.
And this is really where I think Stuart's company come in, um,
and have got a little bit of a, a different, take,
a different way of looking at your, your portfolio and how to manage it. Um,
and I think on the next slide we've got, um,
we've got a little graph that sort of, um, shows, you know,
how money gets spent. So, Stuart, I,
if you've got a couple of things to say about this, uh,
this particular graphic here,
Well, actually before we get to the graphic, I just have to say, Thomas,
I'm glad you were there. Um, you know, mm-hmm. Get, get your camera on,
wave the duck around, um, that we're,
we're gonna cover a lot of the same ground actually today. Um, but,
but at a slightly more leisurely pace, I hope. Um, so,
so as we're going into this, by the way, uh, do jump onto chat, right? I've,
I've got on on one screen, I've got the slides on another screen,
I've got teams. Um, so I will try and keep half an eye on chat,
um, because we're all gonna get more outta this session if it's interactive,
right? Yeah. Um, so if you're agreeing, disagreeing,
let me know if you've got comments, if you've got a story to share,
get it out there. Um, cuz cuz we we're all learned from, from each other.
Yeah. Um, but, um, just,
just going back to what just happened there. Let's go up,
go going back to this one again, right? So,
so lots of people kind of look at this and they cut themselves in the back and
say, oh, yes, yes, this is a job. Good job.
We're doing a very good job cuz we're delivering 70% of the, our projects,
we're delivering the intended business value. Now, first of all, right,
I don't believe that number.
I think there's an awful lot of fudging going on in that number.
There's a lot of, um, yeah. Oh, the project's in trouble, let's cut the scope.
And then when you deliver that reduced scope, you say, oh, you see, we,
we de delivered the intended benefit, right? Oh, no, you didn't. Sorry. Um,
so I think there's a lot of kind of fudge in here, but that, but you know, six,
you know, the, the top line is met original business intent, right?
So imagine you get in your car in the morning to drive to work if Emily still
does that, but you get in the car in the morning to drive to work and
30% of the time it breaks down or catches fire or something on the
way to work, you would not call that a success.
You would not call that good performance. In fact, you would get rid of the car,
right? You would junk it or at least get it fixed.
And that is the feeling that your executive team has when they
think about the pmo, right? The, uh, and, and you know, they,
they very often, the ex the,
the relationship is a slightly stressed one where they're,
they're looking at you going, for kit's sake,
we're giving you all this resource and all this money and we still can't get
stuff done, right?
And now this is against the background. You know, the,
the Einstein quote is perfect because,
because what we've been doing for the last, you know,
20 years is increasing the amount of process,
increasing the certain number of certifications that we've got putting in place
PPM tools so we get better at project management.
I emphasize that project management, okay? Yeah.
All of that work is about improving project execution.
Is any of that having any effect on the only thing that matters, which is,
are we delivering the business value? And this chart says, no,
it is not right. It's having no appreciable effect. We've kind of, now,
if you go back 20 years, 30 years, actually that,
that top line would've been about 30%. Okay? So,
so all of that project management stuff that we do has got us from 30% and 70%.
If we stop doing it, eventually we drop back down to 30%, right?
So I don't wanna say there's no value in all that stuff that absolutely is,
but it's not enough to get to the level that we need to get to as a,
as a profession. That's, that's kind of my view. I dunno, what do you,
what do you think, Jackie?
Totally agree. You know, it, it is not just, are we doing stuff right?
Are we doing the right stuff? You know, are we,
are we making the right choices upfront? Which leads us on nicely to,
to the next slide as well. And, you know, obviously the roles of, you know, the,
the key points of what you need to do when you are managing your portfolio
is, you know, start or continue the right ones.
Make sure they are the ones that are gonna deliver the right value,
the value that you needed. So you first, we've gotta understand where you are.
Um, and then time them, you know, we've only got, as we said, so much money.
E every organization has only got so much, um, uh, resources to spend.
So you've gotta think, do we do it this year, next year, all that good stuff.
And then oversee the portfolio delivery,
which is where your project and program management comes in.
We've just got a question in the chat, uh, Stuart, which is, it was the chart,
uh, specific. Oh, we've got an answer as well. Yeah. Thank you for that.
So yeah, these, these are the different sort of strands that we're,
we are looking at when we're managing, um, a portfolio. Um,
and really I think the focus mostly of today's session is making sure
we are picking the right initiatives that are going to deliver the greatest
value for us and making sure we continue with that based on information we get
back in. Um, so we are maximizing,
always maximizing the sort of value, um,
which brings you back to your duck analogy, I believe.
Absolutely. Absolutely. So, so I love this one. Um,
so who would like to guess which, which is the boy duck, which is the gold duck.
Uh, bang it in chat. Come on, have your guest get in there.
Who can get in first? Cuz someone's gonna get it right.
Come on. You can do it. You can do it fast. Type your fingers the bigger one.
Yay. Well done, Sean. The, yeah, the one on the left is the boy duck. Now,
um, uh, the girl is bigger. Yay. That, that would be good.
So, oddly enough, right? So,
so the things that you learn on your professional journey are amazing.
So one of the things I learned preparing this, this,
this whole talk was that actually for most kinds of
duck the way, oh Catherine dangerous ground.
Love it. Um, so for most breeds of duck,
for most breeds of duck,
the way you can tell regardless of coloring and all the rest of it is you see
that little curly tail thing, right?
Most boy ducks have that little curly tail thing. So if you're ever in doubt,
is it a boy girl or a girl? Duck. Look for the curly tail.
Why on earth are we talking about ducks? Well,
this goes back to a conversation, a friend of mine, a guy called Roberto Kaman,
who is based in Brazil,
and he was meeting with the CEO e o of one of the world's biggest oil and gas
companies. And he was, he was giving an update on his project, you know,
and he's, he's sort, you know, here's our, here's our flow and here's our,
here's our GaN chart and here's this. And, and, and the guy's eyes just glaze.
And he stopped him. He said, Roberto,
I don't care if you have a boy duck or a girl duck, I just want eggs.
Right? In other words, he really doesn't care how the project gets done, right?
Really doesn't care about the details of your project,
he just wants to get value from the project,
right? He just wants the business value from that project. And,
and I think as a profession,
we sometimes get a little bit caught up in the beauty of our
agile flow.
Or is it agile or is it agile or is it aji fall or is it waterfall or is it,
who cares?
No one in the business cares at all about any of that,
right?
So we need to kind of get over ourselves and just remind ourselves what our job
is. So if the business only cares about eggs,
our job is to give them bigger eggs, better eggs, right?
Make sure we're allocating resources to the most valuable eggs.
We need to give them more eggs, and we need to break fewer eggs, right?
So we need fewer projects running,
running over time or over budget or failing outright or whatever it may be,
right? And that, by the way,
the bottom line or the second to bottom line on that chart I showed you earlier
was projects where the, the failed budget lost, right? And,
and that number was 30%. So I, so again, I don't really believe the data,
it's gonna give us an idea, but I think it's much worse than, than,
than it really is. Cuz the, the 30% budget loss number,
if you add that to the 70% that deliver the budget,
that means projects either either deliver the full benefit
or they fail budget lost. And that's just not true, right? So,
so the don't get too lo caught up in the data,
the important message is that performance isn't good enough.
What we've done in the past doesn't work.
And we spend too much time as an industry focusing on the process and the people
and all that kind of, you know, the,
the process and templates and things like that.
And we forget that we only have one job and that's to deliver eggs,
right? And we only have three levers we can pull, we deliver bigger eggs,
more eggs, and we break fewer eggs. Make sense?
That opportunity, it's minimizing the opportunity lost, isn't it really? Um,
yeah.
A, a ab absolutely,
Absolutely. The money sunk in that. Yeah. So we've just got here, you know,
common problems that we see, um, with, uh,
making decisions on our portfolios. There isn't anybody here today,
I'm sure that hasn't sort of had this scenario of too many projects. You know,
we're all trying to respond to,
to too much stuff that's coming in and hitting us at once. Uh,
sometimes less is more. Uh, I teach a lot of change management as well.
And this is a perennial problem. Yeah.
The business is trying to just cope with change. On change, on change.
We've got tools like heat maps and things like that that can help us get an
appreciation of all the different things that are going on.
I'm working with a corporate client at the moment and they've got 500 plus large
scale,
they call them transformational initiatives going on at the moment at once.
500.
500. Wow.
500. These are,
these are ones that are affecting more than one department depart, it's mahu.
Um, I, I,
I need to talk to them.
Well, we'll see if we can get a conversation going with them. Yeah, yeah. Um,
yeah,
obviously there are many organizations end up with initiatives that have been
started up by maybe a head of department or something. They've got budget,
it's it, you know, pet projects. We're all, we're all familiar with those,
you know, hobby, horses, whatever. But are they really supporting a strategy?
So in the chat, let's have a heck yeah.
For anyone who has pet projects in their portfolio, and if you're being honest,
every single person is gonna put heck yet in the chat.
Who can get in there first? Sorry, Jackie, carry on.
No, that's fine. He interrupting. Is that, is that another,
is that another one on, um, eggs?
Yeah. Well it could, could be. Yeah, they, they're rolling in. Look at this.
We've got a heck yeah.
Yeah. It's, it's the world over. So, you know, we need to be canny about this.
And I, I dunno if you've seen other common problems,
but I think we've got the main ones, the main ones here on the page.
Has anyone got anything, any other sort of issues they've got or problems,
common problems when they're making decisions on which projects to do? Anything?
Anyone got anything to add? I,
I tell you what Jackie, we did, we did a little survey. We, we did it, uh,
we did a version of it at the project challeng,
and then we did it again at House of PMO the other week. Um, where we, we,
we put down the top 10 things, challenges that we hear. Yeah.
And we just, when people came to the booth,
we just had them check off which ones applied to them. Excellent.
So if you like, we can, we can share that afterwards. We, we can, yeah. Yeah.
No, that would be good. We, we were just doing the analysis the other day,
so we we can share that, that
Would be interesting. Yeah. Yeah.
But it's, but it's, it's all of this stuff and it's things like, um, you know,
you end up with silos where, you know,
people aren't talking to each other and you get duplication and, and,
and stuff like, you know, everything's number one, everything's top priority.
Uh, so yeah.
And it's back to that thing of whether it's much better if you can have an
organizational portfolio, but often we have departmental ones,
which Yep. Then,
then you get that silo thing and you get overlapping initiatives and people
aren't aware they're doing similar things in different pockets.
So all of that going on.
Um, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And, and yeah, this is brilliant. So, you know,
Catherine, you're a hundred percent on That's what I was just saying.
Everything's top priority. Yeah. Um, you know,
just ignoring half the cost of the project. Yeah. Oh, well, you know,
they're only internal people. What they don't cost anything really. Um, yeah.
And lack of sponsorship around decision making right. Is, is really key. So,
we'll, we'll probably talk a little bit,
hopefully by the end of this you'll have a story that you can tell that'll help
get people's attention. Um, and, uh, and,
and we'll probably show a little bit of, uh,
Thomas will probably have a little bit of visualization later on.
I'll show you the, there's one little bit of one slide,
which I'll try and remember and flag up to help you with that defunding problem.
Yeah. Yeah. But that I've started, so I'll finish mentality. Mm-hmm.
And it sometimes it takes a brave person to pull the plug, um, you know, HS two,
is that gonna continue or is it, no one's brave enough to say,
we've put this money in and
Oh man. Yeah. You're not ashamed, you're not. Shame already wouldn't make
That call. I would not wanna be making that call. But, you know,
that's the kind of things though, isn't it? So, uh, absolutely. Obviously on a,
on a big scale. So, okay. When we are thinking about portfolios, you know,
I remember you talking at, uh, project Challenge about,
you often go into an organization and, you know,
usual times when they're thinking about portfolio management,
it's not a greenfield site. You're not coming into a blank page.
So the first challenge is to understand what's going on, where they're at.
And I remember you saying something about, um, you know,
one of the first things you do is you,
you sometimes you even like walk away a bit,
is you need to understand where you are first. Um, and, and,
and get that data and decide, you know, what is gonna be included in your pmo,
um,
in your scope of the things you're looking at and the things you're measuring.
And that client I mentioned with 500 plus,
they were just the ones they were measuring. Yeah.
They were just the big transformational ones. They know,
they call them sort of continuous improvement or business change that affects
one department. They know it's actually many, many more than that.
So you need to make decisions about where are you having a cutoff,
what are you measuring, what's, you know, what are you considering a project?
Um, absolutely. And then you've got to think about, right, okay,
we're bringing in a pmo, how are we gonna start doing it?
So do you have any particular thoughts, Stuart,
on whether it's better to do like, um,
a big bang or just start small in one department
and go from there? Cuz I'm sure you've seen,
I'm sure you've seen different models.
Yeah. And, and different organizations will, will,
will feel comfortable with different models. Right.
But it fundamentally comes down to, um,
what's in the being crazy, what's in the way of, of delivering those eggs.
Mm-hmm. You know, if, if, if it's about, um, uh,
execution of projects,
then actually it makes sense via PMO to start in the place that I always tell
people PMOs should be spending just 20% of the time. Right. Which is,
which is in project execution. Right. But if you're, but if as an organization,
the pain that you have is project execution, you can't execute projects,
then actually you probably need to start there. Yeah. On, on the other hand,
if you, you, if you've got reasonable level of maturity in project execution,
then you start somewhere else. And, and usually the,
usually the next big thing that you need to fix is prioritization. And,
and, and,
and then take it into scheduling and planning and all that kind of good stuff.
And then you get to governance and then you get to, you know, so, so there's,
there's kind of usually a natural progression to these things. But,
but it's gotta start with a discussion with the business,
with the business leadership team, um, about what's,
what's important to them. Um, uh, and,
and at the end of the day, so one of the analogies I use is that the PMOs, um,
they're Janus. Okay.
And I'm gonna give you all a few seconds to figure out who is Janus. Anybody,
anybody know who Janus is? I'll give you a clue.
It's is, uh, is Roman.
That's very cool.
Two faces, bang on. Well done, Thomas. Nice. Uh,
so, so Janus is a two-headed, God,
you've probably seen pictures of this guy with, with one.
He is your normally depicted with kind of one head, but two faces, right? And,
uh, and he has those two faces because he, he's the god of transition.
He's gotta change, right?
And so he actually guards the gate between, you know,
heaven, where the gods live and where the rest of us live, right? The holyo.
And so the key thing is that, you know,
PMOs are kind of like Janus because you are the gateway
between the world of the mortals,
the project managers and the people implementing projects and the world of the
gods, the executives. And guess who makes the rules,
not the mortals. I'll give you a clue. Right? Of course. It's, it's the gods.
So the, so the place to start is to go, you know,
sacrifice a metaphorical calf, go talk to the gods and find out what's,
what's broken. But you also, you also have to have a good chat with the,
with the, the worker bees to understand what's in the way of delivery. And,
and very often what's in the way of delivery is you the
pmo. Because you've put in so much process,
so many templates that people spend more time doing that and actually managing
projects, right? So very often the one of the first things, you know,
very often the process will start with having a discussion about what can we
stop doing? What do we not need to, what do we do that we don't need to do?
Yeah.
Comment in the chat. Stop starting, start finishing.
Yeah. Yeah, there we go.
Exactly that. Exactly.
I love it. Yeah.
Love it. Yeah, no, perfectly said. And that brings us onto the next slide,
which is, you know, getting those decision makers to agree. Oh,
have we gone, we jumped one. Yeah, yeah.
No,
No, no. So yeah, get, getting, getting them to agree. Um,
they've all got their different perspectives of what's important to them.
You know, some people are more charismatic or, you know,
got more political power in the organization, so they often win out.
Um, people do have hugely differing perceptions of,
of risk and which ones are acceptable to risk to take on and which ones aren't.
And again, that can come back to their pet projects again. Uh,
it can be tempting to go for, oh,
well this one's quite cheap and sometimes there's a place for that. If,
if you can get a quick win out of something, you know, uh, that,
that might be the right thing.
But we've gotta try and get the thinking in a row if we're gonna get this
agreement.
And, and, and there's a lot of, um, so, so this is actually really,
really difficult, right? Because, because, because, you know, I said,
I said it's all about delivering more eggs, but if,
if the VP of sales wants chocolate eggs
and the,
the C F O wants Berger eggs and the manufacturing guy,
cuz manufacturing guys are always down to earth.
He just wants an egg and an omelet, right? He just want,
or a boiled egg or something. Right? Um, so, so if they're,
if they're trying to, if they all want different kinds of eggs,
then this whole thing about bigger eggs, more eggs, fewer broken eggs,
makes no sense. You can't do it.
Yeah.
And so, so that, that's a really,
really difficult problem because it's political. It's about power,
it's about persuasion, it's about salesmanship,
it's about all of these things that have got nothing to do with delivering eggs.
And so, so it turns out that the,
that there's a lot of research into this. How do you do it, right? And,
and research typically lives in psychology departments,
operational research departments, engineering departments, whether looking at,
uh, looking at best practice and decision and you kind of group it all into
something called decision science. Yes. It's a real thing. Decision science.
There are guys out there who, who do this for a living. And,
um, and you know, they,
they've come up with lots of different ways of prioritizing projects.
Um,
but they all fundamentally come down to the skill that,
that even five-year-olds have, right?
Which is identifying where's the most value. So if you, you know,
you go to a typical five-year-old and you say, would you like a lollipop?
And you offer them this selection of lollipops, which one they're gonna take
be one of the two middle ones, right? Of
Course. Yeah.
Prioritization is not difficult.
You just invest in this conceptually, right?
The idea is really simple. You just invest in the ones that make most,
you know, that are, that give you the most value, biggest bang for the buck.
But the, the, but as a, as an industry, we're, we're really bad at this.
Okay? So again, this is PMI data. Mm-hmm. Um, so they,
they commissioned in the economist intelligence unit,
this is about four or five years old now. Um, but they,
they took a look at portfolios around the world and one in five projects,
20% projects were so badly aligned with the goals of the organization that they
should be stopped, right? So let's give that the name. It deserves it's waste.
And, you know, as a, as a PMO leader,
or that's your failure,
cuz your job is to make sure that the right process is in place.
It's not your job to make the decisions,
but it's your job to make sure the right processes are in place to allow
decision makers and to offer an incentive to the decision makers to make those
decisions. Does that make sense?
Having consistent information, that's a challenge, isn't it?
On all the projects for one thing.
A absolutely having consistent information,
understanding what a business case means, right? So, so what's the value? What,
cause we, we talk about return on investment, okay? Right?
So return on investment. How do we define that? Well,
if you open a finance book, it's very clear, right? There's money that goes out.
It's,
Yeah,
There's money that comes in and you divide one by the right,
you do calculation one that minus that divide by this, right?
That's your return investment. But okay, okay, now you're the nhs.
Yeah.
You spend 2 million bucks on a new MRI machine, what's your roi?
Yeah, yeah.
Not bring more
Revenue, you know, need, you know, you need MRI machine,
which is the optimal one,
which is gonna give you which works quicker or which works more efficiently or,
you know,
which one is less to maintain and all that good stuff has got to come into play.
Absolutely. And, and, and the point is that there are, there are different,
there are different aspects to value. Not all of them are mo you know, monetary,
some of 'em are usually Yeah, but they're not.
But a but a business case doesn't just mean money.
It means what are those intangible things and how are we gonna measure them and
how are we gonna agree on how to select the ones that add the most value? So,
so you have to work on getting the leadership team aligned on what value even
means. So the, the guy that we talked about at the beginning, Roberto Kaman,
the duck guy. Um,
so there's another thing that Roberto talks about, which,
which I think is absolutely correct, which, which is that, you know,
your executive team,
they may come to the same building as each other in the morning, right?
They walk through the same front door,
but they're going to work in completely different companies. Yeah.
The sales guy thinks he works for a sales-oriented company.
The manufacturing guy thinks he works for a manufacturing company, right?
And the, and the C F O thinks that he, he works for the city, right? Yeah.
And so they, they, they,
they have a very different mindset what it is that's important to the
organization. So even when you've got the strategy, right, the vision,
the mission, you know, you pay McKinsey a couple of million bucks, right?
And the whole exec team goes offsite for two weeks and they come back feeling
really pleased with themselves that they've got a vision mission,
and this lovely strategy. As soon as you're one or two levels below the C-suite,
generally people don't have a good understanding at all of what that strategy
means.
There was some research recently that suggested 95% of employees have no
idea what their strategy means at all. Yep.
So how can you pick good investments if you dunno what you're trying to achieve?
You might have a vision statement somewhere in your building or a mission
statement, but yeah, that's as far as it goes.
And there's usually a little template strategy kind of visualization and things
like that, you know, seven, seven key points. Okay? But what does that mean?
Yeah, right? And how do we trade off, okay,
you're telling me seven things are important,
but I'm trying to allocate resources to projects and those projects have to
support all seven of those things. But which one's most important, right?
Because I've got a project here that supports that one,
I've got a project here that supports this one down here. Yeah.
So which of those do I do? Because they're both on the list.
They're all on the list, right? So it's, it's really hard. So, so these,
these wonderful geeks,
those decision scientists that spend a lot of time have done quite a lot of
research into this and at,
at the risk of over trivializing their research, right? There is a,
there is a right way to prioritize projects and, and that,
uh, so, so as an example, some of the research University of New South Wales,
oops, gone too far,
but the University of New South Wales did a study where they looked at over a
hundred different methods. So it was basically meta research. They looked,
so they did a study looking at all the research into all these different
methods.
They looked at over a hundred different methods and they found that only two
methods that they looked at were suitable, right?
And suitable was the word they used. Um, notice they didn't say it's brilliant,
it's perfect. They said it's suitable, right? So there,
there are only two methods that are suitable.
Neither of those methods involves banging together a magic spreadsheet,
right? That is not one of the two winners. We'll come back to that in a minute,
I suspect. Um, the,
the two methods were called d e a data development analysis and
a h p analytic hierarchy process of the two A H p
is much easier to get your head around and to implement in the real world. So,
so our opinion is that a h p is the winner. Um, you know,
they're both suitable. They both kind of work, but, but a h p is the,
is the winner because it's easier to implement. Does, does that make sense?
We'll dig into what a h P is in a minute, but does that make sense Jackie? And
Yeah, no, absolutely. We,
we've so many places have developed their own ways of doing things and you know,
as a safe sciences can show this, bring it on.
Excellent. Excellent. Um,
now maybe another time we can dig into some of the decision science and the,
the biases and the noise and all these, these kind of things. Yeah. The, the,
the and and, and that's really powerful. Um, you know, so governance,
a lot of people misunderstand governance.
Actually I was on a LinkedIn chat this morning where, uh,
a very knowledgeable and well respected consultant
and published, you know, top five things PMO needs to do.
And one of the things he said was, you know, you need,
you need to reduce the amount of governance cuz all these checklists and
templates and everything else are getting in the way. Do you know what?
That's not governance. That is not governance. Governance is decision making.
Yeah.
Right? That's what governance is. It's, it's,
That's what you go to them for.
Yeah, absolutely.
It is decision making templates and all the rest of it enablers.
They're, they may, they're enablers to project delivery or they're Yeah.
Things that give you shortcuts, whatever it is.
But you wanna have the minimum of that you can possibly get away with, right?
The, to enable people to do things.
Governance is about decision making and it's not about
checklists. Okay? And, um, so, so,
and, and one of the biggest areas of decision making,
of course is the prioritization process.
You've got the scheduling and resource allocation and all of that kind of good
stuff going on as well. So this is,
this is where the PMO can add uniquely add value
because project managers can't affect the governance process.
Executives don't know enough about project management and projects to know
anything about what the good good governance process should be.
So the only part of the organization that,
that should know about good governance is the PMO team.
Yeah. Right? Different companies call it different things, right? So I'm, I'm,
I'm gonna use the term pmo. Some people will call it an E P M O, some will call,
call it a strategy realization office. Yeah. It doesn't matter what you call it,
right? It's that, that group that is Janus, right?
They're the guys that live at the gate, right? Yeah. And they,
they form the bridge between the, the, the humans and the gods.
Um, so, uh,
what is this a h p thing? I hear you cry, right?
And what's it gotta do with ducks? Well,
having good prioritization is how you get bigger, better eggs,
right? Because, because actually at the end of the day,
what the chief exec really wants is they,
they want eggs so they can make omelets, right? So the bigger the eggs are,
the bigger the omelets you can make. Cuz cuz those omelets, that's what he,
to the customers and to the shareholders and all the rest of it, right? So,
so we wanna get bigger eggs and prior doing prioritization properly lets you do
that.
It lets you invest in the projects that are gonna give you the biggest bang for
the buck from, from your resources.
So the process a h p is conceptually very similar to what you probably do in a
spreadsheet if you decided to whack one together, right?
You define a bunch of criteria that, that, so you take your business goals,
you convert 'em into criteria, you weight those criteria,
then you score projects against those criteria.
You look at some pretty pictures and you get you, you make your decision, right?
How you do it that matters. Um, uh,
be because you have this problem where,
where your leadership team fundamentally don't agree, right?
On what the definition of value is. They don't agree on what those criteria are.
They don't agree on what the weight is. And if you don't get that right,
right, if you don't get this piece right,
then anything that you do down here is a total utter
waste of time. Because if you don't get this right,
your leadership team knows it's wrong. So when you show 'em pretty pictures,
they're gonna ignore them and they're gonna go back to horse trading politics,
he or shouts by this and all the rest of it. So,
big message number one, if you wanna get bigger eggs, better eggs,
then you should be using a h p because it is the best way that
we currently know of to get your leadership team aligned. It's a,
it's a collaboration process. It's quite structured.
It's not terribly difficult, but it's quite structured, um,
to get your leadership aligned.
Scoring projects at scale is a different challenge. Uh, you know,
and obviously we sell software that does that.
So I would say that that's a really difficult challenge and you need software to
do it, but doing it at scale,
you have issues of noise and randomness and bias and your scorers and all
that kind of stuff, right? That you, you also need to do.
But the big message I want you to take away, right? This is,
this is kind of a second order effect. The big one is this one, right?
You need to get this scoring model, right?
You need buy-in real deep buy-in,
not just people sitting in a meeting not disagreeing with you.
That's not buy-in,
that's just people who can't be bothered having a fight today cuz they've only
had one cup of coffee. Real buy-in is active,
real buy-in is participatory, right? Um, and,
and, and it's, it's, you know, really, you know,
it's real ownership of the scoring model. And if you don't do that, right,
if you don't get that right, then you've got a problem. Best way of doing that.
It's not the only way, but the best way of doing that is using a h p. Yeah.
Um, and, and your output to that should be your reasonably clear picture of,
uh, the, the, the scoring model will tell you what the value is,
how big your egg is. But the size of the egg isn't the only thing that matters.
It's, it's the cost of the egg as well that's gonna determine bang for the buck,
right? Value for money. And,
and it might be cost or it might be resources or whatever your,
your main constraint is. Um,
but then what you want to do almost always is present something like this.
So, so, uh, we were talking, I think, was it Thomas, some, I forget who it was,
was talking about projects that never die and how do you kill 'em and all that
kinda good stuff. So here's the key thing, right?
Most organizations don't do the prioritization step, right?
So there's no real buy-in to the scores that you
generate assuming you generate the score. Um, and so when you present this
and someone sees that their project is in the pet zone, right? Low value,
high cost, their response is yeah, but the model's wrong, right?
And they defend the project. If on the other hand
you have real buy-in from the leadership team on this value metric
and someone's project is in the pet zone, the precise opposite happens.
Nobody wants to be the executive who's defending a project in the DA in the
death zone, right? Yeah. So we can very,
some people don't like the pet analogy cuz it, you know,
eventually you gotta put your pet down, right? Um, so if that offends you,
I do apologize. That's not my intent is I don't mean to offend anybody,
it's just a useful analogy, right? So, so, um,
so by really getting this right, you can focus on the stars,
you can focus on the projects at high value, low cost,
you can question the Royces, right? So yeah, yeah, yeah.
That project does add lots of value, but it's also incredibly expensive.
Yeah.
Might it be better to do three of these than one of those?
Would that move us forward faster and better, right? Yeah,
that's an interesting, that's an interesting conversation to have.
Dare I mention HS two again?
Well, there you go. Um, topical. Yeah. And, and again,
there's not a right and a wrong answer. No. As a pmo,
your job is to give a put in place a good process and to give the guys the
information, the guys and gals the information they need to make good decisions.
Um, so this, this is a visualization that I would always recommend people use.
Super simple,
but it only works if you have a value model that people trust.
And if you have cost data, that's not ridiculous, right?
We all know this is decision making under uncertainty.
We all know it's uncertain, right? Yeah. So the important thing here is,
um, you know, to make that as good as you can and,
and to try and turn it into a quarterly process or a monthly process instead of
an annual process. Because quarter to quarter you're gonna refine these numbers,
you're gonna learn about those projects,
and those numbers are gonna change and become more accurate, right?
So when you have decision making under uncertainty,
what you want to be trying to do is make incremental investments to help you
reduce the uncertainty. And again, having a, so this, this, this, uh,
intelligent, uh, part of that definition of intelligence was about learning.
Yeah. And, and so making it an agile,
repeatable process lets you learn and make it much more intelligent.
Would you say, Stuart,
is there a relationship between the frequency of doing that and the
maturity of the organization? Do you,
would you say the quarterly is something to work towards
where you get more mature? Or does it make you more mature,
doing it more frequently? And maybe you can do it every six months little
Bit? Is there a relationship there or not? Bit of, not really bit, no, no.
A little, little bit of both jackets. Great. Great question.
A little bit of both. Um, definitely the, the, um,
so this annual planning cycle is because people historically
Annual's normal. Yeah.
Well, annual's normal be for two reasons. Reason number one is that we,
is that it's treated as if it is a budgeting process.
Yeah.
It's not, it's as strategy execution process, right?
And strategy is executed all the time.
You don't just do that during budgeting season, right? So it's,
so it's a strategy execution process.
Don't treat it like a budgeting process once a year. That's, that's
Reason number one. And those projects, you know,
Um, absolutely. You know, and, and, and just, you know, you you, you open the,
you open the cannon, there's a whole bunch of worms in there.
Suddenly your project costs three times as much.
Well that moons it's just gone from being a lovely,
a lovely backpack filler over here to being an absolute dog,
right? Yeah. So, so if you, if you fire and forget with your portfolio,
you are not being intelligent,
you are not reacting to the information that's coming in. So what's the point?
Putting a PPM tool in, if you're not gonna use that information to make,
then drive your decision making. None at all, I would argue, right?
Um, so anyway, the, the, the,
the other va the other visualization I would recommend,
always recommend is something called an efficient frontier.
We've got blogs on this, it comes to the website. We, there's, we,
we talk about this until people get bored and fall asleep. Um,
but it's really powerful.
So those are the two workhorse visualizations that I always recommend.
I'm not gonna go over this one cause we don't really have time to, to,
to dig deep into
It. Yeah. Just looking at the time. We've got 10 minutes or so.
Yeah, yeah. We've got, we've got 10 minutes.
The second thing that's really important is, so most people think that, so,
so what we've been talking about so far is about bigger eggs, right?
Picking the eggs that add the most value.
I wanna talk about getting more eggs now because, you know,
project flow is absolutely critical if you want to, and, and it's,
it's how many finish. It's not how many you start, it's how many, you know,
we're gonna use this road metaphor. We're gonna change metaphors here, right?
So, so on the road of life, right? Cars,
cars are projects,
and the number of people in the car is the value that you're gonna deliver,
right? Because actually, it doesn't matter how many cars reach the destination,
it's how many people reach the destination that really matters, right? So,
so when, when you have zero utilization of the road,
right? So, so your people aren't doing any projects, it looks very nice,
very artistic, but we're not getting any value at all. So what do you do?
You add some projects and so then you start delivering some value and you add
some more projects and you deliver more value and, and,
and your utilization rate goes up and up and up and up until at some point
you reach 100% utilization, right? And,
and we call that a traffic jam, right? When, when it's on the road.
And the same thing happens in portfolios, right?
So there's a point somewhere between zero and a hundred where there's a maximum,
right? We know that a hundred isn't the maximum, right? So,
so all those executives will say, we want more value, do more projects.
They are wrong. You need to be able to,
you need to be really confident in this message that you can go to them and say,
I'm very sorry, but we will get peak flow. Not at a hundred percent utilization.
Usually it's about 80, 85% is the peak, right? And, and you know,
there's a bunch of maths behind where that comes from and it,
it kind of tends to work. So, you know,
it's based on queuing theory and all that kinda good stuff.
I had exactly this with my own business, you know, and,
and one of the challenges when you run your own business,
there's always a new shiny over there and you know, you,
you just have to sort of, you know, this is the strategy.
This is fulfilling the strategy you need, you do need to adjust it.
We talked about covid and, and whatever, but, but generally, yeah, you,
you need to keep your focus in the right place.
Absolutely.
Otherwise nothing, otherwise nothing turns up
Well, and,
and the challenges that most organizations aren't positioned on the
top of the hill, they're positioned somewhere over here. Mm-hmm. Right?
Usually it's somewhere over here, if I'm honest, when we,
when we first talk to them, but I'm being charitable.
Let's say they're somewhere here, right? So, so if you can po if you can use,
prioritize that prioritization discussion to enable the decision makers.
Notice I say enable, right?
To enable the decision makers to put you at the top of the hill, right? So,
so layering in not just value for money, but also resource capacity to deliver,
yeah. To put yourself at the top of the hill,
not aiming for 90 or a hundred percent utilization, but aiming for 80,
85% utilization. I promise you,
you will get more flow add into that. If you use a h p,
you're on a higher hill anyway, right? Because we're getting bigger,
better eggs, right? Then the, the,
the extra value that you would get by doing this is huge,
right? So that's roughly a doubling in value, right?
This is the point I'm hoping to hear lots of kind of squidgy squelchy noises as
people's brains seep out to their ears.
This is the bit where your brain should be melting.
We have done nothing about project execution,
but we just doubled the flow of value to the organization,
right? And if you think I'm making it up, go talk to a guy called Mike Hannon.
He does this for a living where he,
he applies these principles and he will typically get 2, 3, 4 times
the flow from the exact same resources through one
of his engagements, right? So this stuff really, really works. It's not,
um, some theoretical ivory tower thing, broken eggs.
Why do projects fail? Well, projects fail. Be because,
well obviously because project managers are doing a bad job.
So let's go talk to the project managers. Well actually projects failed because,
because team members, they're always behind. They never deliver stuff.
They say they deliver on time. So we go talk to the team members, well,
I deliver stuff late because there's too much on my plate and you keep adding
more, right? So I'm juggling too many. How am I meant to deliver that?
So then some smart says, I've got a resource management problem. No,
your resources are fine. They're brilliant. They're, they're fully utilized,
they're smart people. The problem is that you've got too many,
you've got too much stuff that you're asking those resources to do.
So why, why, why do we have too much?
Because the prioritization process is broken, right? So,
so the solution to a lot of project failure
comes down to project prioritization. This is one path to it.
If your answer to why do project failures, cuz we don't have exec sponsors,
why don't you have exec sponsors? Cuz they never turn up.
Why don't they turn up? Cause you're working on their own projects,
they're not interested, right? Yeah, yeah. If you,
so there's a whole bunch of failure modes for projects and if you trace them
back, they come back to prioritization and resource sequencing,
uh, issues, right? So this portfolio management piece,
the reason that the industry is stuck at 60, 60, 60, 60
to 70% is because they're only focusing on project execution.
The forgetting to focus on resource management, right?
So if you want bigger eggs, more eggs, fewer broken eggs,
place to focus is at the portfolio management level, right?
We assume you're gonna execute projects well because you've got trained project
managers. But if you want to get to that next level, um, then you,
you really need to think about the project management piece.
Did you wanna talk about this?
Um, I think we are, we've only got sort of five minutes or so left. Um,
maybe go on to the few unless you particularly want to. Um,
No, I'm happy not talking
About this. Think, yeah, I think you've got a couple more slides and, and,
and some time if anyone's got any questions,
you've got the next one which talks a bit more about your a h p and the future
and the impact of ai. Of course.
Absolutely. Absolutely. So, so the, the, so the,
the only point of this slide is to say keep your eyes on this space because
portfolio management and, and spm.
So the strategy portfolio management space is,
is changing quite quickly and transparent choice and others are coming up
with some really cool AI tools to help. So for example, you know,
once you've prior, once you've scored your projects using a h p,
we've got this really cool stuff in in beta right now that will then optimize
the portfolio to maximize,
to figure out what portfolio will simulate thousands of portfolios using ai,
define the portfolio that adds the most value.
And then once you're happy with that,
it will then automatically create your portfolio roadmap.
So you don't have to play whack-a-mole with resources, you know, oh no,
January's broken, let's fix January, March is broken. Oh no, right? You,
we've all played that game. So, so the, the message here is that, you know,
the portfolio level stuff is where the big gains remain.
AI is gonna certainly help a little bit around efficiency and effectiveness, um,
in project execution, but AI as it, as it is,
as it becomes more and more common is gonna completely change the portfolio
management layer. Um, and you know,
we're doing a huge amount there that that's gonna be transformational.
So what's, what's this space is, is kind of the big message. Um, uh, you know,
the, the, uh,
an AI really is a game changer here.
And you say you've got a beta version that you're working on now. If,
if there's a timeframe for that,
it would be interesting to have another chat when you are further down the line.
Yeah, yeah, we're looking at sort of 3, 4, 5 months,
something like that before it's generally available. So not, not too,
not too far out. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Okay.
And then just a little wrap up really.
And of course if anyone's got any questions, put them in the chat. Um,
and we'll get some, we've only got a couple of minutes. I know there's,
There's, there's not gonna be any questions Jackie,
cuz everybody's brain's on the floor having melted out through
It is, it's back to that. Yeah. You're, you're melting ice cream.
Oh, dear. We, we, we do like a good,
a good metaphor and a visual joke here at Transparent Choice. If you,
if you check out a blogs, they're full of stupid, stupid things, right?
You know, this stuff's important, but it should be fun as well. Yeah.
Yeah.
Um,
And so I'm just gonna go look back through the chat and just see if we've missed
any currently working on, okay. Uh,
is there a best practice for how many criteria? Good question.
Yeah, yeah. There, there absolutely is. So the,
the golden rule of thumb is that you, your criteria should be hierarchical,
right? Mm-hmm. So, so you would have, typically at the top level,
you'll have things like, you know,
strategic fit or geographic expansion or
reducing systemic risk or something, right?
Or patient outcomes or something, right?
But those things are so high level that it's that you can't put together any,
any good mechanism. So, so normally we recommend five is the golden zone,
no more than, you know, seven is kind of okay. Nine is pushing it,
right? Yeah. Um, three, if your business really only needs three,
you know, three suggests you're too high level,
but then beneath each of those you should have, you know,
2, 3, 4, 5 maximum sub-criteria that are at a more
measurable level of things that you can kind of score projects against and in a
meaningful way. Mm-hmm. So yes, the, and, and, and they need to be balanced.
If you go to our website into the resources section, there's a video,
an ebook that will give you the basic grounding and then when you're ready to do
it for real,
we've got a how to guide that is really detailed on all of this stuff about
criteria, how many, how do you define scales, all that kinda good stuff.
Um, yeah, we'll push some stuff out in a follow up from this with a,
with a copy of this, um,
the video or whatever that we've taken. So there's some more things in the chat.
I think the message is gone.
Excellent.
Yeah, I can't quite see the,
Uh, then we've got, uh, so,
so I honest is, um,
talking about the best practice around portfolio management.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's obviously the course that we do
And Absolutely. And, and I mean this stuff is common sense actually.
Not so common,
Right. I mean there's a, there's a lot of research behind a lot of it, right?
Yeah. And how to do it, but the concepts are, are common sense,
but we, we, we often just forget to apply it. Right.
Easy to say. Hard to do.
Yeah. Yeah. Indeed.
Indeed. Well,
I think our time is largely up and people probably want to go eat something.
Thank you so much for your time. Um, yeah, really useful. And the,
the messages in the chat, I mean,
quite a few people registered and didn't manage to make it,
so we'll send this round anyway, but thank you very much for your time. Um,
ser you still here? Are you still with us here? Welcome back, sir. Yeah,
I'm with you. Oh, someone got a hand up.
Oh, Louise, Louise Louis has a hand up, I think.
Sorry, one button. It happens. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Anything you want to add? Uh, ser are you happy?
Yeah, I'm happy. Thank you so much, Stuart and Jackie here. Um,
definitely look something new today and hopefully the audience did as well. Uh,
I know that Stuart,
you've shared your LinkedIn profile in the chats and I can see it on,
on the screen if you'd like to connect with them. Um,
thank you for everyone for joining and, um, we'll see you, uh,
at the next session. We'll be posting some new, uh,
events on the meetup group as well. Yeah. Uh, please feel free to join and, uh,
sharing your feedback and thoughts as well. And thank you so much.
Thank you. Thank you, sir. Brilliant. Thank you Stuart.
And thanks for having me. It's been, it's been fun.
Yeah. Enjoy the rest of your day. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Cheer.
Bye.