Beware of Ranking Traps

Manage Your Project Portfolio, Second Edition — by Johanna Rothman (46 / 136)

👈 Use Other Comparison Methods to Rank Your Projects | TOC | Your Project Portfolio Is an Indi cator of Your Organization’s Overall Health 👉

As you consider how to rank your project portfolio, beware the ranking traps. Most of the traps occur when we want to use traditional measures to rank the project portfolio. Once you move to agile and lean project approaches, the more traditional measures don’t add value to your decision making.

If you work in an agile environment, you might know about “story” points. Story points are a relative estimation technique.

Some people might think the business value points are similar to story points. Business value points are a way to assign a relative value to each project or program. Business value points are not relative sizing.

You might need size to consider the relative value. I don’t find that useful, because projects can change so much. Instead of size or date, consider Cost of Delay.

If people start thinking about business value points as story points, ask them to consider the Cost of Delay for this project as opposed to other projects. They will start to reconsider what value means to them.

In an ideal world, there would be a cross-functional team of people with the responsibility to decide the relative value of each project. These people would meet often enough that you would always know how each project is ranked. In some organizations, a project management office (PMO) does this. In other organizations, product management does this. Some agile organizations ask their product owners to get together and rank. In other organizations, your senior managers would do this. But your world may not be ideal.

You can rank-order the projects yourself, using the approaches in this chapter. Even if you’re wrong, you’ve provided the organization information about what’s not first. I recommend you present this ranking as a strawman. Use your mission (as in Chapter 13, ​Define Your Mission​) to help guide you. You can always ask for help from your peers to help you assign…

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