This new book is part of the stable of Best Management Practices guides from the OGC. Sitting alongside PRINCE2 and MSP, Management of Portfolios (MoP) looks at—unsurprisingly—managing portfolios of projects and balancing organisational change.

So, what are portfolios and portfolio management? The book explains like this:

Portfolios represent the totality of an organisation’s investment (or segment thereof) in the changes required to achieve its strategic objectives. Portfolio management is a coordinated collection of strategic processes and decision that together enable a more effective balance or organisational change and business as usual. As such, portfolio management provides senior management with reliable evidence enabling better and more informed investment decisions.

Portfolio management includes managing resources, risk and dependencies appropriately. Its aim is to be a decision support function.

MoP sets out 5 principles and 12 practices for successful portfolio management, split across the cycles of portfolio definition and portfolio delivery. Together, all this concentrates the organisational ‘energy’ on doing things well. There is a lot of talk about ‘energy’. It’s defined as “the extent to which an organisation, division or team has mobilised it emotional, cognitive and behavioural potential to pursue its goals.” Maybe ‘corporate focus’ would have been a better term.

Managing without bureaucracy

The book does include case studies and real-life examples. There is a clear desire to present portfolio management as non-bureaucratic and something that can be introduced even where programme and project management practices are not mature. However, some of the case studies don’t exactly demonstrate a non-bureaucratic approach. Take this one:

HMRC [HM Revenue and Customs] created an investment committee to make portfolio investment decisions, and a change delivery committee to monitor and assure delivery confidence. Each of these is chaired by a director general and includes director-level members, who can only sit on one committee. Formal links are maintained between the two committees by mandatory shared updates, drafted by chairs after each meeting. Additionally, each chair writes a post-meting report to the CEO for executive committee discussion.

I’m sure in large organisations this multi-level committee approach is practical and necessary.

Linking to an non-existent strategy

Ideally, portfolio management should link to strategic objectives. No strategy? No problem. MoP sets out several techniques to deal with this including portfolio segmentation and pair-wise comparisons for making decisions.

The book goes to lengths to suggest that portfolio management is useful regardless of how messed up the rest of the organisation is. I know this is true, but I think that it would be a difficult message to present to executives.

There are some tools in the book that would contribute to that executive pitch, like prioritisation metrics, bubble and tornado reports and dashboards. This gives the book a good mix of both softer elements like collaborative working and hard skills of net present value, internal rate of return and payback.

If you are looking for a book that will convince you about the value of portfolio management, Simon Moore’s Strategic Project Portfolio Management is better. But if you want a book that will explain how to actually do portfolio management, MoP is a great guide.

Buy on Amazon.co.uk

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Taming Change with Portfolio Management Taming Change with Portfolio Management: Unify Your Organization, Sharpen Your Strategy and Create Measurable Value is a meaty book – and I only got the...
2. Book review: Strategic Project Portfolio Management It took me a while to get my hands on Simon Moore’s book, Strategic Project Portfolio Management, but I’m rather glad I did. For a...
3. Managing Portfolios: The basics In this video, author Melanie Franklin talks about managing portfolios, and the OGC guidance book on this topic. She talks about how to explain portfolio...

None of my projects last year had quality plans.

Shocked?

The project teams delivered high quality results, on budget and mostly to the timescales agreed with the customers.  But we didn’t do it with the help of quality plans.

A quality plan is a document that sets out what ‘quality’ means to the project and how it will be achieved.  This could be through quality reviews, audits, peer reviews or other methods designed to ensure that the products are fit for purpose.  PRINCE2 recommends using quality plans.

A document doesn’t make you deliver quality results.  You could have the best quality plan ever written and still end up with deliverables that aren’t what the customer ordered.

Work with customers instead

On my quality plan-free projects we worked extensively with the customers.  We understood what they needed and what they wanted.  And we worked with them to help them understand when we couldn’t do it, and why.  We worked with suppliers too, and challenged them when they weren’t up to our standards.

Yes, sometimes we delivered items that were not of the standard we’d have liked.  But a quality plan wouldn’t have made any difference there.  I believe we did everything we could to do a quality job.

In my opinion, quality plans are a waste of paper.  I know that not everyone will agree with me. And I know that there will be some projects where a quality plan is inevitable, such as where it sets the internal standards for code review on software development projects.

Get the quality attitude

Quality is an attitude.  Writing a few pages about what quality means to this project doesn’t equal quality deliverables.  Quality should be something we manage instinctively as part of the deliverables for a project task.  We shouldn’t need a document to tell us to do our jobs properly and deliver a good quality, fit-for-purpose outcome.

If you don’t know what your customer wants, then something’s wrong.  If you don’t try to do your best and deliver that, every time, then something’s wrong.

How do you approach quality planning?

Related posts:

1. Happy holidays, future plans Sorry – I’m on holiday.  No post today.  Normal service returns next Monday.  Future blog posts will cover a software review of ConceptDraw Project 3,...

The Inside PRINCE2 series continues with this look at how PRINCE2 and PMP are compatible.

In this video Peter Milsom, Executive Program Manager at Aegian Consulting Service Corporation, talks about why he chose to take PRINCE2 when he was already a PMP.

Related posts:

1. Inside PRINCE2: Working with APMP PRINCE2 is a well known qualification, but that doesn’t make it incompatible with other qualifications or project management methods.   OGC has recently produced a white...
2. PRINCE2 and PMBoK: why both? The OGC, the UK body that produces PRINCE2, is doing a lot at the moment to show how PRINCE2 supports and integrates with other project...
3. PRINCE2 is now an IT course! Yes, I am still on holiday. Yes, normal service resumes on Monday. But I had to share this with you: an article from thelondonpaper, which,...

The Inside PRINCE2 series continues with this look at pm4success.

Exam rooms for APMG exams like PRINCE2 can be daunting. The desks are clear apart from the papers you need. And somewhere on the desk is likely to be a leaflet for pm4success, the APMG’s website for exam candidates. In the stress of the exam, you could overlook the leaflet and forget to fill in the blanks to ensure you get access to the website. However, with over 1000 pages of content aimed at project and programme managers, it is worth remembering that you have free access to this site for 12 months after your exam.

Here are 6 reasons why you should log on to pm4success.

1:  Ask an Expert

You can Ask an Expert, or browse the questions that have already been asked. Those asked in the last 30 days are flagged as ‘new’ so you can see what’s been recently added. Questions are answered by people like the chief examiner, so you know you are getting a good quality reply. Some of the answers include templates or sample documents, so you get more than just a stock answer – you get a tailored response with useful additional material if they have something extra to share.

2:  Alchemy for Managers

You get a year’s subscription to Alchemy for Managers – which is very useful. Project management is also about good management, so brush up on all your basic (and some more advanced) general management topics. The year starts from the day you sign up to Alchemy, so it doesn’t run concurrent with your pm4success membership. This alone is worth logging on to pm4success for.

3:  OGC Resource Toolkit

There’s a guide to the OGC Resource Toolkit. The OGC website is extensive and difficult to navigate. pm4success provides direct links to the most useful entry points, documentation and briefings, which saves you time. It’s in flux at the moment as the OGC website is being updated.

4:  Mind Maps

There are Mind Maps to download for M_o_R, MSP and PRINCE2. You need to download Thoughtograph, a mindmap viewing tool to be able to view them. It’s not how I think or structure my notes, but for graphically-minded people it’s an aid to not having to build your own.

5:  Sample papers

There are sample exam papers available for PRINCE2, MSP, M_ o_R. Sample papers are a highly valuable resource. In order to get access to pm4success, you will have had to take one of those exams, but if you are thinking of taking another, you can get some exam practice in advance as part of your pre-course learning.

6:  Free

It’s free! There are over 1000 pages of content. While I found that some of it is not helpful at all (although it might be helpful to people at different stages of their career), there has to be something here you can use!

Will I renew my subscription?

No. Much of the content on pm4success is static, and while they do add new articles on a regular basis, it’s not enough to encourage me to pay the annual fee. The Ask an Expert feature is excellent, but the newsgroup is not very active and I’ll get the same benefit of discussion with my peers from forums on Gantthead or LinkedIn groups. Overall, it is a useful perk to have for a year, but not worth continuing after that.

Have you used pm4success? What do you think?

Related posts:

1. Methodologies matter: PRINCE2 Last month I was interviewed by Diego Nei, for the Brazilian blog, Papo GP (Talking PM – I think I’ve got that right).  We were...

This new version of the PRINCE2 manual for project managers feels a lot clearer and structured. Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2: 2009 Edition has more diagrams and a greater degree of clarity and explanation about the themes and processes.   This makes the book more graphically interesting than the previous versions, and I’m sure this makes it easier to study and reference on a daily basis.

There is a greater degree of emphasis on the business case, and the text in general spends more time on evaluating and understanding the project context.  Chapter 5 sets the project in the organisational environment, with advice on working with a project team – part-time or otherwise – including short guidance on training and line management responsibilities.

This version has a clearer definition of the quality approach, including a sample quality review meeting agenda.  Overall, the book provides more structured guidance on the ‘how’ of managing a project with examples of what the techniques or criteria actually map to within a project.  Each Theme chapter ends with a table explaining the responsibilities of each team member as it relates to that Theme, and this is replicated in a similar fashion in the Processes chapters.  However, the text still talks about a daily log and I remain unconvinced as to the usefulness of this concept in an electronic business environment.

The book includes useful checklists, and the Closing a Project checklist seemed particularly good, although it does overlap slightly with the Authorise Project Closure checklist.  In total, the health check lists provided by Appendix E do offer a project manager the opportunity to assess the state of any project, which is helpful if you have not been the project manager since the beginning of the project, or if you are coming to the close of a major stage and feel that it is an appropriate time to schedule a review.

There is clearer guidance here as to how PRINCE2 sits within the family of OGC texts, and there are references to Management of Risk in Chapter 8 (Risks).  This, combined with the advice on tailoring PRINCE2 for your own organisation, makes the manual seem more practical and more coherent.  Previously, the PRINCE2 methods were in danger of being applied in an ‘all or nothing’ approach, but this new version sets organisational maturity and appetite in the heart of the project management process.

Buy on Amazon.co.uk
Buy on Amazon.com

Related posts:

1. Book review: Directing Successful Projects with PRINCE2 This book is long overdue: it’s a great idea to have a separate manual for those responsible for directing projects and sitting on the Project...
2. Book review: Managing Projects: A team-based approach I have read a lot of project management books over the last 5 years, and I’m pleased to say that this is my 65th book...
3. Inside PRINCE2: Fixed date projects Planning is an essential part of what project managers do, so you would expect there to be some mention of how to deal with fixed...