project portfolio management case study

Introduction

Thinktank Consulting was contacted by a medium-size European software company producing various value-added services for the telecommunications industry. The organization has experienced a very fast growth in terms of revenues, full-time employees and the portfolio of services it offered.

The executives felt that now was the time to venture into the non-telecom domain by providing professional IT services to other organizations and by developing their own mobile apps business line.

Problems and Challenges

The senior management of the company had several concerns about the future development of the organizational goals. They included:

• Our projects are getting bigger, especially the professional services ones. Do we have the in-house skills and capabilities to handle them?
• We started experiencing certain problems with our projects already. They include poor quality of product, need for rework and missed deadlines. What are the root causes of these problems?
• We are entering two new business domains with very steep learning curves. How do we balance our best resources without damaging the existing business lines?
• We seem to have too many project ideas. How do we handle the resource allocation?
• We need more project managers and business analysts, but they are not readily available in our market. What options do we have?

Constraints

As the company employees have been already heavily involved in multiple projects already, the time factor had to be considered as we did not have the luxury to “remove” the resources from their projects for a prolonged period of time.

Solution

Thinktank Consulting has identified three problem areas for the company. They included:

• Lack of project management capabilities
• Lack of requirements management (aka business analysis in the IT and software development world) capabilities
• Absence of project proposal prioritization and strategic resource allocation (project portfolio management)

The following steps were undertaken: