"It's counterintuitive until you think about it," says Kurt Milne, managing director of the Institute. The business world is accustomed to trying new initiatives but being willing to move on if they don't work. But, as Milne points out, in IT there is inherent value in stability, so it's no wonder we're hesitant to pull the trigger. "I don't know that that's a skill that IT folks think they need to have, but logically, it makes sense to shoot your bad projects and move on."
Line of business executives understand capacity planning, prioritization, and making tradeoffs, Milne says, but they expect these choices to be presented in business lan-guage. What they do not understand is when IT overpromises and then under-delivers by failing to meet deadlines or not completing a project properly. Unless IT becomes skilled at PPM, we'll never close this credibility gap.
Our survey respondents cited personalities, hidden agendas, and politics as top barriers to efficiently managing their project portfolios. Establishing a good, documented project initiation and ongoing evaluation process is your best defense against managing by whim. Reach out to non-IT departments when you're creating the process so they have buy-in to the final product. When deliberating about the process with those folks, here's what you should be thinking about.
>> Measure work capacity. You can't even begin to justify why you need a process until you have a clear sense of how busy the IT staff is. You must measure. Even if you don't feel your group is overburdened, you can use capacity data in other ways. For example, a project manager in the finance industry told us that he doesn't usually use work capacity metrics as part of the decision as to whether to undertake a project, but they do play a role later.
"We agree to do all requested work," he says. "Then we start negotiating with the customer—or not—about slipping delivery."
The fact that 63% of respondents to our poll use "best guess" or don't even attempt to determine their groups' work capacity may also indicate why so many folks struggle with this keystone concept. Of those who do keep track, some use allocated FTE hours, while others standardize on project queue length, that is, the number of simultaneous projects that IT is working on. This works as long as you establish a baseline first, to highlight positive or negative trends as the business environment changes.
>> Build visibility and support. Sharing your data, good or bad, about work capaci-ty is a must given limited staff and financial resources. "It assists IT and business units in prioritizing work and determining if additional resources, like contractors or consul-tants, are required," says a government project manager in California. "It also provides understanding to business about workloads and prioritizing." Or, put another way, how can they feel sorry for you if they don't understand how badly they're beating you up?
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