What is the Blue Line?
Are your Project and Portfolio Management capabilities optimised to deliver your portfolio?
For any organisation it’s important to recognise that what you are doing now won’t be good enough in the future.
To achieve success as a project based High Performing Life Science Organisation, it is important identify and optimise the range of capabilities that are required to meet today’s business needs and to prepare the foundations for future growth.
Project, programme and portfolio management (P3M) provides a great example of where understanding and optimising the desired capabilities is essential as your organisation evolves. Failure to do so results in many of the frustrations that we routinely hear.
- Projects are taking longer and not delivering to agreed timelines.
- Different project teams have differing ways of working and roles are not clear.
- Priorities are not clearly defined leading to confusion / conflict between teams for limited resources.
- Decisions take too long and are re-visited and it’s not always clear who makes which decisions.
- Data and reports on project and portfolio progress are hard to obtain and plans reside in multiple PowerPoint slide decks.
These are symptoms that what might have worked in the past isn’t working now.
The solution is to understand what your business needs are for your current circumstances, your size and complexity and to put in place appropriate tools and processes and to provide more clarity on project and portfolio functions and roles. Buying in an expensive IT project and portfolio management tool may look like an attractive and quick solution – but if it’s not appropriate for your organisation it will make things worse.
Importantly, getting ‘Blue Line Thinking’ embedded into an organisation will not only improve today’s performance but will provide the foundation and direction to allow you to evolve to meet the ever-increasing demands place on companies.
The Blue Line represents a way of thinking to help continually evaluate whether your current P3M capabilities are fit for purpose for today and prepared for the future. This has a dual focus on ensuring that you operate at an optimal balance and maturity of P3M capabilities.
Below we describe the P3M capabilities and dimensions of company size and complexity
P3M capabilities
It is important to take a holistic view when considering the capabilities that are required to establish your best balance for your current needs to deliver the portfolio to meet the company vision and strategy. This means defining:
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- Processes and standards for project and portfolio management.
- People’s roles and responsibilities and developing the skills.
- Technology and tools required to plan and control the portfolio.
- Culture for a project centric organisational
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Company / Portfolio Size and Complexity
The capabilities defined above will be driven by organisational size & complexity of the portfolio and growth aspirations.
The Blue Line should become a way of thinking and evaluating whether you have the necessary P3M capabilities to support your project and portfolio strategy and delivery, and whether these have optimised.
Are you on the blue line?
We can help you to assess your current position and if required, create a roadmap to get you there. In conversation with you and your colleagues, we can quickly assess your current position and identify gaps and opportunities that are right for your current situation and best for future growth.
We’d be pleased to talk to you – a Free exploratory Conversation with no prior commitment – Contact us to arrange.
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