Part 3 of 4: Excerpts from the forthcoming PPM book - Project Portfolio Management: Leading The Coporate Vision by Shan Rajegopal, Philip McGuin and James Waller

Executives are more accountable today for answering these questions than ever before, and are under the critical eye of the shareholders and the board to deliver value, maximising ROI while minimising the risks. It is at this level, that of the ‘executive community’, that buy-in and sponsorship are paramount. The executive decision making stream is critical to the success or failure of any project and establishing a PPM process and solution within the business is only workable if it has executive support and visibility. And this support is only tenable in the long term if members of the executive body have a reliable and workable
framework for extracting the information they need.

PPM is a lame duck if executives and senior management do not take ownership and are unable to sell its benefits to board level. Executive sponsorship provides the infrastructure whereby the right authority is empowered to drive the right behaviour in the organisation. In others words, a truly strategy driven approach to deploying PPM must start at the top in order for accountability, transparency and above all credibility to extend throughout the organisation.

It is essential that the establishment of PPM within the business be based on upon a simple yet effective premise of managing it as a change project from the top down. Executives can eliminate many problems simply by involving themselves at the appropriate points in the project delivery process, and this is never more true than with the implementation of PPM.

Moreover, the tools and processes that are put in place must be bolstered by continual executive support and not delegated downwards once the process has been implemented. Therefore, as discussed in the next section, a permanent executive place on the PPMT is not only required but is essential to its long-term longevity. Managing the PPM process form the top down increases visibility of the primary project planning functions, enabling executives to make top level decisions that are based on coherent factual information, presented and accessed simply and delivered in real time. This visibility gives the executive decision making stream a bird’s-eye view of each department, their project progress, their cost and who is responsible for each. As a result, executives are able to make strategic and operational decisions quickly which can be adjusted as changes to projects in the pipeline arise.

The strategic contents of the portfolio, reasons for selection and execution fall to executive champions and project sponsors. However, as stated earlier, the successful deployment of the PPM process is in effect a multilayered relationship and is also dependent on how executive and strategic decisions about the business portfolio of projects are translated in real time to the operational side of the business. In other words, how does the business communicate downstream with it programme, project and
resources managers? It is simply not enough for both sides to communicate within the strategic planning process, then afterwards for the focus to split back to each side’s respective interests with no iterative communication
between the two elements.

A key component of sponsorship by executives is their role in managing PPM deployment as a change management project. In other words, change management needs to be represented at board level and executive buy-in will be needed to help set up a change programme that will address the cultural issues stirred up by PPM. The change programme will need to agree a corporate vision and justify the necessary resource management decisions needed to select, buy and implement the PPM tools. Executive
sponsorship will provide the PPM process with the necessary leadership to drive its implementation, weed out resistance, and sell its benefits to the board as well as provide it with long-term sustainability and credibility. As PPM is pushed down to the lower levels of an organisation, this will begin to change the culture and impact the way of doing business.

• 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