The Goldilocks of Project Portfolios

About this webinar

How much capacity detail do you need to make a useful portfolio decision?

Mike Hannan has worked at both extremes. Detailed, resource-loaded project plans can be powerful, but they are difficult to build and keep current. Simple rules can make planning easier, but become less reliable as the portfolio grows.

Finding the middle ground

Mike starts with flow. His bottleneck example shows why starting too much work at once can create congestion, and how staggering starts around a scarce resource can produce more completed work with the same resources.

At first, Mike thought prioritisation plus staggered starts was the answer. In practice, it was hard to sustain. Priorities were contested, a few weak project plans could distort the resource picture, and the model needed constant upkeep.

Even identifying the right constraint can be difficult. In one client example, a large IT organisation paused and resequenced work around senior architects it believed were the bottleneck. A month later, nothing had improved. The real constraint was upstream in the business. Mike's point is that testing the assumption in a model could have exposed the problem before making a costly organisational change.

How much detail is enough?

Dan Dures demonstrates a portfolio-level approach in TransparentChoice. The demo and Q&A turn the Goldilocks idea into a few practical choices:

• Start with less data than you might expect. A value score for each project and a few scarce resource pools may be enough to begin. Capacity can be expressed in person-months, for example, rather than detailed named-person schedules.
• Choose before you sequence. A prioritised list still has to become a portfolio that the available capacity can support.
• Treat prioritisation as a threshold, not a one-way gate. If a project slips or becomes more expensive, update the assumptions and ask whether it still justifies the commitment.
• Put favoured projects into portfolio context. Instead of asking whether one sponsor's project should go ahead in isolation, compare the portfolio that includes it with the alternatives.