One of the main things I hear when I am asked to assist an organization improving their portfolio operations is that everyone thinks the solution to their “problem” is to get more people. The feeling is that there is simply too much work that needs to be done. Organizations in this situation will decide that “something needs to be done” and so start looking to quantify how many more people would be needed to get all the currently approved work done. Organizations ask each project something like “given target completion date is X, and based on progress so far, how many more people do you need to hit the date?” Since so many projects are in trouble with will result in a “need” for 30% more people which is probably not possible given the current budget.
The reality is that given that, even if there was budget, onboarding is a lengthy process, we really need to understand whether we are getting the most effective outcome given the capacity we have. Further we need to step back from the problem and ask ourselves how we keep on getting into this situation? Generally, I have found that organizations are not making the best use of capacity for two reasons:
A couple of simple exercises can be used to provide visibility (data) into these areas. Firstly, we need to understand the demand we have on the system and compare it to the capacity available to deliver on that demand. The approach I’ve taken in the past is:
In many cases this will lead to a healthy discussion about how we focus our efforts on a few of the most important initiatives as well as a discussion of how much work we should kick-off at the portfolio level. I’ve seen situations where there is 5 years of work that has already been approved and there is still more work being approved! The resultant discussion typically results in a pure prioritized top-10 list to start to clear the backlog and rules for any subsequent approvals (e.g. cannot approve new initiative until another item is finished.)
A second aspect of this kind of analysis is to look at the rate initiatives are being finished. We can easily determine the throughput of Initiatives, which will provide further data on portfolio completion. To do this count the number of initiatives that have finished in a time period and apply that to the future. So, if we have 120 initiatives to complete, and we are completing 7 initiatives per month, then we can expect out backlog to be cleared (without any new initiatives being approved) in 17 months.
One place I worked showed that there was, according to the demand vs capacity discussion above, enough people to do the work but that based on people’s gut feel this was not correct. This analysis revealed there was a backlog of about 2.4 years. This lead the VP responsible for portfolio management to day:
So what you are telling us Hans is that we just suck at execution!
Additional analysis lead to a discussion about whether we were effectively using the people we had. Issues in this organization included:
Both tools - demand vs capacity and initiative throughput - are simple, lightweight tools to work the perceived need for “more people”. In most cases the “demand” side of the equation can be developed in a couple of 1-hour sessions, while the “capacity” side of the equation is the result of a series of questions to provide a useful range of figures. The throughput discussion is typically available by watching current initiatives generally generate from historical data. And while simple the data produced is hard to argue with. In all cases the data generated typically opens conversations and moves the discussion away from “how do we get more people” to “how do we ensure we are working on the most important things given the capacity we have”.