There’s always more demand for projects than capacity to supply. So how do you decide which to do? A Cranfield University study in the Europe found that over 53% of companies accepted they did this badly.

How our Investment Management products fit together to help you succeed

Investment management/prioritization is a process. It runs alongside the project delivery process, extracting information and generating an ‘outcomes’ and value focus. However, most investment management processes are full of ‘holes’ — gaps and deficiencies through which potential project value falls (often quite rapidly). Fixing an investment management process is not difficult, but does required commitment and an understanding of what the dimensions are and how they fit together.

To enable you to fully understand the value of an effective Investment Management Process quickly we’ve written “Understanding the value of an Effective Investment Management Process”. This guide spells out the issues, their consequences and how fixing the problems exponentially increases the project value realized. (To help you get started we’ve provided you this Guide free.)

Then, to enable you to improve your investment Management process and fix any ‘holes’ we offer a range of well proven products that equip you to make your end-to-end Investment Management process value-focused (most are cost-focused today) and maximize the value of all of your investments. These guides are discussed briefly below. Click here for a diagrammatic view of how our Investment Management Guides individually and cumulatively enhance the performance of your Investment Management process.

You can purchase individual Guides or one of a number of ‘sets’ we’ve compiled to make upgrading your investment management process easier for you.

Investment Management as an 8-step process.

1. First you need to set up and initiate your project correctly. If you set your project off on the wrong ‘rails’ it will be ‘off the rails’ in no time. Our “How to initiate a project” guide  takes you through a quick and easy project initiation process to ensure you set up your project for success. It guides you through the questions to be asked, the information you need and the guidance you need to provide.
   
   
2. Once you know what your project is going to propose our “How to generate your project’s value proposition” takes you through the process of identifying and quantifying the value from and risks to your project. This is a sequential workshop-based process to define the ‘desired business outcomes’, identify the benefits, quantify the financials, assess the risks and plan the required change (the components of a value proposition). Each value propostion-generation step is supported by a specialist guide. Your ‘value proposition’ should be the central point of your project around which everything revolves — so you need to get it absolutely right. Failure to adequately and accurately define a value proposition is one of the primary causes of project failure!
   
   
3. Your value proposition is only part of what you need to complete a full value-focused business case. Here we provide “How to complete your business case” a guide that takes you through the process of completing our  ‘Value-focused business case template’ (available free). This “How to complete ...” guide gives you information on each field and discusses why it is there and how to complete it (with examples).
   
   To support the comparability of business cases we also provide comparable risk assessments (see “How to manage your project’s delivery risks” and “How to manage your project’s business impact risks”) as well as the means by which you can track and score each project’s contribution to your organization’s strategy (even if you don’t have a strategy) — see “How to measure your project’s strategic contribution”.
   
   
4. Your business case, once completed, needs to be assessed and agreed to by your Governance Team. They need to know what they’re looking at and how to assess it. Our “How to assess your business case” guide takes governance team members through the key questions they should ask of their business case in order to understand, accept and take accountability for it. Better to find any problems now before it is submitted for approval.
   
   
5. Prior to executive or Board approval business cases should be thoroughly validated to ensure they are correct, complete, have identified all the available value and the project is set up for success. Our “How to validate a project” guide enables any party independent of the project team to conduct a thorough validation of any business case to ensure it is robust and reliable and to identify any areas of project  or value proposition weakness to be improved.
   
   
6. At the evaluation and prioritization step two questions are asked — “Is the project worthwhile?” (this evaluation question is answered by the business case) and “Is it something we should do now?” — (this prioritization question is answered by comparing the relative value of the business cases). Our “How to evaluate and prioritize projects” guide takes senior executives through the different questions to be asked both initially and as the project progresses through the delivery process. This consistent approach enables all projects to be evaluated on a common basis and new members of a Project Investment Committee to quickly come up to speed. (Despite initial reservations, many executives teams have found the insights and structure in this guide as “very useful”.)
   
   
7. Where projects need to go to the Executive Committee or Board for approval, a separate set of “How to evaluate projects (Board)” and “How to evaluate project progress (Board)” guides enable even the most hardened and experienced board members (who often quake when confronted with a major IT project to approve) to know what to ask and, importantly, how to assess the answers.
   
   
8. Once the project is approved the focus shifts to benefits delivery.  Our “How to manage your benefits’ delivery” guide addresses the processes of protecting, tracking and measuring the expected value from each project so as to maximize the value realized. Everyone, the project team, business, governance team and PMO, is involved and has a role to play in ensuring the project’s success. This guide gives them all the means to focus on benefits realization throughout the project and beyond.
   
   

Supporting Guides

A whole raft of topic-specific “How to ...” and “Understanding ...” guides also exist to enable the above eight steps — these are referenced in the relevant process guides.

Key supporting guides include “Understanding prioritization”, “Understanding project success” (still a topic of hot debate), “How to manage your project’s scope” (which discusses the four types of ‘scope’), “How to manage your project financials”, “How to manage your critical success factors” and the rarely covered topic, “How to manage the leading indicators of failure”, Each guide directly and succinctly supports and enables your project’s success and protects the value.

Project Governance

In particular the four “How to govern project set up/planning/delivery/closure and beyond” guides provide the overarching governance guidance so that executives accountable for governing the project and ensuring the realization of its outcomes and benefits know how to be involved and ensure its success. This knowledge is not intuitive and, therefore, most governance roles are usually poorly executed. Remember, all of the major IT project disasters of the past 25-30 years have been ‘governed’ by otherwise sensible and experienced business executives! Ignore (or let them crash-through on) project governance at your peril.
   

Benefits

These guides individually and cumulatively will

• increase (and then maximize) the returns generated by your project portfolio. Proven. Simple.
• enable you and your organization to ‘fix’ the problems in your current investment management process
• enable you to quickly  fill key ‘holes’ such as the simple measurement of ‘strategic contribution’ or the generation of standard, comparable project risk profiles
• reorient your existing cost-focused business case to one that is value-focused — focused on the ‘value proposition’ that can be progressively tracked and measured through to realization
• generate a greater understanding of the value drivers in projects and how they need to be managed and protected
• enable you to generate a sustainable lower cost competitive edge, as you’ll be able to do more projects and generate more value in less time and with less investment. It doesn’t get better than this!!

These guides go well beyond PMBOK or Prince2 and lead the way for business-led, value focused projects to be successfully delivered.

Guides

1. Understanding the value of an Effective Value Management Process
2. Understanding prioritization
3. Understanding project success
4. How to initiate a project
5. How to generate your project’s value proposition
6. How to complete your business case
7. How to measure your project’s strategic contribution
8. How to assess your business case
9. How to validate a project
10. How to evaluate and prioritize projects
11. How to evaluate projects (Board)
12. How to evaluate project progress (Board)
13. How to manage your benefits’ delivery