Article 6: How Do You Know When You Are Successful‪?‬ Tales From A Portfolio Manager

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If, like me, you've had a long list of potential projects to review, triage and investigate, you may have come across entries that need to be clarified. For example, it could simply just read "Hospitality Management System". There are no clues as to the purpose, how urgent it is, the relative size of the project and whether it is funded or not.
 
In this scenario, you may ask yourself, "How much time should I spend on investigating this compared to the other 30 line entries that are equally vague". I've spoken in previous podcasts about the starting point in structuring your demand, but this time I want to focus more on the next level of detail required for each request. Many organisations I've worked in have a scoping document, request form or an ideas document that outlines the essential information to help fit these jigsaw pieces of the puzzle, and it's at this initial stage where the seeds for scope creep, overspending, and delivery failure start to creep in. This is because it's down to the type of questions posed in the template.
 
Imagine the scene. You set yourself a task of understanding what the "Hospitality Management System" means. So you meet with the business sponsor to understand more and have your scoping document to fill out. How do you conduct the meeting, and what questions do you need to ask to ensure we don't sow the seeds of failure later in the delivery process?
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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. 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 .
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I find that these scoping documents start with a project management mindset, looking "downstream" towards the end deliverable, where the impulse is to answer the question "How much?" we control time and resources. Someone else decides whether it is worth doing or not. Yet, we need to look "upstream" towards the source of demand in the first place. So in this example, we'll need to reverse engineer the phrase "Hospitality Management System". The term itself could cover many activities. So what does the business sponsor specifically have in mind? What is the pain point that, overall, they are trying to resolve?
 
In the meeting, we need to get the conversation as quickly as possible onto their objectives. This will be understanding their agenda and how they measure success. They may be prepared to share what they have outlined in their personal performance development plan or what their line manager holds them responsible for. The higher up the organisation you are, the higher level the objectives will be. For example, if it is a department head, they will have to manage a budget, and they may be asked to reduce costs. Other things could be compliance, revenue, and efficiency savings.
 
So in one of my examples, I spoke to the Head of Customer Services. They have been given the joint objective with the Head of Sales in a hotel chain to increase revenue, and they have decided the best opportunity is to do this through up-selling room bookings to existing clients. Think weekend getaways, that sort of thing. In this instance, they have a call centre alongside a brochure website. In the call