Maintaining Alignment Through Review and Prioritization

Completing the initial creation of your business project portfolio is a solid milestone; however, maintaining the portfolio will require considerable effort. There are two basic mechanisms for keeping the elements of your portfolio in alignment as the various projects and the business move forward:

1. Ongoing project reviews

2. Periodic portfolio prioritization

Project reviews involve the ongoing monitoring of project status, milestones, and issues. When you are managing several agile projects simultaneously, you may find yourself addressing major project decision points almost constantly. As these significant events take place, you should not only be assessing their impact on the individual project, but also on the overall portfolio that is external to the project in question. If impacts on other projects are identified, then the project managers for those projects should be notified and apprised of the situation. The solution will likely involve some kind of joint effort or give-and-take between the two project teams. No matter what form the remediation takes, the key point is that the impact is identified and communicated in a timely manner. In this way, any ripple effect caused by a single project will quickly propagate through the portfolio and then settle out, hopefully before the next impact event.

Agile Strategy

When conducting individual project reviews or status reporting, include a portfolio element to ensure that the project manager assesses how her project may affect others, and how they might affect hers.

Portfolio prioritization usually takes the form of a periodic review meeting chaired by a program manager and attended by the executive and/or functional management team. The goal of these review meetings is to reassess the priorities of the business objectives, programs, and projects, based on any changes driven by internal or external events since the last prioritization. This is a top-down process that gives a quick overview of the various elements of the portfolio, based on a few predetermined evaluation criteria. So, while this is largely a qualitative process, there is a quantitative dimension to it that helps keep emotions and pet projects in check. The evaluation criteria should be selected to reflect the business goals, as well as the realities of project management, most notably resources and progress to plan. An example of a workflow and template for a project prioritization process in provided in Appendix D.

The results of the reprioritization may have their own impacts and ripple effects on the project portfolio. Likely project adjustments coming out of a reprioritization include schedule and resource shifts, as well as project cancellation or postponement.

Agile Strategy

Conduct periodic portfolio prioritizations based on the top-down approach of systematically looking at high-level business goals and organizational resources, to ensure that the organization continues to efficiently advance its highest-priority projects.

In an agile environment, you cannot afford the inefficiencies of working on things that do not contribute to the business objectives. By employing the bottom-up, project review–driven approach to portfolio adjustments, combined with the top-down prioritization process, you will have a much better chance of keeping your high-level objectives aligned with your tactical projects.