by business value, and the senior manager buys into that ranking, you can start to kill projects. When you kill a project, it’s dead. No one works on it part time. No one does a little bit to prepare for it. In Star Trek vernacular, “It’s dead, Jim.”
Project Portfolio Decisions Are For Now, Not Forever
The nice thing about agile and lean approaches is that they make managing the project portfolio easy. You can assess the projects and re-decide at the end of every iteration. Or, you can reassess whenever you’ve finished one card in a kanban system.
Because the project portfolio decisions are temporary, it’s easier to commit for now to high-risk projects. It’s easier to decide if a project is not returning enough business value and park it or kill it. It’s easier to decide if a project is not worth anything at all to the organization and kill it outright.
And, because the decisions are for now , not forever, it’s easier to experiment and commit to just one project at a time and avoid multitasking.
Excuse me now, I’ve finished this article, and I need to go back to fixing my chimney.
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About the author
Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” helps organizational leaders see problems and risks in their product development. She helps them recognize potential “gotchas,” seize opportunities, and remove impediments. Johanna was the Agile 2009 conference chair. She is the technical editor for Agile Connection and the author of these books:
- Manage Your Job Search
- Hiring Geeks That Fit
- Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects
- The 2008 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
- Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management
- Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People
Johanna is working on a book about agile program management. She writes columns for Stickyminds.com and projectmanagementcom and blogs on her website, jrothman.com, as well on createadaptablelife.com.
