Improving your project or portfolio management first? Did you choose? Threon did!

With a tradition of 20 years in project management, companies keep contacting us on a weekly basis with requests to train their project managers or to coach their agile teams. When asking for the underlying problem they want to solve with this training request, they share frustrations on:

• My key projects are soooo slow in delivering
• Even when they deliver, the scope is almost never what I expected
• Even my project managers have problems telling me where exactly each project is

Did we consolidate 20 years of best practices in project management and are we still eager to help you in that area? Absolutely!

However, we used our 20th anniversary to rethink where and when all our services bring most value to our customers. We talked a lot to our key customers and had intervisions with all our consultants.

Conclusion?

We believe that in today’s VUCA world, we should challenge our customers even more to invest in their strategic portfolio management maturity, rather than just continue investing in their project management practices.

We are convinced that:

• There is a major value opportunity if companies better align their project portfolios with their strategy. Studies and threon’s field experience proof that over 50% of the investment budget of a company does not contribute to the realization of their strategy.
• A lot of the frustrations of executives we talk to, are not caused by lack of project management best practices but simply because organizations push too many projects towards their teams (often double of what the organization can manage efficiently).
• This is the best, but not the easiest road:

• • Neither for our customers: they have to tackle a problem that is a lot closer to the executive level than just providing budget to train project managers.
  • Nor for threon: we have learned since many years that, with strategic portfolio management, we are in a much more sensitive area than when just helping PMO managers to improve project management.

• It is the road we should travel with our customers to make our leadership in portfolio & project management future-proof.

But what does it mean, improving your strategic portfolio management? There are five major steps to take. In the next blog coming up I guide you through some major steps to take to improve your strategic portfolio management.