Reading the projections of several consulting firms and solution providers worldwide and listening to the most dynamic communities of practice, several macro-trends are emerging in Project Portfolio Management for 2023. As organizations seek to transition from recovery to return to prosperity, expectations are building around project portfolio management activities.
Management teams want to improve their ability to align strategy, prioritize, balance scenarios in their project portfolio and see the effects of their transformation on their business. As your business goals change, new ways of working and recent trends in transformational portfolio management emerge.
You will need to consider these if your organization is to adapt and remain competitive in its field Market. You don’t have to know or apply all the trends at once. Based on the ambitions and maturity of your organization, you should assess which trends will significantly affect your daily and future performance. Of course, it’s also essential to have flexible and adaptable tools to implement these new trends.
What Do You Think Of These 2023 Trends We Collected For You?
The Governance Of Project Portfolios Must Be Pragmatic
The constant reduction of the horizon of the strategic vision leads to changes in logic and pace for the governance of project portfolios. The tightening of budgets in 2022 sees the need to sell business ideas to convince to grant investment financing even more than before. A portfolio that, therefore, must be focused on the continuous delivery of value, both for the organization and for its customers and users.
This defended investment management calls for a much more entrepreneurial attitude. It is more demanding in terms of reliable data from its sponsors to discuss with decision-makers the value of projects and the allocation of organizational capacity. Establishing priorities to obtain optimal results requires greater attention to the statement of short and long-term benefits and threats, as well as a continuous monitoring mechanism to be put in place with the development of the management of the profit realization.
In today’s environment, the logic of planning costs, resources, or budgets one year in advance is no longer appropriate. The Digital era, especially the COVID-19 pandemic, has constantly reduced the life cycles of projects, products, and services. Companies need to react agilely to the changing trends of their users and customers.
Companies must review their strategic objectives in increasingly short cycles to maintain market competitiveness. They are also forced to adjust key aspects of strategic portfolio planning, such as resource allocation and management, costs, and prioritization of deliverables accordingly.
This adaptive logic applied to transformation portfolios already requires revisions every three to six months, which will become increasingly impactful. It will also mean taking the time to relinquish some control and provide a means of delivery that will be simple, pragmatic, that can be done from afar and in a process that everyone will understand.
The Organization Becomes Hybrid In All Its Dimensions
The long-term installation of the current context requires applying the best working models and known project management methods. The COVID-19 pandemic has permanently changed the professional landscape and brought new challenges in the management and execution of the organization’s portfolio. New communication channels, collaborative work practices, and information relationships with all stakeholders replace previous benchmarks and references.
With the introduction of telecommuting, a face-to-face meeting is no longer the dominant channel. There are now many online tools that you use every day to communicate with Domain Managers, Project Managers, Executive Committee Members, Product Managers, Scrum Masters, and more.
Suppose all of them temporarily replace all face-to-face meetings. In that case, they are gradually taking an intermediate place with so-called hybrid panels (face-to-face and remote) now that teleworking is permanently practiced. With the emergence of many collaboration tools, building relationships is the biggest challenge with mixed working. In this pendulum movement, some stakeholders need to be sufficiently informed of the progress of specific portfolio initiatives.
The decrease in informal exchanges no longer allows implicit communication. Adapting to these new relational demands confronts how we adapt to this culture, this team spirit, and this collaboration when teams are fundamentally dispersed. More and more companies understand that their competitiveness in the markets depends on their ability to adapt to the constantly changing environment in which we live.
And that means embracing models that take the best from more traditional management approaches and new ones like Agile at Scale. While conventional methods emphasize project delivery, more and more organizations will adopt more product-driven delivery models to improve agility and emphasize value. The future of work will be hybrid along three dimensions: geographical, collaborative, and methodological.
As a direct result, there will be an increasing number of changes to allow key initiatives to run concurrently and to substitute some for others as sponsors more frequently make the necessary iterative prioritization trade-offs. Faced with this phenomenon, the PMO will have to gradually demonstrate maturity in business acumen and stakeholder management to bring data and underlying transformation management capabilities essential to this evolution.
The PMO Actor Of Talent Development
The PMO is on the way to becoming an actor in recruiting project talents and an essential management facilitator in hybrid transformations. The role of the PMO is becoming crucial in attracting and retaining top talent. 2023 will see much more thoughtful and focused discussion in exploring what people need to perform well and what they need to have available to stay. The mandate of the PMO is now broadened in this area.
There are already teams in which the PMO of a portfolio is invited to participate in recruitment interviews to help evaluate the cultural suitability of future arrivals and even to manage the recruitment of project managers centrally. This stems from recognizing PMOs’ ideal place in the geographicalstructure. This is how they are increasingly associated with recruitment and enabled to make a difference in this area.
Another theme expected to gain traction in 2023 is PMO personal development. They will be encouraged to do so within PMO communities, ensuring they identify and acquire the behaviors necessary to perform their role. Many in these collectives seek ways to renew themselves and hone their skills in building high-performing teams, resolving conflict, and building trust, motivation, productivity, and strategy. Communication.
PMOs increasingly have the opportunity to activate a set of “soft skills” within teams and offer coaching and advice. Finally, in its traditional form, the training activity is central to the project management industry. However, since the start of the pandemic, virtual training has taken over. This form of digital learning is not going away soon, so we have to adapt to it.
From an organizational and team perspective, this approach has several challenges that need to be considered, such as (and most importantly) the quality of the content and interactive format of online courses. Online training involves trade-offs like networking and interactivity. But it also comes with unexpected benefits, such as bringing global teams together and a reduced carbon footprint.
Valuing Governance Data By Moving Toward AI
The technological progression of transformation portfolio management tools draws a series of steps toward a dynamic governance capability. Technological progress over the next few years, applied to project portfolio management tools, is already opening up prospects for services with a significant impact on the content and workload of project management players.
PMOs will participate in each stage of questioning the current ways of working. The first step for many organizations is to integrate the various tools used to record and manage different aspects of their project portfolio (Kanban boards, timesheets, Gantt charts, Microsoft Excel, email, Jira…). With an easy-to-implement PPM software solution that packs all the necessary functionality into a single interface, you can manage strategic planning and execution.
This is with flexibility that adapts to the different needs, methodologies, and governance systems that may coexist in your organization. Added to the benefits of this integration are the standardization of processes, the automation of tasks, and the automatic creation of reports. The next step after mastering the technical, financial, and scalability considerations of PPM software concerns integration with the financial IS before that development.
Thanks to the rise of Strategic Execution Management, you will soon be able to link the governance of the strategic plan and the management of portfolios and projects at the heart of the value chain. As we saw above, there is no question of using automation to predict what is coming. Organizations that can predict and diagnose these changes in advance, and prepare other roadmaps, will have a clear competitive advantage over their competitors.
- The final step responds to the pressure to satisfy management’s need for
- real-time governance data. This allows for continuous monitoring and helps plan
- numerous launch and adjudication decision points to provide the maximum flexibility for
- value-driven deliveries. It is foreseeable that the volume of data generated by the
- a portfolio of projects may become even more of a tedious and intractable activity. Turning
- to an intelligent data analysis market application will allow you to integrate and
- automate both the collection and synchronization of this data in dashboards and
reports containing your portfolio’s relevant information.
The Maturity Of The Risk Management Process
Develop the attitude and means of analyzing contextual data to guard against risks and prepare for opportunities. If very few organizations had COVID-19 in their strategic or project risk register, most organizations did not consider its impact or likelihood high enough to be serious. And then, overnight, everyone was affected. This collective risk behavior bias is representative of the maturity of the risk management process at all levels of organizations of all shapes, sizes, and industries.
After two years of the ‘Stop & Go’ crisis, the most challenged organizations have ramped up by developing the training and risk management process to ensure their teams are ready for another calamity. For PMOs and actors in managing projects and products, developing a culture of risk in decision-making is associated with creating an entrepreneurial attitude.
If the application of agile principles facilitates the adaptation of the organization in the face of uncertainty, risk management questions and prepares it for possibilities in the short and medium term and thus constitutes a lever for action on its constraints. Instead of planning (at any level) and then doing risk management, turn the logic around and allow risk management to inform your planning.
If it had been considered as such before Covid-19, the transition for organizations and employees could have been less painful and costly. The other aspect of emerging risk management for the PMO is based on the intelligent analysis of internal management data with those of external contingencies. When he has the means to do so, he will be responsible for using the results to mitigate the impact or the probability that a risk will materialize and impact the objectives of his portfolio of projects/products.
