Leap Session Q&A for EXECUTIVE: Herding Cats - Lesson learned on our journey to effective Project Portfolio Management

[LisaMi2]

@Audrey Tiffenbach‚ and I had a blast presenting at Leap2020. We hope you enjoyed our session on lessons we learned while on our journey to effective Project Portfolio Management. Catch it here if you haven't watch yet.

Please comment below if you have questions about anything we shared. We’ve learned a lot along the way about how to wrangle the chaos and are happy to share our journey.

Do you use Workfront to manage your project portfolio? We'd also love to hear about your experiences and grow together.

[kynabaker16]

So many great nuggets in your presentation! You are so well spoken as well, I loved seeing your video. Felt like I was hanging out with you on a video call.

My question is about the dashboards that you create for everyone in the company. I think it's incredible that you've been able to tie all of your projects to the strategic goals for the company. You mention that you created specific dashboards for executives that are different than others... can you share some examples of what those executive visibility needs are and how you show them what they need?

Second question - you said you have one task specific to meeting notes. Do you just have a unique update for each meeting? Do you report on those tasks/updates at all? I'm wondering how/if those notes turn into action items?

I might have more questions as I let your session sink in, but thank you so much for sharing your expertise!

[tiffenbacha]

Thanks for watching our session - we welcome your feedback and questions!

First question: Our dashboards have been a great tool to ensure our users are presented with clear, consistent project data. We utilize several tabs of dashboards to show the Organizational Projects (by strategic goal), Project Hours (drilled down by business area, project and individual user), as well as the Status of Active Projects. These dashboards help staff make a connection between our organizational strategy and the projects that they contribute to and/or are impacted by.

Executive leaders are provided most of the same information, but presented with an executive perspective: Project hours per strategic goal, Active projects this quarter, Project roadmap, etc. This allows executives a high-level overview of the project strategy, with detail reporting of where we spend our dollars (people, effort, focus).

Some reports from these dashboards are also disbursed to a target set of leaders via weekly emails generated through Workfront's automatic report delivery.

Second question: We use a task template to ensure every project has a base standard for things like reporting hours, weekly updates and meeting notes. The meeting notes task allows our Project Managers and Core Teams to have a central repository for meeting discussions and to capture action items that may not always be created as an individual task. Keeping the meeting notes in a single task greatly helps with historical reference of team discussions without referencing individual notes, documents or a separate system. We do not generate reports on the meeting notes task, but our teams appreciate that there is a consistent location to document this information.

Please let us know if you come across more questions. I am happy to share specific examples or screenshots, as needed. We are always available to share our PMO/Workfront journey!