How To Monitor Strategic Priorities with PPM Software Tools
Gerald J. Leonard, Strategic PMO Advisor for Government and Fortune 500 Organisations, and independent tech journalist Pat Brans discussed solutions for C-level executives to monitor strategic priorities.
We’re summarising the insights provided, so you can get the key takeaways from the conversation and explore effective ways to monitor strategic priorities within your business.
How important is it to track performance against priorities?
It is crucial for C-level executives to prioritise their critical objectives and investments. It helps deliver outcomes that align with the organisation’s strategic vision. One of the things to consider is using an application or framework called analytical hierarchy processes.
This allows you to identify your business drivers and where you want to go. An effective way to prioritise that from a structure perspective is to map your projects to those. It’s designed to be intuitive and, crucially, helps executives get on the same page.
It’s not so much what tool you use or what process you use, but it’s getting the C-level executives speaking the same language and moving in the same direction that matters most.
Examples of strategic priorities to track across projects
With the fintech sector, the key priority might be compliance with evolving regulations. Sustainability is another consideration. In the healthcare sector, it’s really tracking patient safety initiatives across projects. Moving onto transportation, it’s about alignment on road construction, the impact on the environment, and economic development in areas where they maintain roads.
These are just a handful of application examples, and the priorities, pain points, objectives, and goals differ, but it’s all about alignment, regardless of the sector. With the right framework, each business sets its own unique drivers.
Aligning all projects to core agreed priorities helps focus your attention and ensure time and resources are effectively utilised.
Why is it so hard to collect information on where projects stand and present an overview in a single dashboard?
Many executives have a task list in their back pocket that they’re not willing to share. They fear that by sharing, it might not get done. However, the result of this is that organisations begin to bottleneck.
You may have a backlog or inventory of demands that need to get done in people’s pockets. The problem is that this is difficult to see. That’s where having a centralised database can help. All that information is in one place and prioritised. Dashboards make it easier to focus attention and realistically manage workloads with available resources. It’s a system that helps prevent the backlog of ‘secret’ tasks and creates a standardised process and system.
Ultimately, a dashboard provides visibility of where projects are with timelines. Large organisations have colliding deliverables, trying to fit too many project deliverables in the same window.
By leveraging an enterprise software system with timelines, you can help identify when to change deliverables and deadlines. This prevents delivering too much in a small window. This also makes executives aware and sensitive to what users are going through. AI allows you to do this faster, but people still need to consume this information. You need to consider how you’re digesting and presenting this information. Colour-coded charts and timelines on a dashboard are a smart way to communicate this information.
What does tracking projects with a single dashboard look like?
Strategic alignment metrics, such as cost vs. value, identify key business drivers that can be mapped to metrics. Get metrics to help drive the system. For instance, you could see risk over time. You could have tens of thousands of projects stretching across millions of pounds, but if your systems don’t talk to each other, this means your data is not connected and universal.
Now, with dashboards, you can see across these divisions and projects. It helps laser-focus projects that need special attention. Looking at cost and value could help you choose what to zoom into. Technology and databases do the heavy lifting, so you can focus on the exceptions, i.e., what’s not working as it should. You can select colour codes and trigger alerts to understand what you need to pay attention to and get projects back to green.
Who should define the strategic priorities?
Portfolio executives should sit side-by-side with senior executives. A common concern is where to find the time to map out strategies among other responsibilities. Think strategically; have a chief portfolio manager officer collaboratively establish next steps together and understand which projects are most aligned. It’s not the list of projects that’s valuable; it’s the fact that executives are on the same page and heading in the same direction that truly matters.
The outcome? This boosts engagement and helps achieve overarching strategic goals for the business and separate departments simultaneously.
One thing to remember is that there’s a big difference between boards and committees. Boards make decisions and committees provide information.
For productive outcomes from these meetings, all the data should be presented in a concise and colour-coded format. A one-page chart about their portfolio that highlights the top 10 initiatives and shows where they are from a performance standpoint will help them make better decisions and more quickly.
This changes the response from “I don’t have time to look into this” to “I get it!” This helps get approvals for projects to happen more quickly, as a colour code lets them see the impact instantly.
Should a portfolio be composed of projects that meet only a few strategic priorities, or is it better to have a mix?
The theory of constraints at a portfolio level. Having a few critical projects is like having kids at school with big backpacks on. If they all rush at once, they’ll struggle to get on and bottleneck. You have to have a set of critical projects, and you have to streamline them. At the same time, you need a holistic approach to how you run your business.
- 65% of your portfolio should be dedicated to ‘run the business’ projects to help keep the lights on. This could be upgrading the servers and tweaking the processes.
- 35% of your portfolio should be for ‘grow the business’ projects. These are projects where you’re looking to reduce expenses or increase revenue and profits.
- If possible, it’s also worth setting aside a percentage of your portfolio dedicated to transforming the business projects, asking, ‘What’s next?’.
At the project level, you can have agile or waterfall, and ultimately, you want a scalable model for your portfolio management. You’ll also need to know how to change and adapt when things change in the market. If you’re interested in being dynamic and fluid but still have a framework and process to follow, the software integration specialists at Ignite can support your transition. Contact them today to discuss potential PPM and automation solutions that could help future-proof your projects and the way you manage your business. Getting a snapshot of insights on a dashboard is one way to efficiently access the insights you need at C-level, and Ignite can help set you up with this new, efficient way of working.
