MGMT 690 Week 5 DB Forum 3 Thread Example

Discussion Board Forum 3: Thread

MGMT 690 Capstone, Project Management, Discussion Board Forum 3: Thread

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt and the county's capital program are composites standing in for the course's own forum; Jarocki's book, the peer-reviewed studies and Scripture are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for MGMT 690. The Book Critique due the same week responds to Jarocki's full text and is not sampled here.

Every spring our county's eleven departments submit capital project requests for roads, buildings, parks, water lines and technology, and every spring the requests exceed the money. This year there were 41 requests totaling $26 million for an $11 million capital budget. Until two years ago the county funded them by rotation: each department took a turn at the largest share. The rule felt fair, but it meant that a road resurfacing project on a stretch with three serious crashes waited behind a new parks maintenance building simply because it was the parks department's year.

The county replaced the rotation with a scoring model. Each request is now scored on alignment with the five goals in the county's strategic plan, on safety and legal mandates, on cost per resident served and on readiness, meaning whether design and permits are complete. The weights, 35, 30, 20 and 15 percent, were set by the commissioners in a public work session, and the budget office ranks the requests before the commissioners approve the list. Department heads may appeal a score once, in writing, and the appeal and its outcome are posted with the budget so residents can see why each project moved. This year, the resurfacing project ranked third. The parks building ranked nineteenth and was deferred, and the parks director, who had opposed the change, told the commissioners that the scoring had at least made the reasons visible. Two departments that once waited years for their turn now win funding because their requests address safety mandates the county had been carrying as liabilities.

In the conceptual model Meskendahl (2010) put forward, a company's strategy shapes how organizations structure and manage their project portfolios, and in which portfolio success depends on that alignment. The county's model makes the alignment visible by scoring every request against the strategic plan. Killen et al. (2008), benchmarking portfolio practices in 60 Australian organizations, found that new product success correlated strongly with measures of portfolio management performance and that certain portfolio methods were associated with particular performance outcomes, which suggests that disciplined portfolio practice can pay off.

The model does not remove judgment, and the research says it should not be expected to. Martinsuo (2013) argues that portfolio management research has leaned on rational decision models and needs to pay more attention to how portfolios are actually managed in context, including negotiation and local adaptation. Our commissioners still move projects on the ranked list, usually for reasons of geography or timing, and the model's value is that each move must now be explained in public. In the first year, the commissioners moved four of the 41 requests, compared with what staff estimated were a dozen informal swaps a year under the rotation. Jarocki (2011) frames project and change management as one discipline, and for the county the change has been cultural: departments now write requests to the strategic plan rather than waiting for their turn.

Jesus described a king going to war who first sits down to consider whether ten thousand soldiers can meet an enemy coming with twenty thousand, and who otherwise sends a delegation to ask for peace (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Luke 14:31-32). Portfolio management is that king's sitting down: an honest count of resources before committing them.

Group: how does your organization decide which projects to fund, and who can overrule the ranking?

References

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Jarocki, T. L. (2011). The next evolution: Enhancing and unifying project and change management. Brown & Williams Publishing.

Killen, C. P., Hunt, R. A., & Kleinschmidt, E. J. (2008). Project portfolio management for product innovation. International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management, 25(1), 24-38. https://doi.org/10.1108/02656710810843559

Martinsuo, M. (2013). Project portfolio management in practice and in context. International Journal of Project Management, 31(6), 794-803. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2012.10.013

Meskendahl, S. (2010). The influence of business strategy on project portfolio management and its success: A conceptual framework. International Journal of Project Management, 28(8), 807-817. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2010.06.007