Strategic and operational management

How to reconcile strategic and operational management?

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Project portfolio management then comes into play to coordinate and monitor all the company's projects, and provide an overall vision for optimal governance and management at both strategic and operational levels.

Operational management of project portfolio is generally delegated to departments, which can manage one or more project portfolios, depending on their size, themes, customers, etc. For example, portfolios can be subdivided according to project type (regulatory, strategic, innovation, digital transformation projects, etc.) or, conversely, portfolios based on client departments (by Business Unit, for example).

These project portfolios are often managed by specialized teams of project managers and/or PMOs. Their main challenge is to be able to efficiently collect and consolidate information from all the projects in the project portfolio : planning, meteo, risks, budget, burned , etc.

However, strategic steering is often disconnected from operational project management.

Among our customers in several sectors - banking, energy and agri-food - we find that each project manager often defines his or her own monitoring method and KPIs. From one project to the next, the monitoring method will differ, as will the presentations.

This requires a major adaptation effort at various levels:

• In terms of sponsors, who will follow different projects and have to adapt to the presentation of each of them;
• At the level of managers or project portfolio managers, who will have different types of information to consolidate.

We also encounter the needs of a 3rd equally important player in projects: the business contributor. Generally solicited for his business expertise, project management is not the main workload of his daily life. His first need is to have a vision of the workload and schedule for each new project: when will he be called upon? How much of his time? How will he manage this with his day-to-day production? How can he anticipate scheduling problems and avoid being called upon at peak production times?

With a management approach that is disconnected from portfolios, projects and teams, each player is often unable to have an up-to-date global vision:

• Project portfolio managers find it extremely difficult to retrieve information and consolidate it quickly, so as to have up-to-date data and be able to manage all their projects efficiently;
• Team managers will have to deal with schedule shifts and peak workloads rather than anticipating them;
• Project managers will find themselves caught between two stools: on the one hand, updating the indicators requested by portfolio managers and, on the other, adapting the schedule according to the resources available in the business teams (which they may not necessarily be aware of).

To overcome these problems, several initiatives can be put in place:

• First of all, it is necessary to define a common project management methodology within the same project portfolio . The project portfolio then becomes an extraordinary governance tool, making it possible to consolidate, homogenize and synthesize information from different projects, in order to facilitate decision-making;
• This methodology must then be translated into operational terms. This phase is particularly important. It enables indicators to be automatically consolidated from the data contributed. Project managers save time by having reliable KPIs and reports or communications at their fingertips;
• In addition to KPIs, standardized communication and analysis reports help to quickly analyze information;
• As far as contributors are concerned, it's important to know their peak workloads, and to be able to take them into account easily when re-planning. This avoids having to call on the business team at the most inopportune moment, and reduces frustration on both sides by simply sharing information;
• Project activity tracking, often requested by business teams, is also a useful way of keeping track of the time actually spent on projects. When we're asked what took us the longest over the month, we often tend to talk mainly about recent events, or the elements that seem most important to us. However, when we monitor our activity on a regular basis, we realize that first impressions can be totally out of sync with reality.  

At Tabsters, we're convinced that a good strategy is essential to the success of any project, but above all it has to be well executed, and aligned with operational management.

A tool like Tabsters allows you to :

1. Automatic, seamless consolidation from the project contributor to the central PMO in workload of the project portfolio ;
2. Ensure that all players work with the same methodology and share the same information/vision;
3. Save time for all project managers & PMOs by generating all their PowerPoint presentations in 1 click.

Every player involved has a vision that is adapted, controlled and shared with everyone. This transparency enables the right decisions to be made at the right time.

We have implemented our solution at several customers in different sectors to address these issues. We'll be talking to you about it in a webinar on Tuesday October 11 at 12:00. You will receive the registration link shortly.

See you soon!

The Tabsters team

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