What are the seven key elements required for successful strategy realization?
Element 5: Project Delivery
There are seven core elements, all of which are essential to achieve portfolio success – and we will discuss each in turn in this series of blog posts.
These seven core elements – pictured below as a hub and six surrounding spokes, are not only vital, but more importantly, must all work together to form a cohesive unit. There is a need for a constant feedback loop so that data, information, knowledge, and understanding can flow through and connect the whole process. It is only when all those ingredients are present that real competitive advantage can be achieved.
The portfolio will not produce value all by itself – it must be delivered and actively managed by an appropriate framework of project management. Agile, lean, phase gate, whatever – the most appropriate choice will always depend on context, most particularly the timescale of the underlying initiatives. In the pharma industry, ten-year timescales for a major new drug merits a very different approach to a rapid cycle time digital product release.
All project information should be stored centrally. You can benefit enormously from secure shared environments that holds the latest information. This acts as a gateway to encourage and facilitate cross functional collaboration, and high-quality information collection. Project managers and team members should be able to easily get the latest view from role-based dashboards, maintained and updated in real time.
A fully integrated solution will mean that information captured from project teams is automatically aggregated and analyzed to feed into high level reports and analytics. This ensures that the view from the top is always based on reality, and that decisions and priorities on the innovation and strategic pipeline can be cascaded seamlessly into project plans
For global enterprises, multiple processes will be required to cater for widely varying process methods between different business units. The right solution will offer flexibility so that you can have different processes for different types of project, including being able to determine loose or strict governance rules, mandatory and optional criteria for gates, resource profiles etc. An integrated solution should incorporate best-practice workflow, templates, checklists and tools to leverage proven methodologies.
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Element 1: Portfolio Management
