The challenges of adopting and using Project, Programme and Portfolio management (P3M)

Veredus consultant Donnie MacNicol provides topical insights into the challenges of adopting and using Project, Programme and Portfolio management (P3M). This is based on his current experience of working on with senior managers in major government departments and working with a wide range of private sector organisations in aerospace, media and professional services. This experienced is augmented by his active contribution to a number of professional bodies and research with Kingston Business School where he is a Visiting Fellow.

Challenges of delivery

P3M has become common within central and local government working practices with considerable investment in methodologies and processes. With a continuing high programme failure rate (Reference 1) and often perceived lack of value being achieved from investment in programmes, Donnie will identify 3 underlying reasons for this, providing readers with a valuable insight into aspects of the emerging discipline of Organisational Project Management.

• Cultural appreciation
• Governance and leadership
• P3M in policy creation

Cultural appreciation

Organisations are typically not aware of and therefore have not planned for the often inherent cultural challenges that arise from adopting, using and sustaining P3M and the clash with longstanding protocols and norms. For P3M to work effectively there are certain personal, team and organisational behaviours that must be present to ensure effective delivery. The cultural challenges include:

• The traditional concept of owning a fixed team versus the need to continually justify programme resources
• Loss of perceived power e.g. through the loss of dedicated resources and resulting personal feelings this may create
• Need for an increased level of openness through the need for justification for investment in programmes and follow on scrutiny of decisions
• Working on unique projects when traditionally people are comfortable working on “business as usual” with a perceived lower level of risk
• Inherent need in an project based way of working of being forced to “get real” if it is to work effectively through structured monitoring, reporting and governance
• Inherent complexity of delivering often without hierarchical position while managing multiple, conflicting, dynamic stakeholder relationships/objectives

These challenges have been heightened by the austerity measures being introduced e.g. how many sponsors are willing to give up resources for higher value programmes which they may perceive as threatening their status and ultimately their job security

Governance and leadership

 "Every project failure is a failure of governance. Every failure of governance is a failure of top management“. Assuming this statement is correct,  senior management in organisations are not providing the necessary leadership – by designing an effective delivery approach, developing realistic implementation plans, communicating it and then ensuring that effective governance is in place to deliver effectively – with P3M as the bedrock of effective delivery. This becomes particularly powerful if senior management model the new way of working consistently. This will require them to accept that they may not always achieve what they wish e.g. where resource requests are not fulfilled due to inadequate planning or  lack of justification and therefore accepting this and not using hierarchical authority to by-pass the process. An indicator of success is also that programmes are stopped – something that rarely happens.

P3M in policy creation

Delivery can often be viewed as the poor relation of Policy creation. Policy creation is often viewed as an art and a creative process. With the relatively basic knowledge of P3M in many areas there is not always the expertise or experience to effectively adapt P3M to a particular organisational or programme context therefore the disciplines are viewed as bureaucratic and of little value by policy makers.

There are also a range of other challenges which include:

• There is insufficient definition of and distinction between benefits and value. Value is the new buzz word but rarely defined sufficiently to provide the necessary direction. Benefits management is also poorly understood with few end-to-end examples available to show what good looks like
• The public sector is becoming increasingly uncertain and changeable making the application of P3M difficult without a high degree of knowledge and experience to apply what can be perceived as rigid processes to a complex dynamic world
• Many of the local and regional government structures through which delivery took place are being removed and replaced causing further uncertainty.

In summary, the next 12 months will be critical for continued adoption of this new way of working. Given the challenges which all government departments are and will increasingly face in the future, there is the potential for 2 extreme scenarios:

• P3M bypassed and ignored delaying or jeopardising the full embedment in the culture
• P3M becomes perceived as the means to improve delivery and of value and therefore accelerating the intelligent embedment into the way of working

Given that a P3M based way of working can provide considerable savings, there is an opportunity to make even more of the investment made to date by many organisations and start to apply the principles in a more comprehensive and consist way e.g. portfolio management can provide an objective benefits focused method of assessing between different options and demonstrate that decisions are being made objectively and openly – something that is critical at the moment.

Reference

1.       “ This year's results represent the highest failure rate in over a decade“
Jim Crear, Standish Group CIO regarding the CHAOS Summary 2009 Report