Manage Your Project Portfolio, 2nd Edition

Never Make a Big Commitment

The big rule of project portfolio management is that you never make a big decision where you commit an entire organization to a huge project for a long time. I define huge as more than 50 percent of your people, and I define long as more than three months. That’s not very big, and it’s not very long. So, why am I so adamant about not making a big decision?

In three months, if you’ve allocated more than half your people to one project, that project better deliver something you can see, at least as a demo. If not, you don’t know whether you have three months of valuable work or three months of waste. You just don’t know.

Some of you might be saying, “Look, we allocate budgets once a year. We assign people once a ...