This research report suggests that project portfolio management in a multi-project environment suffers from the core. The release issue serves as a catalyst that causes seven adverse effects in the project portfolio management environment.
I NTRODUCTION
Value can be seen as the amount of money generated by the organization for a given period (through sales) as well as the return on the. 34; System productivity must improve because it is fundamental to the value of an organization through the value metric of return on investment (ROI)." (Viljoen, 2005:4).
T HE FUNDAMENTAL MANAGEMENT PROBLEM
P ROBLEM STATEMENT
LITERATURE REVIEW 10
P ROJECT PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT
- The rationale for effective project portfolio management
- The effects of lacking effective project portfolio management
- The four goals of project portfolio management
- Project portfolio management approaches
- Comparing the approaches
- Popularity and effectiveness of portfolio methods
Achieving balance – the right balance between long-term and short-term projects and those with high and low risk, consistent with the company's goals. Respondents were asked which method is dominant – the method that dominates the decision-making process.
P ROJECT SCHEDULING AND MANAGEMENT
- Schedule development
- Critical path method
- Program evaluation and review technique
- Schedule control
- Resource management
Project Plan: “An approved project plan, called the baseline plan (which must be technically and resource-feasible), is an integral part of the project plan. Performance reports can also alert the project team to problems that may cause problems in the future.” (Project Management Institute. It can be formal or informal, very detailed or broad, depending on the needs of the project.
Staff may be assigned full-time, part-time, or variable, depending on the needs of the project.” (Project Management Institute, 2000:114). The directory can be formal or informal, very detailed or broadly designed, depending on the needs of the project." (Project . Institute of Management.
O PERATIONAL PROBLEMS IN MULTI - PROJECT ENVIRONMENTS
- Research background
- Seven undesired effects
A project is busy when the right people are reliably assigned to work on it. The directory can be formal or informal, very detailed or broadly designed, depending on the needs of the project." (Project . Institute of Management, 2000:114). These unresolved issues were often escalated up the organizational hierarchy to the resolution of those responsible for managing the project portfolio.
Often there are no free or slack resources available and when resources were reallocated, this often had negative effects in unexpected places in the project portfolio. These seven undesirable effects severely hamper the performance of project portfolio delivery systems and can ultimately compromise the four objectives of project portfolio management described earlier.
G OLDRATT ’ S THINKING PROCESSES
- Current reality trees
- Evaporating cloud diagrams
Sometimes the cause itself may not seem sufficient to create the effect. These cases are tested with the reservation of absence of cause and improved by reading: "If cause and ________, then effect." What is the missing dependent statement that completes the logical relationship. If the main problem (which will be related to at least 70% of UDEs), can be addressed; then almost all UDEs will disappear.
Assumption D is believed to be necessary to obtain requirement B and assumption D' is believed to be necessary to obtain requirement C. To make the assumption for D-D' visible the following statement is useful: On the one hand we must have D, but on the other on the other hand we must also have D'.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 46
T HE RELEASE - PROBLEM EVAPORATING CLOUD DIAGRAM
The goal that project portfolio managers should strive to achieve is "Continuously executing many projects that increase the value of the organization." This is called objective A. One of the requirements or needs associated with achieving objective A is to "satisfy the demands of each customer," called requirement B. In order to fulfill requirement B, we must take the actions advocated. with prerequisite D, namely "Release more work to the system regardless of resource load".
Requirement C is a necessary condition for the achievement of Objective A, because "System productivity is an important determinant of the value of an organization, through the ROI metric." In order to. Now we are in the grip of the conflict (the release problem) between taking the.
V ALIDATING THE FUNDAMENTAL MANAGEMENT PROBLEM
Viljoen (2005:8) states that the latter effect follows logically, although not explicitly recognized by Engwall and Jerbrant. This logic serves as the first confirmation that the release problem is a fundamental management problem and suggests that it is worth continuing the current effort to gather empirical evidence to validate the release problem.
RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY 53
- R ESEARCH OBJECTIVE
- R ATIONALE FOR THE STUDY
- R ESEARCH QUESTIONS
- A PPROACH AND STRATEGY
- U NIT OF ANALYSIS
- T IME PERIOD OF THIS STUDY
- E NTITIES TO CONSIDER
- R ESEARCH INSTRUMENT
- A NALYSIS OF DATA
- S OURCES OF EVIDENCE
- R ESEARCH MAXIMISATION
- S UMMARY
Are the effect-cause-effect patterns derived by Viljoen present in the multi-project environment of the investigated company. The primary unit of analysis will be the project portfolio environment of the South African company that executes multiple projects simultaneously using a common pool of resources to execute their projects. The embedded unit of analysis will be a project executed within the multi-project environment of that company.
This approach provides graphical insight into, among other things, which events have hindered the completion of the project under consideration. The main research tool used in conducting the case study is a questionnaire.
DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS 57
B ACKGROUND ON THE ORGANISATION
I NTERVIEW PROCEDURE
The project considered during the research is a wireless telephony project, which aims to create a product that would allow mobile phones to be used in a rural environment; instead of conventional fixed telephones for connecting to the network infrastructure with the EDGE protocol. The analysis of the interviews will be presented by illustrating the evaporation cloud diagram (which was finalized and agreed upon during the interview) and by stating the conclusions that can be drawn from it.
P ROJECT M ANAGER
The project manager stated that this is particularly important to guard against the effects of normal project variance.). The project manager stated that once a resource left a project, there would be a difficult denial process involved in reassigning them to the project.). The project manager managed to keep resources on his project longer than was strictly necessary by assigning people to the project throughout its life cycle.
The project manager actually kept resources working on the project longer than was strictly necessary. There was a difficult negotiation process involved in reassigning key resources to the project after they had officially left.
R ESOURCE M ANAGER
The personnel on the project are not sufficiently trained or numerous enough to deal with the situations that have arisen. There is a lot of pressure from various parties to ensure that the project gets extra staff. The resource manager stated that it would rarely be necessary to reallocate resources between projects, as project teams were kept relatively stable.
The project under review was assisted with additional staff in the early stages, as the project was not adequately staffed from the outset, as the amount of work to be performed was dramatically underestimated. Although the project under review was assisted with additional personnel during the early stages of the project, the reallocation of resources within. organizing was in fact a rare occurrence and at best took place on an ad-hoc basis.
P ROGRAM M ANAGER
Requirement B is a necessary condition for achieving goal A because “there is a lot of uncertainty inherent in the environment and requires the ability to accept it. In order to satisfy requirement B, he must take the action advocated by precondition D, namely "move the work earlier to take advantage of the project delay". In the project under consideration, when the works were rescheduled earlier, this did not cause any unintended conflicts.
Shifting work early can create unintended conflicts for resources due to the realities of dependencies and variability. On the project in question, the work was moved earlier, as the necessary components did not arrive from the key supplier.
M ANAGING D IRECTOR
In order to fulfill requirement C, he must take the action advocated by precondition D', namely "to focus attention on short-term or daily considerations". The general manager believes that the prerequisite measure D' has become less relevant for him because of their structural changes. Despite the above, the CEO felt that the project portfolio management hierarchy may still be overburdened.
There is still room for improvement regarding the number of times the managing director had to intervene on operational issues. The managing director said that their project portfolio gate decisions were not delayed and that their project portfolio meetings took place every Monday morning to assess project progress.
S ALES M ANAGER
The business must do everything it can to ensure the fulfillment of the commitments of the projects it has already started. The sales manager always actively bids for new contracts, but when the need arises (depending on the availability of resources) he delays the start time of the project. The amount of contracts that the organization is able to bid on is currently limited by the available capacity of their system engineers.
It is the function of the engineers of these systems (who are senior technical specialists) to identify the resources, skills and components required to complete the project. If it is difficult to determine when ongoing projects will end and there is an ongoing bidding process, it is foreseeable that some projects (the start of which has been delayed at least during the bidding process) may start later than planned due to resources not being available. are available.
S OFTWARE A RCHITECT
Requirement B, he must take the action advocated by Prerequisite D, namely "work on only one activity until it is completed". There is then no need to refresh myself on what I have previously achieved with the task if I have not also worked on other tasks. During the early phases of the project under consideration (the concept phase), the software architect had to multitask to complete all the necessary activities and in this period, an amount of setup or reorientation time was required when switching between activities.
This implies that he had long queues of work waiting for him during that phase of the project under consideration.
S UMMARY
CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 80
A VENUES OF FUTURE RESEARCH
An electronics design firm can outsource work if resource strain becomes problematic in the South African context. In the eighteen months prior to the survey, the South African arm of the multinational organization had undergone major structural changes. They have moved away from fixed independent departments or silos with their own business and operational infrastructure to a global collection of resources that share a business and operational management infrastructure.
Portfolio Management for New Product Development: Results of a Study of Industry Practices - Working Paper No. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, Published by the Standards Committee of the Project Management Institute, Upper Darby, Pennsylvania 19082, USA.
