The Irreverent Guide to Project Management: An Agile Approach to Enterprise Project Management, Version 5.0

By Jason Scott

The stress of being a project leader can be enormous, having to deal with time and budget constraints, unforeseen obstacles, uneasy executive stakeholders, and a thousand other concerns. You need a tested and proven toolkit to ensure that every job in your portfolio is done absolutely right.

The Irreverent Guide to Project Management offers comprehensive, step-by-step instruction and best practice techniques to help you move your project forward aggressively and achieve optimum results. J. Scott covers all the bases with engaging wit and mind-blowing expertise, from kickoff meeting to final review, offering straight-to-the-point direction for creating a viable work plan, control log, and job status documentation; establishing a baseline budget; prioritizing and managing impediments; and so much more.

Both practical and flexible, with guidelines and procedures that are appropriate for any project, large or small, The Irreverent Guide to Project Management will lead you to a consistently successful outcome every time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781544501093

Book preview

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CHAPTER 1:

Getting Started

The 120VC Project Management Guidebook was originally written as a training curriculum for our professional Project Managers and as the standard by which our Program Managers manage and quality assure the projects in their programs. As such, it is completely unchanged and provided to you as a way of sharing our proven approach to completing Enterprise Projects successfully. In addition, the Project Management Standard contained in the Guidebook applies to every project, regardless of environment, subject matter, or client methodology. And we have proven over time that if you follow each step, it will ensure a consistent, successful outcome on every project.

While we have created the 120VC Project Management  Guidebook, it doesn’t contain anything not currently considered a best practice by the Project Portfolio Management (PPM) community at large. In fact, most of our innovation comes from actively managing projects for the Fortune 100. When we encounter a client that employs a technique that creates great project management return on investment, it goes into the next version of the Guidebook. Therefore, the 120VC Project Management Standard is simply a compendium of instructions to execute the most current best practices in Project Management today. We define Enterprise Projects as those that require multiple-matrix, cross-disciplined teams, and sometimes external vendors, to complete. Enterprise Projects require communication and cross-organization dependencies to be managed tightly to ensure that team members on one team are ready to start work as soon as the dependent work is completed by a member of another team. Enterprise Projects cannot be completed by a single, fully dedicated, multifunctional group.

When 120VC engages on smaller projects, we decide at the beginning of each which of the tools and techniques in the Guidebook are necessary and which are not. However, to consistently enable Project Manager success and to support the success of the program and Portfolio Management layers, we don’t ever change the tools or techniques that we choose to use.

Lastly, we are not academics, but real heads-down, hands-dirty Project Portfolio Management professionals. We recognize that no one starts a project because they want their organization to be the same when the project is over. Over the years, we have learned three things that have proven to be universally true:

1. Leaders change things—they take organizations on a journey

2. Change is about people

3. Culture eats strategy for breakfast

(Peter Drucker)

So, if you are the leader who gets excited about driving change by helping your team members reach for their potential—the kind of leader who wants to succeed by helping your team members self-actuate their own path to a shared goal—this Guidebook is for you. If you are the kind of person who wants to win despite the impact it has on your team, pass this copy of the Guidebook on to someone who is committed to leadership.

Because leadership isn’t about you.

If you are still reading, expect some good-natured profanity, some sarcasm, and some straight-to-the-point direction. More importantly, expect to learn how to plan and manage a project instead of a bunch of theories that enlighten you but don’t provide any instruction on how to apply them to your current projects. As you read, you will encounter specific instruction that you can begin applying as you complete each page. There is no need to wait until you have completed the book and understand the steps as they apply to the entire project lifecycle to begin applying them.

Methodology vs. Project Management Standards

If you are looking for a project management methodology, you have come to the wrong place. Methodologies are company-specific and are used to:

• Control portfolio pipeline

• Support financial allocation

• Support project team-member staffing/allocation

• Provide data to facilitate executive stakeholder decisions

Because every company’s culture is unique, their approach to decision-making, project team members, and financial allocation will vary dramatically. More specifically, a methodology is something that serves the company—a set of required project deliverables executed by the PMs on every project. Methodologies are not intended as tools that the Project Manager can use to plan and successfully complete a project; they are a set of standard deliverables that provide value to the company. The 120VC Project Management Guidebook is a standard set of techniques, criteria, calculations, and tools that enable a Project Manager to plan and manage a project successfully and realize the benefits intended from our clients’ methodology!

Project Managers and regular run-of-the-mill managers can both complete projects successfully. The difference is that today’s Project Manager should be able to do more than:

Use a Work Plan like a checklist of items necessary to complete the project 

Kick off the work, cross their fingers, and go for it

Today’s Project Manager needs to have the skill to:

Thoroughly define a project

Perform a sanity check on the tasks and durations provided by the subject matter experts

Defend the defined approach, each task, and the schedule to Executive Stakeholders

Once the work is kicked-off, the Project Manager should have the tools and discipline to:

Lead project Executives

Help Executive Stakeholders, Functional Manager(s), and team members stay accountable

Use the Work Plan to forecast how impediments that arise during the course of the project will impact the project end date and cost

Identify impediments, determine how long they can go unsolved before they begin impacting the project end date and cost, prioritize them, and develop appropriate responses to ensure any potential downstream impact to the project end date and to mitigate the cost fully

In this fashion, the Project Manager makes data-driven decisions today that control the outcome tomorrow and move the project forward as aggressively as possible, leaving no time or money on the table.

Project Portfolio Management:

Consistency & The Big Picture

Organizations launch Portfolio Management Offices (PMOs) because the CEO and the CFO want to be able to make data-driven decisions about how to allocate funds and team members across their portfolios, to achieve the greatest return for their investment, and to complete as many of the projects in their portfolio each year for the amount of money that has been allocated. Essentially, a project portfolio is no different to them than a financial portfolio, with one major exception: a CFO delegates the responsibility of delivering the results of their investment to others and keeps them accountable for the results by closely assessing the financial results over time. When one of these delegates is a Chief Portfolio Officer or Portfolio Manager, they are responsible for both the investment dollars and delivering the projects that will realize the return on investment that the CEO desires.

Ideally, both the CEO and CFO would receive a weekly or monthly fact-based report from the PMO that lists each project in the portfolio, along with a summary of their health in relation to the project end date and cost. The executives would use this information to make decisions for the reallocation of funds and team members from projects with a surplus to projects in need. This is not unlike an investor making buy-sell decisions based on the report provided by their finance manager to maximize their return on the funds they have available.

Organizations committed to realizing the benefits of Portfolio Management then began implementing PPM systems at significant cost and impact on their organization in an effort to automate the collection of data, to perform demand management, and to report across their portfolio. The obstacle they often face after implementation is that the consumers of these reports can’t make confident decisions with subjective data! This is evidenced by the weekly or monthly status meetings that every Project Manager must attend to talk about their projects with executives who have already received the report. This meeting takes place because the executives are attempting to validate the data in the report before making any decisions because they don’t trust that their definition of Red, Yellow, and Green is the same as the Project Manager’s definition when reporting on the project. This is largely because the criteria used to determine project health, assess impediment, and report status varies from Project Manager to Project Manager. Due to this lack of consistency and the ability to effectively use the reports produced by the PPM tool to improve their Portfolio success rate, PMO leaders spend most of their time implementing or refining their methodologies. Each new change or refinement made by the PMO requires training and adoption, during which most Project Managers are not consistently adhering to any set standard. This cycle of constant change is the number one contributor, to the lack of consistent application of an organization’s methodology across their portfolio.

The second major to a lack of consistency in Project Management approach across projects is that Project Managers do not need to:

Follow a standard or adhere to a methodology to get a project done or to succeed in the eyes of project beneficiaries.

This is because the project beneficiary is generally the person in the business or a consumer who is looking forward to having the project done—not the CEO, CFO, or Portfolio Manager who is responsible for ensuring completion of all projects in the portfolio.

Roughly translated, the chaos created by constantly changing and lightly documented methodologies that aren’t tools to help the Project Manager successfully complete their projects are perceived by most Project Managers as unnecessary overhead.

In reality, most methodologies and PPM systems aren’t broken! They just need to be combined with a solid, consistently adhered-to Project Management Standard and to be regularly quality assured by a Program Manager.

We have now come full circle to the role of the PMO. The reason PMO leaders need to ensure the consistent application of their methodology and a Project Management Standard is so their CEO and CFO don’t need a secret decoder card, ten meetings per month, and a private detective to get the data they need to make decisions.

Program Managers, Portfolio Managers, CEOs, and CFOs can’t successfully control the outcome of their Portfolio if they need a secret decoder card to determine what criteria individual Project Managers are using to plan, track, assess impediment, report status, and rate health. If everyone is performing these functions differently, there is no way to quality assure the data or the project. If the data can’t be quality assured, it won’t be used confidently to make business-critical decisions. Therefore, the criteria for Project Manager success can’t simply be to get a project done. Run-of-the-mill managers can do that. We built the 120VC Project Management Guidebook to enable Program and Portfolio Manager success by providing a set of best-practice techniques and a standard to measure them by in order to ensure Project success. At 120VC, we measure a Project Manager’s success according to the following criteria:

Moves their project forward as aggressively as possible, leaving no time or money on the table.

Ensures the realization of the intended value from our clients’ methodologies and PPM tools.

Consistently applies the 120VC Project Management Standard to provide standardized, quality-assured information to our clients that enable data-driven decisions to effectively manage their portfolio of projects.

The 120vc Portfolio Management Model Overview

In the previous section, I talked about the responsibility that executive leaders have to ensure all the projects greenlit each year are completed for the funds allocated. If they don’t complete them all, coming in under or over budget, they have failed. I also talked about the role that the PMO and the PPM tools, methodologies, and Project Management Standards play in enabling Executive Leadership Teams to allocate resources from projects with surplus to projects in need. In the following section, I will walk you through a simple workflow that illustrates how each of these components fits together to enable the benefits of portfolio management. In no way am I suggesting the following portfolio model is a mature workflow; its presence in a Project Management Guidebook implies that it is meant as a learning tool. The 120VC Portfolio Management Model illustrates the fundamental components an organization needs to put in place and measure before they will begin to realize the basic benefits of Project Portfolio Management.

The final reason for its presence in a Project Management Guidebook is to drive home the fact that project management is a fundamental component of effective portfolio management. If a Project Manager chooses to complete their projects on time and on budget while ignoring the needs of the portfolio, they are an obstacle to achieving the benefits of portfolio management. On the other hand, if a Project Manager chooses to complete their projects while adhering to their organization’s chosen project management standard and ensuring the benefits of their organization’s methodology, they are enabling the success of their organization’s entire portfolio.

As you read through the description of each layer of the 120VC Portfolio Management Model, it is important to remember the cumulative outcome of each step. The ultimate outcome is to enable Executive Leadership to make decisions to reallocate surplus from the information in the report generated by the PPM tool. Imagine a world where a CEO gets a report, reads the report, and can act on the information contained in it. Priceless!

There are several layers that contribute to achieving the vision of Project Portfolio Management. The workflow depicted in this figure starts at the bottom left, flows right across the Project Management layer, then moves up to the Program Management layer and resets to the left side of that and the subsequent layers. Each of these layers contributes to achieving the vision. Each layer is explained in the following sections.

The Project Management Layer

The Project Management layer breaks down into three functions:

1. An external Project Management Standard that the Project Manager uses to plan and manage their projects.

2. A proprietary organizational methodology. The organizational methodology outlines required processes that the Project Manager executes on each project to obtain the necessary support from the client organization.

3. A project plan with weekly project and budget reports.

To explain the role of each of these components, I am going to use an analogy. The Project Management Standard in the figure above is similar in purpose to the medical standard that a doctor learns in medical school. Doctors learn a medical standard and are thoroughly evaluated before becoming board certified to practice medicine. Once certified, the doctor can work in any hospital and practice medicine on day one. Hospital methodologies are different from hospital to hospital and state to state. A hospital’s methodology defines how to prescribe meds, order lab tests, and handle patient files, but it doesn’t cover how to practice medicine. Can you imagine a world where every hospital had their own proprietary medical standard? Doctors would have to study for months before being able to practice medicine in their new jobs. This would be very costly and inefficient. How would people choose which hospital had the best medical standard? How would someone judge malpractice? It just wouldn’t work.

Essentially, the adoption of the 120VC Project Management Standard by corporations would allow new Project Managers to be productive in any organization immediately, and the use of a consistent standard enables the Program Management and Portfolio Management layers. The organizational methodology would contain those procedures that are truly unique to an organization and anything that might give them a competitive advantage. Together, the standard and methodology serve as a road map for project planning and management, which will result in a tight project plan and will support weekly quality assurance and reporting.

The Program Management Layer

The Program Management Layer breaks down into four functions.

Quality Assurance

Eliminates any risk to the project associated with Project Management aptitude by performing daily and weekly quality assurance exercises. This sounds terrible if you jump directly to the worst possible scenario, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons that a competent Project Manager can get in over their head. It is the Program Manager’s job to realize this before it impacts the project negatively and to help the Project Manager keep the project on track. Notice I didn’t say get the project back on track. That’s because the Key Performance Indicators allow Program Managers to proactively manage their programs instead of waiting until something goes wrong to act.

Escalation Management

Inevitably, the Project Manager will encounter impediments that need to be escalated to the Project Owner or an Executive Stakeholder. An escalation is essentially the assignment of work upward to an executive. If you have ever done this, you have noticed how not excited the executive is to have unexpected work added to their priority list. The Program Manager’s role is to alleviate this additional work when possible by:

• Taking ownership of the escalation from the Project Manager

• Communicating the task to the Executive

• Getting buy-in from the Executive to complete the task

In this way, the Project Manager can stay focused on moving their project forward as aggressively as possible while the Program Manager completes the task and closes the escalation so the Executive can stay focused on their day job.

Program Analysis

Again, because the Project Managers are all following the standard, the data from each project can be quality assured for accuracy. With accurate project data, the Program Manager can effectively analyze their program to rob from the rich projects and give to the poor projects to complete as many of the projects in their program each year for money that has been allocated.

Weekly Program Reporting

When the Program Manager completes the weekly quality assurance process, they are 100 percent up to speed on their projects, the decisions made, and why. They’ve had a chance to ask questions to validate each decision, to complete their Program Analysis, and to help the Project Manager when necessary. The project information is then compiled and sent to the Portfolio Management Layer for review and assistance if necessary.

Key Point: This level of quality assurance is not possible unless the Project Manager is following the standard. If Project Managers adopt their own approach to planning, assessing impediments/health, and reporting, the Program Manager will need a secret decoder card to interpret the success of each individual Project Manager on their team. In most organizations today, the lack of adoption of a consistent Project Management Standard is the primary reason why Program Managers are constantly fighting fires. Their Project Managers are all doing things differently, and the Program Manager can’t effectively quality assure the chaos!

The Portfolio Management Layer

The Portfolio Management Layer breaks down into three functions.

The Weekly Portfolio Meeting

During this meeting, the Chief Portfolio Officer (CPO) or Portfolio Manager reviews the individual program reports with each of their Program Managers. During the review, the CPO asks questions to understand the data in the report and the reasoning behind proposed solutions to get Red or Yellow projects back to Green. They also coordinate the allocation of resources from healthy programs to programs in need.

The three main things that get allocated across programs are money, people, and project slack. In project management, float or slack is the amount of time that a task in a project network can be delayed without causing a delay to subsequent tasks and the project completion date.

I am going to use a financial example to illustrate a situation that might require the allocation of resources from one program to another. In this example, there are two Program Managers. Both have projects that will go over budget by ten thousand dollars. One of the Program Managers has a surplus of funds in their program that will cover the overage. Therefore, the CPO can simply accept the overage for that program. The other Program Manager has no surplus, and the overage will cause the entire program to go over budget by ten thousand dollars. In the second scenario, the Portfolio Manager needs to determine whether there is enough surplus across all programs (the portfolio) to cover the ten-thousand-dollar overage or whether they need to cut projects to ensure the portfolio doesn’t come in over budget.

The Executive Portfolio Report

Once the CPO is up to speed on all projects, has validated the proposed solutions, and has facilitated the necessary allocation of resources across the portfolio, the Executive Portfolio Report is produced. The exercise in the Weekly Portfolio Meeting prepares the CPO to lead the Weekly Executive Portfolio Meeting with the CEO and CFO.

The Weekly Executive Portfolio Meeting

In this meeting, the CPO will review the Red and Yellow projects with the CEO and CFO. The CPO briefly explains the impediments impacting those projects and their proposed solutions. The CEO and CFO will ask validating questions to understand the solutions and will either approve them or ask the CPO to work with their teams to provide alternates.

The Portfolio Report

In this image, you’ll see a snapshot of a portfolio report. Try to imagine a report like this that contains over 100 projects. We have created a list of three projects to keep the explanation simple. The bottom financials above are the sum of all three projects. You can see that the name of each project is listed on the very left, followed by the name of the Project Manager, Project Start, and Finish Date.

The next field is the Project Manager’s average Project Review Score. Because 120VC Project Managers all follow the 120VC Project Management Standard, it is possible to quality assure their work weekly and derive an average performance (or quality assurance) score over time.

Ask yourself this: If all the Project Managers in a program were planning, assessing impediments, assessing health, and reporting differently, by what standard would a Program Manager be able to quality assure their work? The answer is that chaos can not be quality assured and always ends badly!

The reason we include the average review score in the Portfolio Report is simple. We have learned over time that any Project Manager with a review average of 95 percent or better is moving their project forward as aggressively as possible. Now, just because the Project Manager is rocking the project doesn’t mean that impediments won’t arise that impact Project Heath. It just means that you don’t need to indict the Project Manager when that happens.

The Project Review Score also tells executives that they can trust the data they are reviewing because it has been quality assured twice before making it into their report. The accuracy of quality-assured data allows the executives to make confident, data-driven decisions from the report without having to ask twenty questions about each project, use a secret decoder card, attend ten meetings per month, and hire a private detective to get the information they need to make decisions.

The Project Health field differentiates a project in need from a healthy project. When Project Managers label a project Yellow or Red, they are generally communicating the need for program- or portfolio-level assistance to overcome an impediment preventing their project from moving forward as aggressively as possible.

Program and Portfolio Management can use the Planned vs. Actual fields to prioritize the assistance they provide to unhealthy projects. A portfolio may have five or more Red projects at any given time. All need assistance, but which is the highest priority? For example, if I had a Red project that was planned to be 75 percent complete but is actually only 50 percent complete, and I had another Red project that was planned to be 30 percent complete and is actually 35 percent complete, the Red project that is trending behind should receive program- or portfolio-level assistance before the Red project that is trending ahead of schedule. In the end, they may all get assistance. Planned vs. Actual is simply the mechanism to prioritize projects with similar health status.

Another data point to consider when prioritizing project assistance would be to understand the Red projects’ priority to the other projects in the portfolio. This would require the Executive Leadership Team to prioritize the projects in their portfolio. Then there is the financial information associated with each project. The BaseBudget reflects the amount the Project Owner approved the Project Manager to spend. The Current Forecast is the amount the Project Manager currently believes is needed to complete the project, and the variance is the difference between the two. Spent/Committed is the total amount spent and owed for goods and services, and Remaining is self-explanatory.

Any project with Yellow or Red health will be accompanied with a solution/request for the support needed to get the project back to Green. A project can be Red or Yellow without requiring program or portfolio assistance. When this happens, it is important for the Project Manager to make that clear when reporting on the solution that is employed to return the project back to Green. Now that I have explained the fields, I would like to explain how to interpret the report pictured.

The first project in the figure is on schedule but has an impediment on its critical path that requires resolution before it begins impacting the project’s end date and cost. In this case, the best possible solution is to hire an expert consultant for a week. Neither the impediment nor the $23,743 to resolve it were anticipated, resulting in the negative variance between the project’s BaseBudget and Current Forecast. When the negative Project Cost Variance is considered in correlation with the overall positive bottom line Portfolio Variance of $86,592, the CEO or CFO can accept the negative variance to complete the project in need. An alternative to accepting the negative variance is to cancel the project. This would be a good decision if the project were a nice-to-have versus a must-have for the organization. Since only $16,740 has been spent to date, canceling or postponing the project would save the organization/portfolio the remaining funds, creating an additional portfolio surplus of $57,060.

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