Prioritization and the Connected Leader
Project portfolio prioritization is a tough job. Even when times are good, you can’t undertake every project. When times are bad, you not only have to take on fewer new projects, you have to revaluate your portfolio and stop ongoing projects.
Stopping projects, in turn, is a part of common sense portfolio management. Whether you practice rigid gates, flexible gates, or funding by the seat of the CEO’s gates, project are started and stopped all the time. It’s easier to stop a project when you have clear data that the project is not going to result in appropriate financial returns. It is a lot harder when swirling macroeconomic forces motivate us to scrutinize each project more carefully, resulting in more aggressive choices (cuts) in their portfolio.
How you make these choices has a profound effect on how your organization will respond to news of which projects receive continued funding and which are cut.
Jack & Suzy Welch discuss some pretty critical aspects of good decision making in the age of the Internet in their article The Connected Leader. The Welches say the following in their article:
“We would suggest that it can be just as damaging for a leader not to respond to feedback as it is not to ask for it at all. In the old days, layers of management filtered out too many good ideas from below, but they also filtered out nattering. In the era of Internet communities, leaders will have to find, largely on their own, ways to process the good and bad alike.”
We can’t agree more. Our experience is that the worst approach is to portfolio prioritization in tough times is to have a small number of “senior leaders” close their doors and make these choices in secret, without involving the input of their internal and external stakeholders. Sure, decisions are made, but those affected rarely implement the changes with the speed and clarity needed in these tough economic times.
A far better choice, and one that is advocated by the Welches, is to have modern leaders leverage the many tools that the Internet provides to help them engage with their employees to make better decisions. One such tool is Buy a Feature, which enables groups of internal and external stakeholders to collaboratively prioritize project portfolios. By enabling others to actively participate in the decision process, leaders can gain a better understanding of which projects are most important, and why. Ultimately, the leadership team may not agree with the results of the collaborative prioritization process, and choose to fund or cut a different set of projects than chosen by the team. The benefit to the leaders is now they know which of their choices requires more elaborate discussions with the larger organization.
We’ve recently completed a project whereby we helped a large (>$1B in revenue) software services company prioritize an internal project portfolio of 46 projects affecting their global customer support organization. Using Buy a Feature, our client was able to engage more than half of the approximately 200-person global customer support team at all levels of management, from first-line support agents to Vice-Presidents of lines of business, in collaboratively prioritizing their project portfolio. Completed in just about three weeks time, the organization clearly prioritized 7 projects as the most important.
If you’re thinking about making tough choices in the prioritization of your projects, we hope you’ll take the Welches’ advice, and directly include your employees in this process.
Luke Hohmann
CEO, Enthiosys, Inc.
615 National Ave, Ste 230
Mountain View, CA 94087
m: +1-408-529-0319
lhohmann@enthiosys.com
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