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What Is A Project Status Report ?

A project status report includes all the business-critical efforts, progress and risk associated with a single project. A snapshot of where things are at.

The best project status reports create accountability and ownership within your team. They uncover issues, mitigate risks, and most of all – ensure you’re on track towards your project goals.

For clients, project status reports provide value. It gives them confidence that their money is delivering value. It can make them look good to their bosses. It can ensure funding continues in the future. It can also totally save your ass in that you have a paper trail in case things go off the rails.

Project status reports are created after your project plan is in place and things are in motion.  If we want to get super precise, it’s during the Monitoring & Controlling phase. Typically, they are sent on a weekly or monthly basis. Heck, you can even do it on the daily – but only if necessary.

Project Status reports can be delivered in a variety of methods. There is no perfect way to do it. Email. Through a PM tool. Verbally, and then followed up with a PDF. The options and combinations are endless.

Project Status Reports are not, and should not serve as a task Producers & PMs do because it’s part of the job responsibilities. It’s a Producer/Project Manager’s duty to make meaningful and useful status reports. Not just to “do the status report” that nobody reads.

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How to execute strategy plan?

Most  of the organizations failed to execute strategy. As strategic planning takes a lot of effort and collaboration. First of all strategies should be clearly defined that what organization wants to achieve . Sometimes organizations  set unrealistic goals . Make sure that it is realistic, and can be actually achieved in the time frame that you have set for yourself. Before setting strategies you need to consider some points like - you should do a complete high-level strategic planning following some high-level strategic planning model Like (SWOT Analysis). Do a market analysis to know that what is trending in the market? Organizations should Review their past before setting their strategy.Past performance can help inform a number of your future business goals.     Now once  you have set the strategies it’s important to define stakeholders . As everybody will be aware of their responsibilities and accountability . Then identify , analyze , selecting and prioritizing the components. To execute strategy plan it’s important to have capacity and allocate them efficiently and have good capability. One most important point is that there should be an alignment between all components with the organization’s strategy . Which can be achieved by monitoring and controlling process. There is a need of assessment after each interval to check the alignment of components with organization’s strategy. And another very important point is that there should be a good and transparent communication between stakeholders. 

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Differences between data-driven, data-informed and data-centric

Data informed: Members of data informed company hold some conditions like- 

The company is collecting data from multiple sources. The data is organised and documented.

The staff is aware of the data and knows how to access the data.

The decision makers are using dashboards, or at least Excel.

So, companies that are data-informed make use of data, but not really use of data science.  Data science is the field of study that combines domain expertise, programming skills, and knowledge of math and statistics to extract meaningful insights from data. Data science practitioners apply machine learning algorithms to numbers, text, images, video, audio, and more to produce artificial intelligence (AI) systems that perform tasks which ordinarily require human intelligence.  Data-driven: Data -driven company use data to make decisions . They use data to guide actions and policy. This approach can be used in different field for example in automation a banking website that automatically accept or reject applications for credit card based on consumer credit data.  Data-centric : Data centric approach is where data is the primary and permanent asset, and applications come and go. In the data centric architecture, the data model precedes the implementation of any given application and will be around and valid long after it is gone.

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What is the difference between Portfolio, Program and Project Risk Management

The project risk management process is well known. With initiate the project, identify the risks, asses the risks, plan risk reduction measures, implement the responses. These processes apply to the different levels of an organisation project, program and portfolio, it is just the ways of application that are different. The main difference is the level of the impact. In a Project Management environment the impact on the project success criteria, typical time, cost and quality but also issues such as quality and safety. These are quite tactical project objectives. The goal of project risk management is to minimize threats and maximize opportunities. It is concerned with risks risks and issues that arise inside the specific project. 

In a Program risks will have an impact on the program benefits. Will the organisation receive the benefits from the completion of the projects in the program.

In a Portfolio the risks are associated with the future growth of the organisation. Risks at a portfolio level include things such as the lack of competitiveness or innovation within the organisation or increased competition in particular markets. Portfolios are concerned with maximizing the value of the portfolio. Determining how to balance the programs and projects within the portfolio given the organization’s capacities and capabilities. 

The basic risk process is the same at each level, but the way it is applied is different for each level.

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Portfolio Risk Management

After reading this chapter this is what I understood about portfolio risk management. First of all what is Risk Management or what is the objective of Portfolio Risk Management?

Objective of Portfolio Risk Management - The primary objective of Portfolio Risk Management is to make sure that portfolio  components achieve the best possible success according to the organization strategy and business model. It identify and balance the risk factors (environment, human, legislation etc.) to efficiently and effectively enable portfolio value delivery. Risks can be positive and negative.  Positive Risk (opportunities) - It’s an opportunity to the project, so to get most of it try to enhance it because it brings a positive outcome and results in project’s success. Positive risk is the chance of getting too much of a nominally good thing . For instance - Going under budget on a project is positive risk because it indicates an error in your planning process. Another one is , so many orders you cannot fulfill them all on time , as promised. Through positive risk management it’s easy to manage them. Like - exploit the risk is about increasing the chances of positive effects. If you don’t have resources to boost the positive risk then share it with other people to achieve the best result.

Negative Risk (threats) - It gives negative outcome. To achieve a successful project it’s important to manage these risks. Through Negative Risk Management you can lower or eliminate these threats. Negative risk management may include such activities as delegating tasks, changing the deadline, increasing the number of people in the team or transfer it to someone else who may be better at handling certain negative risks. 

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Key Iterative Steps Of Stakeholder Engagement And Communication

Stakeholder engagement focuses on communicating actions and goals, Integrity and transparency are fundamental to stakeholder engagement at all levels. Following are iterative steps of stakeholder engagement and communication.

1) Stakeholder Identification and Analysis - Identifying and analyzing the stakeholder who operate at the strategic level and then setting plans for engagement.

2) Stakeholder Engagement planning - Outlining the portfolio management principles, processes and activities to engage stakeholders.

3) Stakeholder Engagement Activities - Providing timely assessments of portfolio component selection, prioritization and performance  as well as early identification of portfolio -level issues and risks.

Portfolio Communication - Portfolio communication facilitates a two - way effective dialogue between affected internal and external stakeholders like - executive managers, operations manager, governing bodies, sponsors, project, program and subsidiary portfolio managers, suppliers and external resource providers.

Portfolio communication planning gets the list of stakeholders from portfolio management plan. It requires inputs from a variety of other portfolio management process such as risk and performance management to develop a strong communication management plan. 

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Portfolio Stakeholder Engagement

Stakeholder management is the systematic identification , analysis, planning and implementation of actions designed to engage with stakeholders. Portfolio stakeholders can be an individual, groups or organizations that can affect, may be affected directly or indirectly by decision or outcome of the portfolio.

Stakeholders list at portfolio level is different from portfolio component level. Portfolio level stakeholder will be at higher level management. Portfolio stakeholder engagement deals primarily with delivering strategies and allocating resources. Programs stakeholder deals primarily with benefits management. And project stakeholder deals with delivering scope in terms of quality, time and cost. An integral part of stakeholder engagement is portfolio communication management. In the management of portfolios, the purpose of stakeholder engagement is to provide a coordinated communication approach.

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Stakeholder Management

Stakeholders are those who has any interest in project's outcome. A stakeholder can be either an individual, group or organization . They have an interest in the success of the project. Stakeholders are the one who have invested in the project so they will be affected by the project and their input can impact the project . Projects can affect stakeholders positively or negatively.   Doesn't matter whether the project affects them negatively or positively. If they're affected, they're a stakeholder. Key project stakeholders are those Key Stakeholders ,who are a subset of Stakeholders. If they withdraw their support it would cause the project to fail. These are the people and groups whose objectives must be satisfied. Some of the examples of key stakeholders are customers, project manager, project team members , Project sponsor: the project’s financier, Steering committee, resource manager, executives. Stakeholders are classified into two categories, Internal Stakeholders, and External Stakeholders.  The individual and parties that are the part of the organization is known as Internal Stakeholders. The groups that are not a part of the organization, but gets affected by its activities is known as External Stakeholders. They get influenced by the organization's work. Some examples of external stakeholders are  Suppliers, Customers, Creditors, Clients, Competitors, Society, Government etc. An increase in the number of stakeholders adds stress to the project and influences the project’s complexity level. So it’s very important to identify all stakeholders before starting a new project. Include all those who are affected by the project, and those who will impact to the project. Then, begin the process of building strong relationships among them. 

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Capacity and Capability

Capacity and capability are two separate terms but both are required to make the best portfolio selections. capacity: Capacity is the number of resources you have and where they are assigned,

Capability: Capability is the skill and competence of those resources . Capabilities are a Organization’s capacity to deploy resources . Resources such as - staff, capital, technology, equipment etc.

With very specialized resources, you are limited to the projects or tasks that those resources can be assigned to which often leads to resource gaps , the gap between a company's current resources and what resources will it need to satisfy future needs.

There are a few ways to handle gaps. - You may choose to ignore/accept a gap because you believe it will naturally solve itself overtime. - You may decide to replan projects or reschedule the work when you have the right resources available. - You may decide to rebalance a project vs. operations vs. support or assigning people from different departments to new roles for a short time, but you have to understand the cause and effect of that and what might be lacking when making those changes. - You may re-prioritize those business goals all together because resources are tight on one specific goal and maybe you pause that goal until some higher prioritized goals are accomplished. - You may fill the gap by: Building - develop skills internally, Buying - hiring the skill sets you need, Renting - hire contract workers, Outsourcing - use third party. However, you must fill gaps from an executive level. 

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EPMO: The organizational key to project success

An enterprise project management office (EPMO) differs from a traditional PMO in that it operates at a strategic level in collaboration with executives to ensure projects and portfolio activities are conducting to the benefit of the overall business.

One of the most common reasons for project failure is the misalignment between project goals and business strategy. Organizations that establish an enterprise project management office (EPMO), with the goal of aligning projects and strategy, suffer 33 percent fewer project failures, according to the Project Management Institute’s “Pulse of the Profession 2017: Success Rates Rise.” Organizations are increasingly adopting the EPMO structure, whereby project, program and portfolio managers are involved in strategic planning sessions right from the start to increase project success rates. The goal of EPMO centralized office is to provide company-wide guidance, governance, standardized processes, and project portfolio management best practices, tools and techniques. PMOs were set up to manage and meet program and project-specific deliverables and requirements and were not necessarily directly linked with high-level business objectives. 

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Difference between Governance and Management

Governance : Governance is a system of controls, as a set of processes and as a set of processes and relationship. It is associated with decision making, oversight, control and integration 

Management: Management Is described as working within the limitations set by the governance framework with the overall aim of achieving the organizational objectives.

Difference between governance and management :  Governance is the role of leading an organisation and management is its day-to-day running or operating. Governance is the job of the governing body, such as a committee or board, to provide direction, leadership and control. Management is typically the job of a management or executive team, led by a co-ordinator or chief executive and his/her staff and volunteers. The governing body's role is to oversee management, not to manage. It must be satisfied that the management team is doing its job in accordance with policy and resources. Governance is the strategic task of setting the organisation's goals, direction, limitations and accountability frameworks. "Management" is the allocation of resources and overseeing the day-to-day operations of the organization. Governance determines the "What?" - what the organisation does and what it should become in the future. Management determines the "How?" - how the organisation will reach those goals and aspirations.

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Portfolio Optimization - Data Analysis and Constraints

In our business world, data analysis and data visualization are exceptionally important.  In the project portfolio management (PPM) and PMO’s, organizations need robust data analysis to strengthen decision making and improve strategic execution. The key is to have the right processes in place to collect the right data and ensure that the data is of good quality. The power of having good portfolio data is to conduct strong portfolio optimization.

3 LEVELS OF ANALYSIS : Once organizations have a stable foundation for PMO/PPM data collection, they can embark on the data analysis journey. 

Descriptive analysis—This helps answer the basic “what has happened?” It is fact-based and is required for developing key performance indicators and dashboards.

Predictive analysis—This helps answer a more important question, “what will happen?” With sufficient data, organizations can begin to predict outcomes, especially related to project risk and project performance and the impact to project delivery as well as the portfolio as a whole.

Prescriptive analysis—This helps answer a more difficult question “what should we do?” This requires more detailed and advanced analysis to determine the optimal path against a set of potential choices.  PORTFOLIO OPTIMIZATION : Portfolio Optimization is major part of the prescriptive analysis. Organizations should endeavor to get to this point because it delivers substantial value and significantly improve strategic execution. In order to optimize any part of the portfolio, organizations must understand the constraints that exist (e.g. budgetary, resource availability, etc.). There are four basic types of portfolio optimization described below:

Cost-Value Optimization: The basic constraint of cost-value optimization is the portfolio budget.

Resource Optimization: This utilizes capacity management analysis. The basic constraint of resource optimization is human resource availability.

Schedule Optimization: This type of optimization is associated with project sequencing, where projects are interdependent . The basic constraints of schedule optimization are project timing and project dependencies. 

Work Type Optimization: The basic constraints of work-type optimization are categorical designations.         So having the right data inputs combined with constraints and other strategic criteria can produce optimial outputs.  Portfolio optimization delivers significant strategic benefits to any organization, Having the right data can enable your organization to know what is happening to the portfolio (descriptive analysis), what could happen (predictive analysis), and what senior leaders should do (prescriptive analysis).

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Beware of Project Dependencies

Managing project dependencies are an important part of portfolio planning as well as tactically managing project execution. Unknown dependencies represent a major portfolio risk and in complex environments, inadequate identification of project dependencies can derail projects or programs. Dependencies can be any deliverable, process, standard, technology, or product that is produced by one project team (or work group) but impacts another project or program. Projects that impact other projects may be referred to as upstream projects, predecessors, or givers. Projects that are impacted by other projects may be referred to as downstream projects, successors, or receivers.

Senior leadership needs to proactively manage and monitor project dependencies within the portfolio. If left unmanaged, the negative impact of such dependencies can severely affect schedule, scope, and cost.

Proactive management of project dependencies can significantly reduce risks and expenses. Senior leaders should ask the right questions at gate reviews such as, “what is the real impact to this project if upstream project deliverables are not ready in time?” Will it impact the schedule by a week? By a month? Or longer?” “Are workarounds available if upstream project deliverables are not ready in time?” “If yes, what is the cost of the workaround?” Thorough investigation and planning is needed in order to mitigate against risks.

The Types of Project Dependencies 1) Technical dependencies: “a relationship between two projects that affects the technical outcome of project deliverables”. A technical dependency exists when one project cannot move forward (easily) without a deliverable from another project.

2) Schedule dependencies: (sometimes referred to as a synchronization dependency): “a relationship between two projects where the timing of one project impacts the outcome of another project”. A schedule dependency occurs when project deliverables are needed at the same time in order for both projects to finish.

3) Resource dependencies: “a shared critical resource between two projects”. A resource dependency only exists when critical resources are shared between projects. 

4) Information dependencies: There are two aspects of an information dependency:

1) information shared from one project to another that would impact the latter’s scope or approach to completing the project.

2) The need to incorporate the capabilities and knowledge gained through another project. In this instance, important information gained from one project team should be passed on to another project team. This may occur more often in engineering environments.

This is similar to project risk management where the level of impact varies from risk to risk. Impact could be measured in terms of schedule delays, scope impacts, and cost.

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Difference between Goals and Objectives

Goal: Goal is defines as a achieving a desired outcome. If we summarize it in time frame it is a long term driven. Typically involves life changing outcomes. like retiring, buying a home or making a major career change. In goal, actions tend to advance progress in a very general sense: there is often awareness that there are several ways to real a goal. So specific outcomes are not necessary. A goal is often characterized as a change of direction that will ultimately lead to a desired outcome. Goals tend to control objectives i.e. a change in a goal could eliminate one or more objectives or add new ones.

Objectives: Objective is a specific result that a person or system aims to achieve within a time frame and with available resources. Objective is also about achieving something but within a time frame with available sources unlike  the goal. Which goal don’t consider such constraints. Objective is a series of smaller steps, often along the way to achieving a long term goal. Unlike the goal objective is usually a near- term target of a larger expected outcome. Such as passing a course as part of completing a degree program. Objective is very specific and measurable , a target is established and victory is declared only when the target is hit. Objectives tend to be actions aimed at accomplishing a certain task , while a goal is characterized as a change of direction. An objective can modify a goal but will seldom change it in a fundamental way, even if the objective isn’t reached. 

For example - Goal is I want to retire by age 50. And in order to reach my goal of retiring at age 50, I need to save some money by the end of this year.

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Vision And Mission

Vision : An organization’s vision describes what the organization hopes to become in the future. In one sentence it can be described as “ Description of something in the future”. A vision provide strong foundation For developing a comprehensive Mission statement. Strategic vision addresses the ‘Where are we going ‘ questions , and it should provide a clear understanding of what the business should look like and provide help to take strategic decisions. Strategic intend should lead to an end . That end is the vision of an organization or an individual. It should be short and specific . It should be based on overall purpose of organization.

* There are many benefits of having vision for an organization like : 

* Help the organization to prepare for the future .

* Clarifies and crystallizes the senior executives views About the companies      long term direction 

* Good vision reduce risk-taking and experimentation.

For example - Walt Disney has vision statement “ Make people happy “.

                        Vodafone has vision statement “ Our vision is to be the world’s mobile communication leader”.

Mission : Mission is a statement which defines the role an organization plays in a society. Mission can be defined as “ essential purpose of the organization, concerning particularly why it is in existence , the nature of the business it is in, and the customers it seeks to serve and satisfy”.

 Different from vision By it is more focused on ‘ what is our business’ As compared to the ‘ where we are headed’ or ‘ what we want to become ‘ nature of vision.     For example - Google’s mission is “ to organize the world’s information make it universally accessible and useful”.

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Things should be automating in IT

Automation isn’t just about saving time or money. Done well, automation reduces errors, increases employee satisfaction by freeing staff from tedious tasks, improves the customer experience.

1. Customer service 

Implementing customer service automation processes can have several advantages. In short, automation removes or minimizes the human element in a given area of service. This removes the potential for redundancy, wasted effort, and human error.

2. HR and recruiting 

Automating administrative tasks to free up recruiters’ time is another worthwhile area to explore. By automating, organizations enable their recruiters to become more strategic and focus on meeting the modern candidate's needs and expectations [and] build meaningful relationships with those candidates to eventually secure top talent. Low-value HR tasks can also be automated, like calculating leave benefits or working out the value of accrued vacation time when employees leave.

3. Payments

Inefficient travel and expense systems waste a lot of employee time. Cloud storage platforms such as Box and OneDrive have added OCR and image recognition to scrape information from receipts. Services like MileIQ can track mileage for travel claims, and the team behind MileIQ has created a new app called Spend that can connect to bank and credit card accounts to automatically categorize expenses. There’s also increasing interest in areas such as accounts payable automation.

4. IT operations

IT professionals themselves believe that almost a fifth of their current daily tasks could be automated by intelligent automation and AI,This could include software or hardware installations, file and folder management, server monitoring. The same McKinsey study mentioned above suggests that 40 to 80 percent of those service desk tickets could be automated with RPA, especially password resets which remain a high percentage of all support requests.

5. Testing

Automation of testing allows to execute more tests in less time, increasing coverage and freeing human testers to do more high-level, exploratory testing. Automation is especially beneficial for test cases that are executed repeatedly.

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Why Prioritize Projects?

The environment is changing around us all the time, and if we don't have a well-structured process for recognizing and reacting to the change, and doing so in a way that enjoys broad executive support, then your organization will fail in its business goals. But if you improve your project prioritization process and select a portfolio that better reflects your goals and priorities you will get benefits in the following areas:

*  Increased project success rate

*  Higher return on investment

*  Better quality of project requests

*  Eliminate obsolete projects

*  Resources allocation 

For IT Companies prioritization of projects is an important factor in helping you design a prioritization program that is right for your organization because one model may do a better job than others of focusing on what is important to your company. 

1) Maybe you have a project portfolio of high value initiatives . In this case your prioritization methods should focus on strategic alignment and value creation.

2) Maybe prioritizing projects is most important to you because there are more projects to do than there is money or people to do them. In this scenario your prioritization methods will focus on resource conservation.

3) Maybe all projects under consideration are equally high value proposals and so there is a need to establish the greater good among an all-good portfolio.

4) Even if there is no shortage of financial or Human Resources, prioritization can ensure the best sequence and timing of projects, or the best mix of project costs, returns, and schedules.