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In the CIO, new projects arrive all year round, and project cycles are becoming shorter by the day. When it comes to the last quarter of the year and preparations for the following year, it’s often a different story. The list of new Projects requested from the IT department has grown, and it’s time to decide on the new Roadmap. It’s a strategic stage, but one that is often played out on a knife-edge, generating frustration and misunderstandings on both the CIO and business sides.
So how do you successfully arbitrate Projects? In this article, we detail the key stages and our methodological advice for successfully completing this crucial phase.
1. Global vision:
Make an exhaustive inventory of all business requests
The 1st step is to draw up a complete overview of the Projects that could be entrusted to you. Because to make the right decision, it’s essential to have all the cards in your hand. To do this, don’t wait for the grievances to come to you, or you’ll end up with an endless list of new Projects to be launched in 2022 (almost all of them urgent priorities, of course)…
Our tips for success:
- Take the lead: either directly or with your PMO, proactively make the rounds of your organization’s departments. Don’t forget any decision-makers – to avoid disappointments and projects that come back to you too late, anticipate these meetings and inform your contacts of your deadlines. At this stage, all Projects deserve to be recorded, from the most strategic to the most anecdotal.
- Créez (ou faites créer par vos interlocuteurs) systématiquement autant de fiches projet que vous avez de demandes, même si le projet est a priori mineur. Commencez par renseigner des items simples (le tri viendra en temps 2) :
- The subject
- Its nature (strategic, technical, minor)
- The entity, department or division making the request
- The challenge it addresses (business, compliance, data, customer service, internal optimization…)
- Its summary (description in a few succinct words)
This will enable you to carry out a real flat analysis of requests. To do this, you can, for example, create a matrix shared with all your contacts, or use Abraxio’s Projects sheets.
- Be educational: these 1:1 meetings with the company’s management can be an opportunity to remind your contacts that your CIO’s activity is made up of new projects, but also of projects already initiated and in the process of being finalized, and above all, of all the day-to-day operational activities which in any case mobilize a large part of your human and budgetary resources.
You should also remember that the Budgets allocated to you are not infinitely expandable, and that you will certainly have to prioritize, defer, choose (and therefore give up…) etc., and that this responsibility is a collegial one, not in the hands of the CIO.
2. Initial “skimming”:
Pre-select “candidate projects” by involving the business lines in qualifying their needs.
You have a vision of all the demands, but are they all really realistic and achievable? It’s time to make a first selection, so as not to investigate too far upstream and too deeply into Projects that are likely to be abandoned in the end.
The CIO’s position is essential to success: he or she must take on the role of coordinator of arbitration, not that of solitary (and all-powerful! 😉 ) referee.
Are the trades generating requests? Involve them in a 1st qualification of these initiatives. You’ll save time and improve accuracy. Above all, by delegating this pre-qualification and needs expression stage to them, you put them in a position to make their own decisions about their Projects, based on their personal assessment of the stakes involved.
Our tips for success:
- Adoptez et faites adopter à vos interlocuteurs un canevas identique à tous les projets même s’ils ne sont pas de la même ampleur : Si toutes les demandes référencées sont qualifiées de façon homogène et pertinente, et même de manière synthétique, vous disposerez plus facilement des bonnes clés d’analyse de la valeur pour la suite.
Incitez les métiers/vos donneurs d’ordre à préciser leurs attentes sur ces 5 questions (et ne faites pas le travail à leur place, laissez-les se positionner !) :- What is the underlying need?
- What is the expected benefit?
- What is the target delivery date for the Projects?
- What’s the priority?
- What are the company’s strategic challenges, and what impact will they have?
- Once you have this information, begin a more detailed analysis of the value of each Project. The objective? To facilitate objective, neutral arbitration through mathematical scoring, based on the axes that are relevant to your organization. Ideally, this evaluation should be carried out by two parties – the business and the CIO – in sequence, or within the same project review body. This will give you a rapid initial assessment of all your Projects. Above all, this co-constructed vision between the CIO and the business is a way of thinking collaboratively and better understanding the contribution of each project to the company’s strategic axes, while opening up your business contacts to your own CIO challenges.
- This value analysis is usually based on 2 types of axis:
- Value” axes, on which it’s up to the “Business” requester to position himself, challenged by the CIO: they enable us to describe the dimensions on which a project generates value. It’s a good idea to base them on the company’s major challenges, for example: increasing customer satisfaction, reducing costs, increasing sales, international growth, regulatory compliance, etc.
- Positive or negative “Factor” axes, which make it possible to assess project execution conditions (feasibility, risks, costs) and thus to qualify the value generated. It‘ s up to the CIO to position itself on these factors, challenged by the Business Line. For example, a project could generate very high value (ROI, Impact, Confidence…) but be risky, long and complex, and therefore costly. Conversely, a Project could generate satisfactory value while being very quick to implement.
At the end of this stage, the score obtained will enable you to narrow down the number of Projects still “in the running”. All that remains is to refine their qualification by entering into a more detailed investigation. Designate a project manager from your Teams to steer each project, and hand over to him/her, always with a view to delegation.
3. Qualification:
Specifythe projects selected in a collaborative and iterative way.
The aim here is to refine the vision of the Projects selected to confirm or deny the intention to commit to them. To do this, get your Projects managers involved in the “advanced” qualification phase, before arbitration. They are in the best position to start “getting into the thick of things”, and giving them a sense of responsibility at this stage is a double lever for understanding the Projects, which will only save time later on, and for motivation by being involved in the initial reflection.
At this stage, key budget and planning parameters come into play. These are the main elements your Projects managers will be working on:
- Brief description of the proposed solution, working hypotheses and identified limitations
- Macro-calculation of the budget: at this stage, we can be satisfied with a large-scale simulation (purchasing budget + number of man-days mobilized).
- Macroplanning, which can take the form of a basic Gantt chart with two start and end dates in relation to the desired delivery date, and a standard breakdown of the major stages (design/delivery/deployment). At this stage of the arbitration, you’re only looking to confirm that the desired Projects are feasible and don’t pile up in a period that’s already completely saturated, for example.
- Integration of project risks (technological, change management, lack of expertise, etc.), which may ultimately affect the evaluation and scoring of the project.
Our tips for success:
- The arbitration of Projects is an iterative process; don’t hesitate to re-evaluate certain axes of value analysis according to the new elements at your disposal following the project manager’s study. This can lead to a more or less significant shift in the scoring of Projects, to the benefit of a more accurate analysis.
- Don’t forget that the score is simply the numerical transposition of the assessment of a project’s value. It remains contextual and linked to an arbitration strategy. Indeed, depending on the moment or the instance, we may want to give priority to Projects that generate the most value on one axis rather than another.
4. Arbitration:
Inform the decision to collectively determine the Projects to be undertaken.
All eligible Projects have been qualified, and have been provided with initial macro-planning and Budgets, as well as a risk analysis… Now you can move on to the dreaded arbitration phase. Of the hundred or so initial requests received at the very start of the process, and the thirty or so studied in detail during the qualification phase, only ten or so will undoubtedly be fiercely debated. Which projects will ultimately be approved for inclusion in your new Roadmap? Which will be abandoned? Postponed? Requested for further analysis?
Of course, you won’t be making these decisions alone, as they will have a major impact on your company’s strategy. It’s often during a Steering committee meeting involving a number of the company’s decision-makers (general management, finance, business lines) that everything is decided.
Thanks to the previous steps, you’ll be able to present and unfold all candidate Projects with relevant, already shared and objective factual data. Even if it doesn’t do everything, the scoring filter should make it possible to pass very quickly over the projects to be committed “without debate” to devote the exchanges to the more tangential projects, already pre-prioritized.
The accuracy of the scoring, which associates strategic axes, expected value, ROI, risks, etc. should then facilitate the retention of the projects to be committed for the right reasons, that of their contribution to the success of the company (and not because one speaks louder or the last…).
This makes it easy to a collegial decision-making process in which strategic decisions are meshed with operational priorities and available Budgets. It’s also an opportunity to discuss deadlines and decide whether to postpone certain Projects. to make them compatible with outstandings.
Our tips for success:
- Project arbitration must be realistic, i.e. valid in terms of budget and man-days to be mobilized. Arbitrate on the basis of the budget actually available, i.e. that which is not already allocated to run activities or the completion of Projects already underway. This is where real-time interfacing with your Resources and Budgets – as provided by Abraxio – comes into its own, enabling you to work on realistic hypotheses and even simulations.
- One of the keys to arbitration may be to ensure that your Projects portfolios are balanced: in terms of time (a parameter that’s fairly easy to control thanks to a Gantt view of the Projects portfolio, for example), but also in terms of business lines (avoid over- or under-representing a particular department, for example) or contribution to the achievement of strategic goals.
- Once again, adopt the right posture as CIO: your challenge is to “steer” the management as a whole towards a decision: you organize and steer the decision-making process, and ensure that the college of decision-makers (of which you are probably a member, as a member of the Management Committee) takes a position and arbitrates. And of course, don’t forget to communicate the choices you’ve made.
What next?
Engage your new portfolio
The list of Projects to be undertaken is clear, and the good news is that your project leaders, PMOs and managers have already been involved in their qualification upstream. So everyone in their respective roles will be able to make progress on the Projects for which they are responsible. These include refining and adjusting schedules and costings, working on the technical solution, generating the 1st tracking tasks and even a 1st flash report including a project weather report, etc.
All of this can be done on the basis of Projects files initiated at a very early stage in the process, enabling you to capitalize on an entire qualification history, without reinventing or re-entering any data.
This makes it easier to mobilize and involve your CIO and Projects Teams in the framing and operational implementation of this new portfolio (planning, staffing, etc.), and ultimately, to frame, simplify and streamline the entire process of building the new portfolio.
Which tool is best suited to steer this process of arbitrating Projects and building portfolios?
Several solutions are available.
The most common “default” tool is Excel; it has the advantage of being available on all workstations, but has many known and shared limitations among user CIOs: stacking of files, difficult traceability and depth of analysis, random sharing, collaboration and delegation, version or template conflicts, limited formatting, etc.
There are many Project management or PPM tools on the market, but they often have other drawbacks:
- or implementation (time-consuming, costly set-up),
- or in use (over-equipping with functionalities not always adapted to the needs of small or medium-sized CIOs),
- or to sharing and cooperation (UX too complex to be shared with occasional users, cost of licenses, etc.).
- Another frequently observed limitation is that they rarely reconcile the management of a project in all its dimensions: Project > Project portfolio > CIO Budgets, not forgetting the associated Teams and Suppliers.
Abraxio, the platform designed to support and facilitate CIOs’ project arbitration.
The Abraxio solution has been designed and developed by CIOs who have also lived through the sometimes painful period of project arbitration, and who have devised a tool adapted to the real needs of CIOs. It enables you to :
- Identify all business requests as they arise, using a collaborative tool
- Involve and empower the business lines at a very early stage in the expression of their needs
- Qualify requests in a collaborative, iterative way, involving your Teams and “principals”.
- Leading and coordinating a collegial and informed arbitration process
To find out more, take a look at our dedicated webinar or book a personal demonstration.