PMI Talent Triangle: Business Acumen (Strategic and Business Management)

Welcome to the PMO Strategies Podcast + Blog, where PMO leaders become IMPACT Drivers! Today we are talking about how we can best incorporate the best of project portfolio management into what the PMO does. Especially from a services and capability perspective.  I am honored to have a guest with me that I consider a friend and a colleague and one of my favorite thought leaders in this space, Andy Jordan. Andy is the president  of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Honduras based management consulting firm with fabulous views of the water every single day. I'm so jealous and he has that. Andy’s organization has a strong emphasis on organizational transformation, portfolio management, and PMO specifically.  Andy was a part of the PMO IMPACT Summit last year and he was one of our highest rated speakers, so we brought him back to the Summit again this year. You can get all of the information on his upcoming presentation and more information about Andy at PMOIMPACTSummit.com.

Learn the best-kept secrets to creating a PMO that drives IMPACT.  Join us for the PMO IMPACT Summit.Register for FreeProject Portfolio Management and the Role of the PMOLaura: Andy, I would love to get your perspective on project portfolio management and the role of the PMO, and why it's important for us to be thinking differently about that role?

Andy: I think there is a lot of good stuff that has been done with portfolio management and PMOs have been at the heart of that. But there is still a long way to go. Fundamentally a lot of organizations don't quite have the right grasp of what portfolio management should be, and I think PMOs can help solve some of those problems.

Laura: Why don't we give some perspective here and talk a little bit about what do we mean when we're talking project portfolio management.? Let's go a hundred thousand foot view and then maybe we can talk a little bit about what's working, what's not working and the role of the PMO and all of that. 

Andy: Sometimes the easiest way to think of what project portfolio management is to think about what it isn't.  It's not a roll up of projects and programs that you just so happen to be doing right now. The portfolio has to come first. The portfolio is the vehicle by which an organization executes on strategy. So if the executives say, “all right, this year we're going to increase our revenue by 5% we're going to reduce our costs by 10% we're going to increase customer satisfaction by three points,” whatever it might be. Those are the goals and objectives. The portfolio is the vehicle we use to actually deliver on that.  We'll have projects that sit within that portfolio, but those projects can come and go. It's the portfolio that's key and we have to make sure that the portfolio delivers results. Delivers results is the key piece here. We're not interested in delivering projects. We do, but we're interested in delivering business outcomes as a result of those projects. We're interested in improving revenue, decreasing costs, increasing customer satisfaction. That's the measure of success for the portfolio.

Laura: Yes. I'm so glad you said that because I feel like I am constantly talking about we've got to stop emphasizing so much the outputs we're creating and shift our focus to the outcomes we're driving. As PMO leaders, it is super important that we help facilitate that mindset shift in our organization. Often times, PMO leaders will get so caught up in the “how manys”  and the “how much” versus the IMPACT they're making. When if we think more about the outcomes we're creating for the organization and driving towards those outcomes, we will be so much more aligned with where the organization is trying to go and where they're thinking.

Andy: Absolutely. You know, if you're an investor in an organization, if you own shares in a company, do you care that they did 10 projects this year or a hundred or a thousand?