Well, well, well, project portfolio management (PPM), my bread and butter.

Excuse me for the rather long comment that will follow. But in all this PPM implementation business, Nature seems to have once again proved our cartesian-newtonian mind to be wrong in our top-down approach to implementing the evidently good news of proper project portfolio selection and management in organizations.

Although I agree with the requirements of the four concurrent processes Glen Alleman alludes to for proper PPM, my last two-year experiences with PPM force me to backtrack from my own top-down view of implementing proper project portfolio management using strategic balanced scorecards as a NECESSARY START POINT, as I proposed it a couple of years ago with some fellow projects managers ( http://www.theprojectpage.com/working_paper_1.pdf ).

The fact that, most likely than not, you are not going to find in many organizations proper stategic visions and goals, shared and known by everyone and subsequent project selection and prioritization based on those premises, really puzzled me very much for a while. The fact that, even when you talk about the need to have proper corporate porject portfolio selection and management criteria, this seemingly self-evident statement does not cause upper management to act urgently for a strategic planning session to clarify things, start doing the RIGHT PROJECTS and stop wasting their finite resources on the WRONG PROJECTS puzzled me even more.

As we wrote in the paper referenced above: «…most organizations usually start organizing their increasing project activities by implementing TACTICAL processes (e.g. the contents of most of the PMBoK). They do not make distinctions between tactical and strategic issues. They start doing projects the right way, but they still do not have a clue about doing the right project or not. (…) Maybe implementing processes upside down is the only way, for these organizations, resource wise and time wise, to realize what is missing along the way and evolve to more complete strategic management and value production processes.»

Actually, with what I know now about Complex Adaptive Systems (that I did not know then) and how they usually evolve, I would change this last statement. Implementing strategic processes «upside down» (or bottom-up) is really the only way that it will happen, because becoming strategic is an EMERGENT, self-organizing process that can only arise from perceived necessity and the existence of building blocks (winning conditions) permitting it to self-organize. And those building blocks are not balanced scorecards (that are at the top of an already emerged process, thus an effect or a consequence, not a cause or a foundation from which the process can emerge), but rather proper tactical project management and measuring tools that will provide the necessary DATA to cause real disconfort and the desire to evolve and start prioritizing our projects.

Last Friday, for the first time, I presented to one of my clients such a building block (at least this is what I believe), giving him the ability to prioritize his projects WITHOUT having, for now, strategic objectives and related criterias approved and shared by upper management, to do the work. All this building block does is provide a way to measure risks and benefits associated with any of their projects in universal terms, in such a way that even a child will understand that a given project is a winner or a real loser before even spending a penny on it. The final result is a WRITTEN report (DATA) comparing projects to one another in very explicit favorable /unfavorable terms (as quantified points on a risks-benefits matrix). This report causes great disconfort and forces prioritization because, when you compare projects this way, even without a customized corporate strategy, you are bound to see very stupid initiatives proposed as projects when compared to others. The key then to start putting together a proper PPM system is not to have clear strategic goals that are contested anyway because their drive comes from the top of the organization. The key is to have a project comparison system based on very explicit terms which will cause disconfort and force upper-management to evolve towards a more coherent way of selecting and managing project portfolios (as opposed to, more often than not, a non-existant one).

PPM, as a properly and fully implemented processs, is a for sure a top-down «strategic alignment and steering» process. However, based on my own experience and failed tentatives to help clients implement what seems to be logical balanced scorecards processes from the top down without having themselves evolved «the mind of the strategist», I believe that «becoming strategic» for an organization as a whole (as opposed to an individual who might be born with this «special gift») is a self-organizing phenomenon that can only emerge from the bottom-up, as anything else i