Project Portfolio Management
When organizational leaders look for ways to improve their business processes, one area of significant interest is finding better ways to manage decisions regarding project portfolios.
Considering that decision makers are frequently dealing with cutbacks, it is extremely valuable to understand what tradeoffs are made when arriving at a budget recommendation. Most organizations are hesitant to halt a project without strong justification that it is not contributing value, yet no one wants to waste money on non-productive initiatives.
Decision Lens assists in the following ways:
1. Creates a structured, repeatable decision-making process for prioritizing projects
2. Provides a flexible platform for rapidly adjusting priorities and allocations amid changing
business conditions
3. Builds participation among competing project advocates by including the input of all parties
4. Tracks project performance as it moves from concept stage to realization stage
5. Provides justification to terminate a project when it is not achieving its goal
Decision Lens supports direct alignment between strategic objectives and projects through its collaborative prioritization capability.
Before using Decision Lens, our resource allocation frequently happened behind closed doors and over table conversations resulting in many additional negotiations and bitter feelings. With Decision Lens, all of the key stakeholders participate and can see how the decision is made. The additional clarity gives us the ability to move forward quickly with confidence.
CTO, AWS WeatherBug
The Decision Lens pair-wise comparison process enables "stovepiped" organizations to bring their leaders together to build a common understanding of the relative importance of strategic objectives. These prioritized objectives drive the evaluation of projects in the portfolio, enabling the organization to gain a more thorough understanding of their value to the business.
In most portfolio management decisions, there are usually some rules or conditions that guide the project budget, most often regarding financial and human resources.
Some examples:
- Project interdependencies where one project should not be funded if another project is not
- Funding minimums where a project must receive some level of resources due to political mandates or commitments
- Time-sequenced allocations based on the projected long-term impact of funding a project
- Multiple sources of funding
Decision Lens assists portfolio managers in creating a structured framework for integrating all applicable rules and conditions into a budget, and helps improve project portfolio decision making in a way that is easy to understand.
