Project Portfolio Management: A View From The Management Trenches

Chapter 4. Are We Optimizing Our Capacity?

John is at dinner with Bill and Chris. It's been several weeks since their first meeting, when they explored the full extent of the issues facing Acme Retail, the $6 billion consumer retail company that John joined six months before as vice president of portfolio management. After that initial dinner, they all agreed to meet up on a regular basis to address different issues. Tonight, John couldn't stop talking about resources.

John declared, "There are never enough people to go around! And if it's not people, then a key system gets taken off-line for maintenance or crashes just when one of the technical teams wants to upgrade, or one of the project managers comes and complains that the head of facilities has taken over his team's cubicles for some other group. No matter how well I think we've planned for resources across the portfolio, project managers don't stop asking for more or someone else throws us a curve ball. What do you advise portfolio managers do to optimize resources?"

Bill and Chris couldn't help smiling at each other. How many times had they heard this refrain from portfolio managers? This wasn't the first time they'd been asked this question and they knew it certainly wasn't going to be the last.

"So, what have you been doing about this?" Bill asked. He knew he wasn't being very helpful by answering a question with a question, but he also knew John well enough that he wouldn't have sat back and done nothing about it.