Podcast - Project Portfolio Management in Theory and Practice

 

My interview with prominent PPM expert Gerald Leonard of Principles of Execution regarding the recent developments in the field of project portfolio management, the impact of strategy on the project selection and many other interesting topics.

 

 

About the Author

Jamal Moustafaev, MBA, PMP – president and founder of Thinktank Consulting is an internationally acclaimed expert and speaker in the areas of project/portfolio management, scope definition, process improvement and corporate training. Jamal Moustafaev has done work for private-sector companies and government organizations in Canada, US, Asia, Europe and Middle East.  Read Jamal’s Blog @ www.thinktankconsulting.ca

Jamal is an author of three very popular books: 

Infographic - Pharmaceutical Industry - Project Portfolio Management Summary

 

I am continuing with with the special project portfolio management releases dedicated to the publishing of my third book  “Project Portfolio Management in Theory and Practice: Thirty Case Studies from around the World”. Todays PPM topic is the pharma industry.

Infographic-Pharma-PPM.png

About the Author

Jamal Moustafaev, MBA, PMP – president and founder of Thinktank Consulting is an internationally acclaimed expert and speaker in the areas of project/portfolio management, scope definition, process improvement and corporate training. Jamal Moustafaev has done work for private-sector companies and government organizations in Canada, US, Asia, Europe and Middle East.  Read Jamal’s Blog @ www.thinktankconsulting.ca

Jamal is an author of three very popular books: 

Infographic - Government Sector Project Portfolio Management Summary

 

I have got some exciting news today! My third book “Project Portfolio Management in Theory and Practice: Thirty Case Studies from around the World” has just been released by Auerbach Publications.

So, to commemorate this event, I will be publishing a series of infographics dedicated to project portfolio management models in various sectors. Todays industry is Government Sector.

infographic-project-portfolio-management-government-sector.PNG

About the Author

Jamal Moustafaev, MBA, PMP – president and founder of Thinktank Consulting is an internationally acclaimed expert and speaker in the areas of project/portfolio management, scope definition, process improvement and corporate training. Jamal Moustafaev has done work for private-sector companies and government organizations in Canada, US, Asia, Europe and Middle East.  Read Jamal’s Blog @ www.thinktankconsulting.ca

Jamal is an author of three very popular books: 

Infographic - Financial Services Industry - Project Portfolio Management Summary

 

I have got some exciting news today! My third book “Project Portfolio Management in Theory and Practice: Thirty Case Studies from around the World” has just been released by Auerbach Publications.

So, to commemorate this event, I will be publishing a series of infographics dedicated to project portfolio management models in various sectors. Todays industry is Financial Services.

Infographic-Financial-Services-PPM.PNG

About the Author

Jamal Moustafaev, MBA, PMP – president and founder of Thinktank Consulting is an internationally acclaimed expert and speaker in the areas of project/portfolio management, scope definition, process improvement and corporate training. Jamal Moustafaev has done work for private-sector companies and government organizations in Canada, US, Asia, Europe and Middle East.  Read Jamal’s Blog @ www.thinktankconsulting.ca

Jamal is an author of three very popular books: 

Infographic - Energy & Logistics Project Portfolio Management Summary

 

I have got some exciting news today! My third book “Project Portfolio Management in Theory and Practice: Thirty Case Studies from around the World” has just been released by Auerbach Publications.

So, to commemorate this event, I will be publishing a series of infographics dedicated to project portfolio management models in various sectors. Todays industry is Energy and Logistics.

Infographic - Energy & Logistics PPM.png

About the Author

Jamal Moustafaev, MBA, PMP – president and founder of Thinktank Consulting is an internationally acclaimed expert and speaker in the areas of project/portfolio management, scope definition, process improvement and corporate training. Jamal Moustafaev has done work for private-sector companies and government organizations in Canada, US, Asia, Europe and Middle East.  Read Jamal’s Blog @ www.thinktankconsulting.ca

Jamal is an author of three very popular books: 

Case Study – Project Portfolio Management Failures – The New Ashgabat Airport

Introduction

On September 17th, 2016 the president of Turkmenistan Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has officially opened a new US$ 2.3 billion dollar ultra-modern Ashgabat International Airport shaped in a form of a falcon (see video below). The entire complex is comprised of 190 buildings spread on a 1,200-hectare site. The airport is designed to handle up to 17 million passengers (remember that number!) combined with 200,000 tons of cargo every year.

Video:

At the opening ceremony the president claimed that Turkmenistan has “all the opportunities to become a transport bridge facilitating economic cooperation between Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, and South Asia.” He also added that the new airport was needed to accommodate a massive influx of tourists eager to visit Turkmenistan.

The official position of Turkmenistan, is understandable since the country’s income have heavily depended on the export of natural gas. As a result of plunging energy prices and foreign currency shortages the government is now forced to develop the tourism and transportation sectors of the economy.

The Problems

There is however an array of problems associated with the new Turkmen initiative. For starters, due to very restrictive visa regulations the country has been visited by anywhere between 7,000 (if you choose to believe World Bank) and 100,000 tourists (if you prefer to rely on official Turkmen government reports). For comparison neighboring Kazakhstan had 4.5 million visitors, while Kyrgyzstan saw more than 2.8 million tourists in 2014.

Here is an additional compilation of facts about Turkmenistan if you are planning to visit that country any time soon:

Article - Top 20 Questions to Ask When Negotiating Your Estimates

 

The science of project management tells us that there are three common constraints to any project: scope, time and budget. Having said that, throughout my project management career, I preferred to work with a PM Pentagon model (see Figure 1) and treat constraints as “degrees of freedom”.

Figure 1

pm-pentagon.PNG

Here is what I did every time I was supposed to present our clients with time, budget or human resource estimates. Usually the estimates presented rarely met customer expectations (budget was too high, duration was too long, etc.) So, the thing to do is for the project manager is to point to each corner of the pentagon and to ask the questions presented in Tables 1 and 2.

Table 1

project-negotiations1.PNG

Table 2

project-negotiations2.PNG

The idea here is that every question you ask is like a door leading to a room with a whole bunch of other doors presenting you with options to deliver a project in a reasonable manner.

And what questions do you ask during your project negotiations?

About the Author

Jamal Moustafaev, MBA, PMP – president and founder of Thinktank Consulting is an internationally acclaimed expert and speaker in the areas of project/portfolio management, scope definition, process improvement and corporate training. Jamal Moustafaev has done work for private-sector companies and government organizations in Canada, US, Asia, Europe and Middle East.  Read Jamal’s Blog @ www.thinktankconsulting.ca

Article - Top 10 Questions to Ask When Conducting Project Document Walkthroughs

 

I would like to start this article with a very interesting statistic originating from the IT and software industry. Unfortunately, due to lack of reliable information from other sectors we have to rely on the data collected in the high-tech field and then construct generalized extrapolations to the rest of the world. So, without further ado, here is a very interesting statistic:

Forty-five percent (45%!) of project costs industry-wide is rework

Let’s ponder this number for a while … If we choose to believe in the power of extrapolation to one degree or another, it looks like by eliminating the amount of rework completely we can decrease all of our project budgets in half. Durations would probably fall by a significant number as well.

How can we minimize the amount of rework?

And the answer is: by conducting technical inspections and customer walkthroughs of all major project documents. The more documents get reviewed fairly early in the process, the less are the chances of missing scope items, unforeseen risks and hidden constraints.

Table 1 contains a list of questions that should be asked during such meetings.

Table 1

walkthrough-questions.PNG

And what questions do you ask at your walkthroughs and inspections?

  1. We do not conduct project document walkthroughs
  2. We use the “ad hoc” approach. If a stakeholder sees an error, she just points to it
  3. We have a checklist of questions or potential problems to refer to

Please leave your feedback in the “Comments” section below.

Article - Talent or Process: What Would You Choose?

 

Several variations of the following phrase have been attributed to a number of business leaders, politicians and, even scientists:

In order to be successful all you have to do is to hire a whole bunch of really talented people and abstain from interfering in their creative process.

I personally strongly disagree with this statement and want to share a study on the roots of project failures conducted by the Standish Group in 2006.

After, yet again, determining that our ability to deliver projects on time and on budget was seriously challenged, they went to the companies they were studying and basically asked the following question:

Our project delivery still sucks. Can you tell us why?

The results of that survey are presented in Table 1.

Table 1

Table1.PNG

A quick perusal of the table should not surprise any project management professional. Yes, lack of user involvement will kill any endeavor. Same goes for lack of detailed requirements document. Yes, projects where customers expect a delivery of a Ferrari for a price of a bicycle, will most likely go considerably over budget …

But an interesting thin happens if we attempt to highlight all of the factors related to processes, planning and systematic approach, thus separating them from the “human” factors (see Table 2).

Table 2

Table2.PNG

It turns out that 70% of project success is dependent on the underlying processes while only 30% can be attributed to the talents and industriousness of the team members!

To put it in perspective, let us imagine that we have two teams:

  • Team A consists of absolute technical geniuses, but does not follow any processes and does not have a project manager.
  • Team B is made up from “average” technical professionals, but follows proper processes and is lead by an experienced project manager

If you choose to believe the table above, it looks like Team B will beat team A 2 out of 3 times on any assignment we decide to allocate to them!

Article - Top 10 Project Risks and What to Do About Them

 

Here is my favourite definition of risk:

Risk is a bad thing that can happen on your project, but you are not entirely sure it will

Below you will find a tables 1 and 2 with ten most common risks and ways to address them both early (highly recommended!) and late in the projects.

Table 1

risks-table-1.PNG

Table 2

risks-table-2.PNG

And what are your “favorite” project risks and what do you do about them? Please leave your comments below.

About the Author

Jamal Moustafaev, MBA, PMP – president and founder of Thinktank Consulting is an internationally acclaimed expert and speaker in the areas of project/portfolio management, scope definition, process improvement and corporate training. Jamal Moustafaev has done work for private-sector companies and government organizations in Canada, US, Asia, Europe and Middle East.  Read Jamal’s Blog @ www.thinktankconsulting.ca