A “release” is a project that addresses a group of recommendations for improving project, program and portfolio management maturity. In short, a release is a grouping of recommendations that feed into a project. This article outlines how to effectively utilize multiple releases and provides recommendations for a maturing PMO.
Growing Up
Releases involve people, processes and technology and should be measured for effectiveness. Each release will provide incremental improvement over the previous releases. Every process improvement release should be executed in 60-to-90 days, with an agreed follow-on period for operation use before the effectiveness of that release is re-benchmarked. It is an iterative process of continuous release, use, benchmark.
The balance here is to come back regularly with measurable value for the following key stakeholders:
A common oversight in benchmarking and improving delivery processes is forgetting the critical role played by the support organizations (project, program and portfolio). Each level of delivery—project, program and portfolio—has its own processes, which are aligned to support organizations that have their own processes.
Therefore, to evolve your maturity levels, you need to improve delivery-type processes and support-type processes that go on at the same time. For example, say you want to improve a process related to procurement. On the delivery side, the project manager will undertake processes for supplier selection, while the support organization, in this case, the project management office, undertakes processes for developing parameters for creating and maintaining supplier lists.
Both of these process improvements would involve changes to staffing or roles. This means that the support organization develops rules and guidelines so that project, program and portfolio managers can carry out the delivery processes efficiently and effectively.
Often, when improving the level of maturity in PPM and the associated processes, organizations take a “bottom-up” approach. We often see the different profiles of functionality released as an organization moves up the maturity level from “Active” through “Business-Driven” on groups of processes.
A possible approach with a four-part release implementation could be:
Release 1. – Implement basic project management including initiation, planning, (plus resource assignments), control, execution (plus time capture) and project closure.
Release 2. – Add project risk management to the basic project management functionality; basic program management of projects and services (mainly grouping projects and services into programs for progress reporting); and portfolio management processes and capabilities for both projects and services.
Release 3. – Add project cost management, project procurement management and project quality management; program risk analysis; and program resource management/
Release 4. – Add IT services portfolio planning; business relationship management; services finance management; program cost management; program procurements and program quality management.
For example, a large healthcare organization decided to take a bottom-up approach. Its first release involved improving its project, resource and time management processes through the implementation of industry-standard processes for project management, supported by standards, templates and software.
This first release raised their level of maturity in many project management level processes. Their second release involved improving the processes they needed to review resource usage and capacity across programs of projects, plus the management of costs and earned value at both the project and program level.
Their future releases most likely will concentrate on economies of scale through the improvement of program-level processes, plus aligning projects and services to corporate objectives through portfolio management “What if?” processes.
An example of a different approach is of a property development company that wanted to improve processes, organization and technology at both the project management and portfolio management levels in the first release. They introduced standardization around project initiation, scope definition, high-level project planning and tracking, and resource allocations, plus grouping of projects into portfolio scenarios for “What if?” analysis.