Portfolio Management
The application of TOC and Interdependency Engineering
Ask anyone engaged in Portfolio or Project Management about his or her measure of success and the answer is some form of ‘on time, within budget and with full content.’ Ask about problems encountered in meeting these objectives and common responses include ‘too many conflicting priorities’, ‘not enough resources’, ‘too long to respond to the opportunity’, ‘too much expediting’, ‘too long lead times’, ‘problems in one project cascade into another project’... and the list goes on. The all-too-familiar end result is that customer demand is not always met – or perhaps customer demand is met, but at too high of a price.
Does any of this sound familiar? If so, then a good question seems to be, “Why is Portfolio Management so challenging?”
We do know that Project Portfolios are complex structures. They consist of several sub-systems: the day to day task priorities, individual project management, the portfolio of work to take on in any given window of times, the capacity of the project organization that results in many, complex interdependencies.. To be successful on each and every project, these interdependencies must be designed to support one another and managed in accordance with the interdependent design.
To be more accurate, there are actually two different aspects to Portfolio Management. One part is more concerned with ensuring that each and every project is managed to deliver on time, within budget and full content in the presence of variability, while reducing lead time. This is referred to as Critical Chain Project Management
The other aspect is true Portfolio Management (TOC PM). TOC Portfolio Management ensures the quantity and due dates of projects committed to are reflective of the organization’s capacity, in the presence of variability. As a derivative, task assignment priorities are globalized to ensure that each project will experience minimal delays and be able to achieve its commitments.
For those organizations dealing with the challenges of managing Project Portfolio, AGI has a customized TOC – TOC Portfolio Management Solution. This solution focuses on not only the proper configuration and management each project (called Critical Chain Project Management), but also on the know how to configure and manage the entire portfolio to permanently alleviate the problems encountered in Portfolio Management.
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