Episode 269: Portfolio Management and the Strategic Project Management Office (SPMO) (Free)

Summary: Play Now: This episode is sponsored by The PM PrepCast for The PMP Exam: John Donohoe (http://de.linkedin.com/pub/john-donohoe/3/545/24b) is the Director of Project Management at Star Alliance, and portfolio management is his passion. He says that many corporations don’t fail when they are developing a strategic plan but instead, they fail in the execution of that plan. This is basically because executing strategy consists of two main components, which are doing the right projects and doing projects right. Once you have this down, then effective portfolio management enables companies to do the right projects by ensuring that all projects are aligned to the overall strategy. And this again means that Strategic PMOs (SPMOs) are quite well  positioned to do more than just ensuring that projects are done right. Instead they will also be able to maximize your corporate portfolio as well as provide the bridge between project demand and resource supply. This interview with John not only discusses this in detail, but we’ll also look at some best practices in regards to managing your project portfolio and we’ll talk about what we all can do to ensure strategic alignment of our projects in an organization where there are no PMOs that support us. John Donohoe has 30-plus years of experience developing IT systems in various roles.  He has lived in the US, Canada, Belgium, Tokyo and for more than 20 years has called Frankfurt, Germany home. As the Director of the Star Alliance PMO, he successfully implemented an Agile approach to complement the waterfall project management methodology.  Additionally he refreshed Star Alliance’s stage-gate and project governance processes. For the past two years his focus and passion has been helping Star Alliance better execute its strategy via portfolio management.  John takes a holistic view of executing strategy with the PMO as a key partner in the overall process. John Donohoe will be speaking on the topic of the SPMO and on April 28th at the 2014 Project Zone Congress in Frankfurt Germany. So if you are listening to this interview before then, you can find out more at http://projectzonecongress.com/ Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only.  Podcast Introduction Cornelius Fichtner: Hello and welcome to Episode # 269. This is the Project Management Podcast™ at www.pm-podcast.com and I am Cornelius Fichtner. Thank you for joining us today. John Donohoe is the Director of Project Management at Star Alliance and portfolio management is his passion. He says that many corporations don’t fail when they are developing a strategic plan but instead they fail under the execution of that plan. This is basically because executing strategy consists of two main components which are doing the right projects and doing projects right. Once you have this down then effective portfolio management enables companies to do the right projects by ensuring that all projects are aligned to the overall strategy and this again means that strategic PMOs, SPMOs, are quite well positioned to do more than just ensuring that projects are done right. Instead, they will also be able to maximize your corporate portfolio, as well as provide the bridge between project demand and resource supply. This interview with John not only discusses this in detail but will also look at some best practices in regards to managing your project portfolio. And we'll talk about what you and I can do to ensure project alignment to the strategy in an organization where there are no PMOs that support us. And here's a little bit more about our interview guest today. John Donohoe has 30+ years of experience developing IT systems in various roles. He has lived in the US, Canada, Belgium, Tokyo and for more than 20 years has called Frankfurt, Germany his home. As the Director of the Star Alliance PMO, he successfully implemented an Agile approach to complement the Wa