A client was experiencing significant difficulty with slippage across their entire portfolio of works. The consequences were typical; frustration amongst management, low morale and motivation among the delivery and change teams, low levels of productivity and a lack of faith amongst the user community in what was expected to arrive on time, if at all.

Initial research into the cause of the problem was focused on requirements management and stability (a common cause of slippage and delivery failure in many organisations). However, this demonstrated that this client was definitely no worse and possibly rather better than many. Deeper research revealed a corporate policy of planning the utilisation of the delivery community at 115% (the underpinning assumption being that, for the higher value work, it would be worth paying the premium cost of overtime to achieve delivery). The consequence was that at this, unattainable, level of loading the planned portfolio was slipping because the organisation was unable to do anything to improve on normal levels of productivity which rarely exceed 80%. The situation was compounded by the ‘surprise’ arrival of additional initiatives; mandatory and ‘emergency’ projects being the most common. The consequence of these ‘surprises’ was constant portfolio re-prioritisation.

Part of the solution was the implementation of a portfolio management and prioritisation tool (CITI’s portfolio efficient frontier analysis [PEFA] tool) which focused attention on the really strategically important portfolio content. This was combined with a formal policy on resource utilisation and a cap on the size of the portfolio. Within a year the organisation had control of a stable portfolio, reliably achieving strategic aims with the capacity to deal with the ‘curve balls’ that inevitably get thrown into the mix.