Managing Projects and Portfolios in Difficult Economic Times: Q&A with Azita Gandjei of Primavera Systems

With the financial services sector in crisis and the rest of the business world facing a volatile and uncertain economy, CIOs and their management team are increasingly under pressure to prioritize investments, cut costs and ensure that projects are delivered on time and at a high level of quality. That’s a big challenge, of course, but it’s a challenge that IT leaders will have to meet in the coming months.

Azita Gandjei, industry market manager for IT at Primavera Systems, recently interviewed CIOs, IT management and business executives from a variety of industries to discover the obstacles they currently face and the best practices they are using to overcome them. In this Q&A, Gandjei shares what she learned.

Good to have you with us today. Before we begin, could you tell us a bit about Primavera Systems?

Certainly. We are a software company that was founded 25 years ago by Joel Koppelman and Richard Faris with the mission of ridding the world of project failure. To that end, we have developed project, portfolio, and program management solutions that are tailored to meet the needs of a wide array of industries. Using our solutions, organizations can make better portfolio investment decisions, improve governance, prioritize their project investments and resources, and deliver tangible results back to the business.

Thanks. One only need glance at the business headlines lately to see that we’re in a difficult economic period, especially for those in the financial services business. You’ve spent quite a bit of time lately talking with CIOs and business leaders. What kinds of challenges are they facing right now?

IT is under a great deal of pressure right now to cut costs and trim their investments, project and application portfolios so that they’re only spending money and resources on the most vital investments. The economy isn’t necessarily creating new challenges, it’s magnifying the impact of existing challenges such as:

• How can we decide whether to undertake an initiative before it’s scoped out?
• How do we make sure we have the right resources on the most important projects?
• How can we manage projects outside of politics?
• How can we modify existing projects and investments as efficiently as possible to stay on track as conditions change?

Another theme that runs through the challenges you mentioned is reducing costs. Can you elaborate on the financial situation for IT today?

Simply put, there are fewer dollars available for IT these days, and, in many cases, the discretionary pool for funding new projects is shrinking even faster because, as the number of applications and systems grows, the cost of maintaining and managing them increases as well.

My advice is to first, look within – the architects can often find ways to bring projects together so that they share resources and operate on common platforms resulting in much lower costs. Empower these architects. They have great ideas, even if they’re not the best liaison to the business. Tap those ideas, and then let the experts communicate them to the business side.

Another great way to recoup some of that discretionary money is to take a hard look at applications and then treat them just like projects in the portfolio. Use the same process to evaluate their worth to the company. It’s incredible how much time and money organizations spend maintaining applications that are outdated, unused or simply redundant.

Where do you start and how do you prioritize?

First and foremost, there has to be a business case for a project – it can’t simply be the most persuasive person in the room – and it needs to go through a process. The person who controls the purse strings often has a great deal of influence over the process, but also shareholders, if you’re a public company, can have a lot of influence over which projects get done.

As far as the process itself, it will depend quite a bit on the unique goals and culture of the organization. Once those metrics and processes are hashed out, however, they need to be followed. Once the project has been selected, start to consider the mix of resources necessary to quickly and efficiently complete it. One area which is critical to cost control and efficient use of resources is optimizing and managing your portfolio of applications. This process is commonly referred to as application portfolio management.

Application portfolio management is conducted by taking inventory of every application in the enterprise. All applications should be evaluated for alignment with strategic goals, risk, value, and health. Using software that enforces this process ensures its consistency. Factors to evaluate include the link to the company’s vision, the extent to which the business depends on the application (which, of course, incorporates risk), functional coverage, ease of use, and cost to implement and retain versus the benefits gained. It is also beneficial to gauge the application’s age, the relevance of its platform, its scalability, ease of modification, and supporting documentation.

What questions should we be asking to evaluate whether to keep an application around?

How many groups does this application benefit? What’s the risk if it goes down? How much money does it require for maintenance? And don’t forget to look at the negative side too. What is the risk of not killing it? Might your organization go out of compliance with important regulations or mandates? Will it integrate well with other critical applications?

If you’re looking for quick hits on finding money, rationalizing and managing your portfolio of applications is a great start. And again, technology tools can help. Solutions exist that can help organizations inventory all their applications, understand dependencies and assess their value-add. Having this information at your fingertips makes following the process much, much easier.

In some businesses, IT holds the purse strings whereas in others, business managers allocate funding for new projects? Which is right?

Every company has their own funding process. Some banks, for instance, have the business side make the call. They couldn’t imagine IT driving the process. In other organizations, IT is the powerhouse that has the CEO in the back pocket. Look to where your sources of funding are. IT and business managers have to find a way to align their interests so that they’re working together to achieve the overarching business goals.

There are solutions, of course, that can help link strategy and execution by gathering information from disparate sources within the enterprise, then analyze it to present a common understanding. But ultimately, the people have to come to their own understanding – the best tools in the world won’t help if human beings can’t agree on common goals.

Resources are also a constant concern for IT. How can management ensure that the right people are working on the right projects and that they’ll have enough resources to handle future projects?

IT is a world in which surprises are the norm. When the competitive environment suddenly shifts, for instance, it’s not at all uncommon for the executive team to demand new functionality quickly.

But IT leaders should not use the inherent unpredictability stop them from planning. With the right tools, managers can track their people, the skills they possess, the type of projects on which they would like to work and their current assignments. These tools, when combined with robust project forecasting and a system that can help prioritize investments according to their strategic importance, allow management to be well positioned to adjust the portfolio and reassign people accordingly when surprises do occur.

Finally, let me ask you about change management, which you’ve just touched on. How can IT manage change more effectively?  

There is no reason that change should creep up on managers and disrupt the work days. Very often, the early warning signs of impending problems are readily available but go unnoticed. When this happens, organizations miss the window of opportunity that exists to prepare and adapt for coming change and mitigate the impact to delivery time and cost.

In addition, once changes have been made to the project or program, too few of the stakeholders have the systems in place to really understand how the change impacts their day-to-day work or even other projects.

A spreadsheet-based system for managing change prevents organizations from implementing proactive change management because it traps records in siloed documents and slows down the process of providing information to the people who need it. Amid the furor of active development and implementation, project managers are unlikely to notice the warning signs that could reveal unforeseen problems with the code or the need for additional hardware.

What’s needed is a centralized system that collects data from a wide array of sources, analyzes that data and then presents information to all project participants and executives in a manner that makes sense to them: exactly what they need – no more, no less. In this way, everyone is informed and up to date. Potential problems can be identified early, and measures can be taken, so that everyone has a full understanding of the ramifications of that change.

Thank you for speaking with us today, Ms. Gandjei.

My pleasure. Thank you.