Project Portfolio Management ROI?

What is a single view of everything worth? If you have a good answer to this – we’re all ears here at Omnivisto. It’s simply not an easy question to answer. It’s kind of like trying to work out what the ROI is of everyone’s favorite spreadsheet application. It’s just not something that comes up in conversation very often. Equally – it’s perhaps considered such an essential in modern business settings that we’ve stopped asking what the ROI is. It’s more a case of what would be the cost to the business of going without it. I venture half the FTSE100 would promptly implode.

Project portfolio management (PPM) is a long established thing. In theory, I’m all for it. In practice, not so much. The reason is that the implementations don’t seem to deliver on their promise. Notably, those implementations are costly, high effort, disruptive and risky.

In the last 10 years, I’ve worked for around 8 ‘large’ enterprises. Some global, some multi-billion pound businesses, often with customer volumes in the millions. Not one had anything even close to an effective and efficient functioning PPM platform. That’s not to say they didn’t have one or, hadn’t invested significantly in it. It was just profoundly underwhelming and I venture a net cost on the business rather than offering any particular benefit. I could go into detail but I will resist the urge to go on a PPM bashing frenzy – it won’t win me any friends.

By the way – combined with my (and I venture a lot of other people’s) tepid view of PPM solutions are the following edicts from those the really do know about such things.

“Every team needs its own, self-tailored methodology.” and “If everyone converges on a standard way of doing things, the organisation diminishes its capacity for creativity and innovation. Your collective organisation starts to fall into the quagmire of best practices, constraints and bureaucracy.” And this isn’t me talking though I wish it were. That’s the co-author of the Agile Manifesto (Alastair Cockburn) and his comrade in arms, Craig Brown.

Interesting right? If that sounds like edgy hipster prose, it might be. But when Michael Quinn Patton in his much lauded book “Qualitative research and evaluation methods” says some similar stuff, hipster prose or not, it’s not easily dismissed.

So maybe the whole drive towards standardization and commoditization is misguided? And, if you’re well on with your journey towards a large scale PPM implementation to standardize investment delivery in your business, then you probably ought to stop reading. You’re just not going to appreciate where I’m taking this.

Here’s a selection of oft-quoted PPM benefits. These are rolled out with differing language and some minor variations but you get the picture.

1. Better decision-making
2. Acceleration of new product and service delivery as well as transformation
3. Consistency across enterprise project teams
4. More opportunities for continuous improvement
5. Optimized resource allocation and increased efficiencies
6. Increased visibility into the entire project pipeline
7. Increased accountability
8. Validation of project selection and business strategy
9. Better risk management
10. Higher probability of success and increase ROI overall

There’s a mix of ROI figures quoted but pay back in 12 months with a 3 year ROI of between 200% and 300% seems about the norm. As business cases and benefits tracking go – you’re going to struggle on this. You think you’re going to tell a project sponsor that their delivery of their project on time and on budget is down to your PPM implementation and not attributable to their own skills? Best of luck with that.

I also think one my biggest concerns about PPM implementations is the requirement to warehouse all your project management data and collateral within a single platform. We’ve got folks out there using MS Project, MS Excel, the previous PPM tool, MS PowerPoint, Jira, DevOps toolsets, Trello, SmartSheet and many more besides. Not to mention third-parties who are pretty much always going to be out of reach.

In short – you’re going to be unpopular, generate a shed load of additional work and re-keying and you’ll get the diehards who just wont suffer to be told what to do. And, however hard you try, you’re probably never quite going to succeed.

With all of these points born in mind (and a few more besides) you simply couldn’t pay me enough to manage the implementation of one of these things. It’s a project which will be measured not by how much it succeeded but by how little it failed.

But like everything there’s a nugget of deep value and insight here. The answer isn’t to forgo the benefits of PPM, it’s to go about getting them the right way. For less effort, less cost, less complexity, less disbenefits, less impact and less risk. And, yes – less headline benefits too as it goes. But if our ROI is more consistent, more achievable and more lasting – then you can count me in. This is project that can succeed.

Omnivisto isn’t shy of sticking it’s neck out and making bold assertions and here is one coming now. Maintain flexibility, don’t wed yourself to an expensive and complex PPM solution. Leave data (and people) alone and pull it in to a single view of everything. Publish that to the business so finance, risk, compliance, health and safety and well, everyone knows what the heck is going on. You’ll have your PPM implementation on the cheap. It’s be quick, lightweight, flexible and fluid. It’ll also probably work.

Some of the information in this post came from the links below.

https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/tip/Benefits-of-adopting-project-portfolio-management
https://www.creato.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/PPM-ROI-Research-Forrester-Study.pdf
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7222568987262398465/