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While all brilliant innovators are PMs in their own right, they pale in comparison with Leonardo da Vinci. Here’s a summary of an excellent article by GanttHead on what you can learn from the master and how it can benefit you role has a project manager.

1. Be curious. Da Vinci was so curious, he wouldn’t take yes for an answer. At a time when no one questioned anything, da Vinci questioned everything.

2. Think for yourself. Da Vinci was not afraid to make mistakes and learn from them. And neither was every great inventor who followed him. da Vinci said, “Test knowledge through experience.”

3. Sharpen your senses. According to da Vinci, the five senses are the ministers of the soul. He trained his sensory awareness the same way Olympic athletes train their bodies. He warned against being locked into and blocked by the same thought processes.

4. Embrace ambiguity, paradox and uncertainty. One of the most significant characteristics of highly creative people is their openness to the unknown and willingness to use their intuition. As a thinker far ahead of his time, da Vinci learned to translate imagination into a technical language and to experience major breakthroughs through intuition. In the same vein, Einstein imagined what it would be like to surf out into the universe on a sunbeam.

5. Balance art and science, logic and imagination with intuition. da Vinci felt that if you want to innovate, you’re going to have to cut loose from conventional grooves. The problem is that people are stuck in either a right- or left-brained world. The trick is to learn to be a balanced thinker. For da Vinci, that meant being creative, rigorous, playful and imaginative.

6. Balance body and mind. In addition to being mentally sharp, da Vinci was also a fitness freak. His recipe for a healthy mind and body: “Avoid grievous moods and keep your mind cheerful.” He also insisted that attitude affects well-being and stressed the importance of keeping mind and body lean and active.

7. Try to see how everything connects to everything else. “That’s system thinking,” Gelb explains. “Da Vinci said you have to see patterns, relationships and processes and how they all fit together.”

Full article - Leonardo da Vinci: The Project Manager’s PM by Bob Weinstein Gantt Head

Who runs the business - executives or the project management stream?

The Project Centric approach certainly empowers the project manager but does it really empower the business.  One of the biggest drawbacks of David Hofferberth’s Project Centric argument is the fact that project managers and executives do not always speak the same language nor do they have the same focus and view of the business.

Project management stream will typically communicate:

• Schedule/Time
• Project Cost
• Performance
• Stakeholder Satisfaction
• Scope/Change Control

Where the executive stream will typically communicate:

• Objectives
• Goals
• Strategies
• Project Selection & Mix
• Cash Flow

For too long the world of project management has been focused on the excellent of project delivery with little connection to ensuring they are delivering the right projects for the business. 

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is the bridge that brings the project delivery process and the business operations together.  It is essentially the core of an integrated collection of processes that represent both operations and projects functions.  It is also the engine that drives the production of project deliverables to enhance the total health of the enterprise.  PPM ties these two key elements of the business into an efficient machine that increases value and purpose of projects.  PPM is most certainly the “end goal” in that it ensures that projects are contributing to the overall health and success of the enterprise.

Hofferberth’s Project Centric approach assumes that project standardisation, structure and governance should come from a traditional bottom up approach.  PPM directly challenges this and advocates project leadership and accountability from the top down.  It is there to empower the business as a whole not just the project process - allowing stakeholders, business leaders and executives to see clearly and understand how effective their strategies are and which projects are delivering.

Understanding the strategy at all levels of the organisation is essential because even simple and seemingly non-strategic decisions are affected. Managers at all levels of the organisation need to use strategic objectives as a guide for ongoing operational decisions. A clear line of communication helps define the expected outcomes and answers. PPM is therefore a formalized method of implementing a governance and structured process by putting together a selection and prioritisation that ensures that all projects are delivering against the organisation’s strategic objectives.  PPM hardwires a two-way contract between the business and the project management stream .  In order for the project management process to deliver, it needs to be supplied with the relevant tools, capability, direction, objectives and strategies. These need to be agreed with and supplied by the business; without this agreement the project management process cannot justifiably undertake to guarantee timely and successful completion of the business’s project portfolio. When supplied and armed with the relevant tools to do the job, the project management process then needs to be held accountable for its delivery.

There are many benefits to implementing PPM for example 

• Having a standard methodology for starting and managing projects and making them accountable to the business

• Empowering the business with control over project GO/KILL/HOLD/FIX decision making

• Delivering a repeatable process for prioritising, selecting and executing projects

• Getting early warning of any potential problems in meeting programme and project milestones

• Making it easy for different stakeholders to access project information relevant to their strategic interests

• Producing a better understanding of resource utilisation in order to ensure that the right staff are deployed on the right projects

• Calculating the financial impact of cancelling a poor-performing project

• Switching priorities based on organisational needs and redeploying staff quickly based on accurate real-time information

 • Reducing project reporting timescales at executive and board level, allowing faster reactions to market and competitive changes and more accurate decision making

Let me start by quoting Harvey Levine. “Where Six Sigma propelled us closer to zero defects.  The PPM process will move us closer to zero project failure.”
 
There is a very powerful counter argument against R. David Hofferberth Project-Centric Approach - click here to read his article. 

This argument is the case for Project Portfolio Management. 

The project centric approach has been around since the dawn on project management and is inherently flawed.  Why?  Typically in project centric environments, organisation tend to focus on individual project choices, made one at a time with little regard for the impact that one project has on the next. Moreover, project-centric tools and processes typically have the reputation of being in the domain of the project manager, not that of the business, divorced from the executive decision making stream.
 
The result is poor quality project information and an imbalanced portfolio which leads to project-by-project decision making. In other words, the business suffers from too many projects that have a bias toward the short term, which are relatively low in value and carry minimal risk. When riskier projects are put onto the agenda, management does not have the necessary visibility of the business’s capability and is not prepared to initiate the project. Most importantly, a project-centric approach is unable to roll milestones up and down the organisation in order to give a business view of what is
and what is not being delivered.

I  argue in my new book Project Portfolio Management: Leading the Coprorate Vision the following. “PPM challenges the narrow ‘pure play, project-by-project orientated focus to planning’ and draws attention to the broader, more integrated approach, which subjects projects to wider organisational considerations and executive responsibility.
 

Simply put, PPM looks to empower the business, not just the project process. It helps the business establish a clear line of sight from the top-level pan-initiative view right down to the individual project layer. From the strategic viewpoint, it allows stakeholders, business leaders and executives to see clearly and understand how effective their strategies are and if necessary which programmes and projects to review. From the operational viewpoint, PPM empowers programme, resource and project managers with tools, support and necessary corporate accountability to execute project delivery.
 
The management of the project portfolio so as to maximise the contribution of projects to the overall welfare and success of the enterprise. Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is the management of that collection of projects and programmes in which a company invests to implement its strategy, for example asset programmes, improvement initiatives and strategic change work streams among others. A PPM process can utilise various techniques to provide tangible results for your business, ensuring that project investments contribute directly to realising your corporate goals.”
Let me finish where I started by quoting Harvey Levine.  He states that” The emergence of PPM as a recognized set of practices may be considered the biggest leap in project management technology since the development of Program Evaluation and Review Technique and Critical Path Method in the late 50s”

Part 2 of 4: Excerpts from the forthcoming PPM book - Project Portfolio Management: Leading The Coporate Vision by Shan Rajegopal, Philip McGuin and James WallerIs there a business today, no matter how large or small, that can afford to invest in non-performing or non-strategic projects? The importance of investing in the right projects, the need for compliance and the urgent demand for new product and service development all provide reasons why businesses depend on their project management processes to deliver and optimise results.It is a fact that businesses operate in a complex environment with many programmes and projects going on at any one time. Project Portfolio Management is today seen as an essential prerequisite not only for driving and improving project performance, but also for ensuring the business’s success. The reality is that in all organisations decision making is not an easy task for the executive team. Making ‘effective’ and ‘efficient’ decisions about a project, based on rational, accurate and real-time data, can be virtually impossible. For example – projects are often arbitrarily assessed only against the bottom-line financial impact instead of being evaluated according to their health, cost and strategic contribution to the organisation over the short and long term.

Essentially many businesses lack the day-to-day tools and processes needed to facilitate the discussion and resolution of difficult project decisions. They lack the standardised processes which help project stakeholders throughout the organisation understand how and why certain decisions are being made and also enable the business to ferret out socalled ‘pet projects’ that do not contribute to strategic objectives. Even when organisations embark upon developing a formal framework for aligning their projects with the business process it is still fraught with roadblocks. Many organisations are still daunted by the perceived capital and cultural investment needed to deploy PPM, and many organisations still ask whether they need such a process to manage their business projects and whether the cultural and technical impact is palatable.

PPM enables the business to align resources and project investments with corporate objectives. PPM provides a structured environment for deciding which projects, programmes and initiatives to fund, to sustain and to eliminate. PPM is about optimising the investment in change initiatives and subordinating programme and project approval to business strategy rather than departmental and business unit objectives. PPM ensures you are running the right programmes and brings discipline to the project muddle and resource contention that are so common in large organisations. PPM is the management of a portfolio so as to maximise the contribution of projects to the overall welfare and success of the enterprise. 

For business leaders and executives this means that:

• Projects should contribute to a positive cash flow for the enterprise.
• Projects must effectively utilise the organisation’s resources.
• Projects must help position the organisation for future success and growth.

The PPM process enables business users to organise a series of projects into an integrated portfolio. As part of this process the business is able to produce reports based on the various project objectives, costs, resources and risks. This will assist the business in making key financial and business decisions. PPM is a dynamic process whereby projects are regularly evaluated, prioritised and selected, based on the goal of obtaining the greatest possible value from the organisation’s limited resources.

• Authors: Shan Rajegopal, Philip McGuin and James Waller
• ISBN: 0230507166
• Format: Trade Book
• Price: £25.00
• Pub. Date: 15/03/2007
• Publisher(s): Palgrave Macmillan

To pre-order you copy click here