Managing to pick the best projects and keep within your budget!
In today’s combined business and technology landscape, customer demands, stakeholder expectations, and protecting ourselves from ever more complex risk and regulation inevitably outweighs available resources and budgets. This is before urgent requests are added, overarching transformation projects are established and so-called normal business takes place!
When looking at the additional workload that ‘change’ brings, we have to find a way to fit the demand into the all-too-many constraints. Identifying those projects that provide the highest returns becomes crucial in prioritising effectively. Moving from order-taker to value creator is what technology leaders have discussed for a long time. This is just one aspect of it.
Understanding which projects bring the most value (whether making money, saving money, and in any way protecting the company) helps to guide leaders to make the right decisions for their businesses. When you create a list of projects ranked by return on investment and overall contribution to the organisation’s success, it should become clear which activities are vital and which breakeven or are possibly loss-leaders. Stopping those less valuable projects will free up resources (i.e. people!) and money to focus on the more valuable investments and the real benefits they will bring.
I have had the personal experience of owning an impossible-to-deliver project list at the same time that operational service was not good enough. In hindsight, I doubt that this was a coincidence. Collaborating with David Taylor from Naked Leader, my team and I developed a methodology [methodology = a documented and repeatable process that answered a set of consistent questions for each and every investment idea, before it was sanctioned and became an actual project] we to evaluate and prioritise expenditures. By identifying and then stopping low-value activities and those project ideas that had a lower likelihood of success (aka ‘high risk’) and doing this with full support from my business colleagues, we achieved greater positive business impact with fewer projects. This disciplined approach reduced overall spend and improved outcomes.
Working with my colleagues was critical to this. Showing all investment requests and active projects in a consistent and transparent way, enabled my colleagues to view the impact of the competing delivery requests that my team was receiving week in, week out. Recognising that each and every project was a ‘business project enabled by technology’ and that each was intended to contribute value to the organisation, it was then possible for my colleagues to start to prioritise which work IT undertook. Together, the best ideas were taken forward first, and the less valuable work was held back.
We came back to those low value projects after we had delivered the others. We had stabilised operational delivery and we could now look with fresh eyes at was really needed. We were still able to achieve the outcomes defined, however we did adjust scope and challenged ourselves to be more innovative with our approach to delivery.
In challenging economic times, spending every dollar is even more important than ever. When you see the request list far outweigh the available resource pool, ask yourself if you are truly focussed on the best projects, or are you being diverted onto lower value activities?
Unless you can answer an emphatic “yes” to the first question, I am convinced that you will be able to find room in your budget for the most important things. It just takes a cold hard look … and some good collaboration with your colleagues to agree what really matters, and what does not.