Day #35: The surprising ingredient that makes businesses work better

Today it's Friday, so there is time for a new video. Motivational, inspiring... or at least not too bad, I hope. 

The speaker, Marco Alverà, is a businessman and self-considered fairness crusader. He is also CEO of Snam, Europe's largest natural gas utility. His TED Talk is about unfairness, and how it does not only affect our personal lives, but also our business or our work. If there is a fairness culture along the culture, we will get happier employees and better results.

Happy weekend!

Day #34: KPI and metrics

We keep being inspired by the course assignment! In order to evaluate business strategy and BRM policies, we quite often make use of KPIs or Key Performance Indicators. But the digital era and the progressive digitization and digitalization in our society make difficult to measure the return of investment (ROI). Old ROI metrics focused on efficiencies, but today they should talk about revenue and customer experience.

That is very well described in the article How to measure IT ROI in the digital era, from a website called The Enterprisers Project, a community helping IT leaders to solve problems.

Specific metrics are considered and split in three categories: strategic, operational and cost impact. Examples of the strategic impact metrics are the customer retention or the time to market for new services. Operational impact metrics might include increase in scale and operational efficiencies. Finally, cost impact metrics are related to business costs or total cost of ownership assets.

Besides, how many IT ROI metrics do you need? Answer below the picture!

a) One is enough
b) Two or three
c) Five to nine
d) Around 15
e) As much as possible

Image from getthematic.com

And the answer, according to Paul Proctor, analyst at Gartner, is.... c! 

Day #33: Business strategy

Following the Monday post with some tips about how to deal with some of the course assignments, it is time to focus on business strategy. This is a key concept which needs to be analyzed or described before checking whether a company's portfolio is aligned with it or not. 

However, when looking for such words in The Portfolio Standard from PMI, they barely appear. So maybe we should try to find some hints about what business strategy is and how it can be described.

There are some good descriptions in several websites, for instance here o here. The basics are shortly described in this post.

Firstly, business strategies can be classified into three levels: 

• Corporate level, which sets the broadest guidelines of what is to be achieved and how it will be done.
• Business unit level, which is a specific strategy depending on the unit of business.
• Functional level, which are specific for the departments within the units, like marketing, sales, operations and so on. 

Then, when the objective is decided, the answers to all W-questions regarding the strategy (what, when, why, how...) should be answered. In order to do that, there are some useful tools such as: 

• Mission, vision and core values. 
• SWOT
• Resource allocation plan
• KPI
• ...

Day #32: Risk management analysis

One of the parts of portfolio management is risk management and their policies. Actually, risk management is a subject itself, with its life cycle, its tools and so on. It is difficult to go deeper without facing complicated stuff, but hopefully there are many resources available to help us.

Today I want to introduce you to one useful document that I found about risk assessment techniques. It is the International Standart IEC 31010. After a short description of key concepts such as uncertainty and risk, the process to implement a risk assessment policy is described in detail. Then, many risk assessment techniques are presented... and here it comes, the part I like the most. There is a categorization of techniques, so that we can quickly see which one is the most suitable for our problem. Besides, we could go for one technique or the other depending on which step of the risk assessment process we are at, and that is also included in the table.

Finally, the las pages are devoted to a thorough description of each techniques, including their limitations. I think that this document is outstandingly useful. I found the full document here, yet when I tried to access it today, I couldnt't... so here is a preview.

Day #31: Determining projects, programs and portfolios

Now that we are more than halfway through the course, it has been time to work on some assignments. Despite having read the recommended literature, sometimes it is difficult to fully gasp all concepts. Specially because in the PMI books there are no examples. Of course, that makes complete sense since it is a guide and not an academic book, yet it can be obscure for people not used to the field. 

One of the first issues I encountered in the assignment was to distinguish between the programs and portfolios in a real company. I have read the differences many times, even watched and posted some videos about it, but I still needed to find some examples to relate (shame on me!).

This is one good example that I found, applied to the aeronautic industry. This is another example with clothes and shoes. And finally this is yet another example with paint. Now it should be easier to apply concepts from PMI to real life... maybe not to those complex multinational companies, but surely at a medium level. Good luck!

Image from inc.com

Day #30: As work gets more complex, 6 rules to simplify

I really like to start the weekend with inspirational videos, or short talks that make me think. Today, it is a TED Talk called As work gets more complex, 6 rules to simplify. I really like the starting point: we may feel disengaged at work because businesses are more dizzy and complex... and traditional management is obsolete. 

The speaker is Yves Morieux, a senior partner at BCG who calls his approach "smart simplicity" and encourages employees to cooperate to solve long-term problems. 

Happy weekend!

Day #29: Porter's Five Forces

At yesterday's post we mentioned several analysis tools that were used in the report, like SWOT, PESTLE and Porter's Five Forces. The former two are very well know, or at least more familiar to the reader. The latter is also widely used, but it may be hidden deeper in our memory. So let's review it!

Porter's Five Forces analysis helps to determine the competition level at a certain industry, therefore it is useful when starting a new business or expanding to a new sector. Basically, the state of competition depends on five forces:

• Threat of new entrants, which depends on the barriers to enter a certain industry. For example, such threat is low in the airline industry - important investments are needed - but it is quite high in the app market - almost everybody can launch a new app!.

• Bargaining power of suppliers, which depends on the number of suppliers and on whether it is easy or not for a company to find a substitute supplier and switch. For example, the power of suppliers is high in the airline industry - how many aircraft manufacturers can you think of?.

• Bargaining power of buyers, which depends on how much pressure buyers can put on a company. It is also related to the buyer's sensitivity to price changes and how easy it is for them to switch from one company to another. For example, in the airline industry such power is high - there are a lot of alternatives and the choice tends to be cost-driven -, but for Apple customers it is very difficult to move to another OS once they have become used to iOS products.

• Threat of substitute products, which depends on how many similar products there are in the market which respond to the same customer need. For example, threat of substitute products in the smartphone manufacturing industry can be considered as high - there are lots of brands to choose from!

• Rivalry among existing competitors, which depends on the total number of competitors and what each competitor can do. For example, in the airline industry there is a high rivalry between airlines.

Image from travelandleisure.com

Day #28: Report on Global Project Portfolio Management Market 2019-2028

A new report has been published about the Global Project Portfolio Management Market 2019 Trends, which focuses on the top key players and their framework. There is a quantitative and qualitative analysis, with focus on SWOT, PESTLE and Porter's Five Forces analysis of the global market. Besides, there is a forecast up to 2028.

A sample copy of the report study can be downloaded, where some interesting aspects are developed:

• Competitors analysis of Project Portfolio Management Market
• Market Leading Players
• Market Segmentation
• Product Volumen Analysis
• ... 

Image from business.bell.ca

Day #27: What the Heck is Project Portfolio Management?

The title may sound a bit harsh, but sometimes that is the feeling we have when going through the bibliography. So today's post is a webinar which explains what Project Portfolio Management is. The author is Jamal Moustafaev, president and founder of Thinktank Consulting and a well-known speaker and author of several books about PM. 

The webinar may be a bit long compared to other videos that I have been sharing, but that is because it is full of content. I particularly like the amount of examples he shows from around the world. I think they really help to gain a better understanding. 

First ten minutes of the webinar

As a bonus, I really recommend the website where this webinar is available. I found the video on Youtube, where the first ten minutes of the talk can be seen. But the website is called The Great IT Professional, and it is full of interesting and useful webinars. Some of them are more technical whereas others are more about leadership. In any case, they are worth checking!

Day #26: Portofolio Management and Japanese renewable energy

As we have mentioned many times, the PMI is not only the main association in the PM world, but also a very useful source to keep ourselves informed. 

In particular, there are interesting news regarding portfolio management. For example this piece of news, Sustainable Change, which talks about how the Japanese energy industry changed after Fukushima. The author, Rajeev Supekar, has managed renewable energy projects in Japan for years. He explains the factors that helped a whole country to embrace the disruption and use it to make a transition towards renewable energies. 

Now that energy and climate are in the centre of all discourses, it can be a good idea to take Japan as an example. Besides, articles like this can help us understand the transversality of portfolio management. 

Image from nrdc.org

Note that many articles from PMI can be accessed just by creating a free account at PMI website, without getting a full membership!

Day #25: Agile methodology & Project Management

Agile methodology is a key concept for anyone interested in PM, or working at a big company. In short, agile is a software development methodology which is based on iterative development. Ideas, requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organized teams. Scrum and Kanban are two of the most widely used Agile methodologies. 

Image from spiinc.com

Agile project management is widely used, yet sometimes not in the best possible way. In this article, Beware the dark side of agile project management, some hints are given about how do a useful and correct agile project management, as well as some reasons why it's needed. 

Have a nice weekend!

Day #24: Larger number of women in investing roles

It is good to keep hearing positive news about gender equality in all fields. Some days ago I shared a post about an interview to women working in project management, and today it is the turn to say something about portfolio management. In this case, it is a study from Preqin which says that 23% of hedge fund investment team and portfolio management positions are held by women, compared to 6% two years earlier. 

Getty Images

However, there are some bad (or neutral?) news as well. The highest growth in female-held positions was in investor relations and marketing, traditional areas for women. About 48% of marketing employees worldwide were women in 2019!

Read the full note here: Preqin seeing larger number of women in investing roles

Day #23: Interview with a Portfolio Manager

Sometimes it is very interesting to hear real professionals talking about their jobs. In this case, Matt Blume, a portfolio manager working in the industry is interviewed by Curated Careers. It is short but very enlightening!