Your project isn’t a project. When is a project not a project? When it’s work. Plain old run-of-the-mill work – remember that? It’s the stuff you can do without a whole lot of planning and processes — and perhaps most importantly, without risk. As Apfel put it, this endeavor might need a team and a schedule to be executable, but whatever it is – an application release, perhaps –  it isn’t a project. Why? “Because we’re not worried about it,” she explained.

Your process is inflexible and slow. Well, those are two adjectives that nowadays should strike fear in the heart of any IT organization. But, Apfel noted, many IT project management processes exhibit both traits. The real culprit here is where decisions are made in the prevailing process model – at the top. You might be thinking, but of course! While top-down decision making does reduce the risk of making the wrong decisions, it also can bring the works to a virtual stop while you await that decision. This isn’t really the “old” way of doing things because so many organizations are still doing it. But if they want to keep up, Apfel said, they’ve got to get on board with the world of “change operations.” In this approach, guidelines are set to empower teams to make certain decisions on their own, making the process — hooray! — flexible and faster.

You’re putting the cart before the horse. Apfel insists that many a project management office would avoid failure if it asked this question from the start: What business problem are you trying to solve, and does everyone agree it’s worth the effort to solve it? Too often the “problem” is actually the sought-after solution, she said. She will ask a client what the problem is, and the answer often will be, “We’re standardizing our PPM process.” That’s a solution, not a problem, she noted, and that proverbial cart will go nowhere until the problem is identified.

The University of Utah categorized its IT initiatives across the university into 11 portfolios, in areas ranging from “architecture and security” to “instructional” and “user experience.” The entire program (which followed a campus-wide IT centralization effort) was completed in 10 months. Now, projects must go through the strategic portfolio process to be approved; it’s not longer a case of “whoever yells the loudest gets their money first.”

As we noted in the story, new SearchCIO.com reader research on PPM found that only 37% of 304 enterprise organizations define PPM as an enterprise-wide discipline used to select and prioritize investments in different parts of the company, including IT. The others use PPM only in IT (31%); don’t have a PPM practice at all (28%); or have one only outside of IT (5%).

It was also striking how that second “P” in PPM played such a huge role for the Salt Lake City-based university. A lot of organizations use PPM software mainly for project management and prioritization; the “portfolio” aspect doesn’t tend to play a big role. In our survey, 42% used PPM software, and of those, only 30% deemed portfolio management as a “very important” feature in PPM software system selection.

It sounds like this “portfolio first” approach at the University of Utah was a huge success. I’m told that an educational facility doesn’t necessarily view ROI in the kind of dollar terms other organizations do, but that they’re seeing results nonetheless. Resources (i.e. people) are being better utilized and the right projects – benefitting the university as a whole – are being completed in a timelier manner.

So why don’t more organizations focus on portfolio creation and management in PPM software purchases and planning? I’d be interested in hearing your organization’s rationale in the comments section below, or e-mail me.