Links mentioned in the Podcast: Free Course Trial: https://bta.news/nmu Imagine the scene. Your boss organises an improvement workshop to brainstorm how members of the Customer Success Team can improve alignment between what we do as a central technology function for a portfolio of about 20 key customers and the overall company's goals. At the meeting, He explained that he has a list of over 200 feature requests, projects and new demands and ideas which need looking into - and that list keeps getting longer. Also, your colleagues say many customers complain that we are not providing the service they want. Finally, the business wants to change direction and keep up with the new industry trends. So where do you start? What would you put down as a list of ideas? Think about your current work situation and how you currently do things. What works well, and what would you like to try out? I have a few ideas, and I'd like to share those with you today. Hi, I'm Jon, and this is a series of short articles called "Tales from a Portfolio Manager". I help people in corporates plan technology across teams. So you could be someone who has a portfolio - of clients, projects, services or a backlog of features and you have to manage them across a wide variety of teams to achieve any number of goals. I have been doing these roles for over 20 years for many corporates, and I have a few tales to tell. The best thing I can do for you is to encapsulate that experience into my advisory, online training and coaching so that you can reflect on how you solve some pretty challenging issues that you come across and, as a result, be more successful in your role. If you like the content, stay tuned for more episodes and try our courses for free with a link in the article description or here https://bta.news/nmu So let me start by giving you some background of my experience. When I began managing a list of ideas, projects, and services, I first used Excel. Also, each item on the list always had criteria related to the dimensions that were easy to describe, such as the size of projects, cost resources, time and objective. Invariably, one of my tasks was to update the different stakeholders on the status of each of these items. And that's where the conversation could quickly derail. As soon as a request made its way onto the list, there was an explicit expectation that I would do something about it, and infinite resources backed me up on delivering it. We all know that is not the case, and I've already discussed ways with you in previous episodes to deal with these expectations. I started by thinking the best way to do this is to sort these projects into some common scope so that I could create a program of related work activities. Then questions would arise about who, what, and why. Next, there would be scheduling, dependencies and priority decisions, so the next step was to talk about governance quickly with some form of committee. But wait - what about all the new demand coming in? How would I prioritise that with the existing portfolio of work? To help, I have often worked with a solution architect to think about how the jigsaw pieces of the future technology footprint would sit together. Typically, I found that when the customer makes the request, it would take three months to turn it around with some idea of whether it can be fulfilled, when and how, even if it is a simple requirement. This work does not even consider the business strategy, which often seeks to reduce cost, simplify and make everything digital. It is a complex problem, and if you feel this reflects some degree of what's happening in your organisation, I can empathise deeply. If you change one cog in the planning gearbox and replace it with another, it may not fit, so you remove all the cogs to see how they could all fit together again. What I can do I can start to outline some steps and a broader framework to guide your thinking. If, like me, at the beginning of my career, you're thinking about organising programs from projects based on an Excel list, I would caution that there are better places to start. One of the prerequisites of the whole exercise is a clear business strategy. Anything written down that explains, even poorly, the customer's plan is a good step forward. A better step forward is to research technology trends, your department's plans, and how that could influence your customer's strategy. Further, finding out the level of risk that the business sponsors are prepared to take is a critical insight since business strategy can be easily formulated into options based on that risk appetite - Do they want to do slow incremental change? Is the customer facing an urgent and critical threat to which it must respond, and most importantly, is the customer prepared to accept the level of disruption and the risk of failure should they choose to radically change the direction of their business? Suppose the customer needs a plan. ...
