PM Network - December 2015

Q&A

a struggle at ;rst, but we eventually started to see improvements in the way we allocated resources,” he says. It also helped the leadership team make better go/no go decisions.

;ose decisions are frequent: Up to 50 percent of
early-stage renewable energy development projects
at Mainstream will eventually be shut down due
to “project killers” like permit application refusals
or the ROI coming up short, Mr. Doyle says. “We
make a lot of little bets and hope some will pay o;,”
Mr. Doyle says. “With the portfolio management
process, the biggest improvement we saw was the
ability to kill projects sooner when the overhead on
them was still low.”
Still, as the number of projects grew, it became
di;cult to know how to best deploy resources
within and between di;erent countries. “In a vola-
tile global market, it’s not enough to be the best
project, it also has to be the right time and place for
that project to be successful,” he says. ;at’s where
the strategic bene;t of an organizational portfolio
management process proved its value.

To appropriately allocate its global pool of resources—rather than allotting a percentage of the budget to each country—Mainstream needed a way to compare projects across countries. So in 2013, the company adopted a global portfolio management process, requiring each country leader

“The secret
to our
business is to
kill projects
early that
won’t make
it, before
they suck
up too much
valuable
capital.”

—Bart Doyle, PMP,
PgMP, PfMP
Mine is not a linear
track. I have never
been formally respon-
sible for program management.

I combined engineering and
business education to develop IT
programs for various govern-
ment agencies, but then jumped
into business management at a
consulting firm. I started getting
involved in specific projects and
then started to coordinate small
portfolios.”
—Lucio A. Lopez, PMP, PfMP, IT
deputy director, Banco Santander,
Mexico City, Mexico

In my case, the portfolio
management role
and discipline was
developed over time, with each
step designed to solve a specific
business problem. I spent sev-
eral years in program and project
management for large telecoms,
followed by work building a PMO
for a consultancy where I also
managed the pipeline of work for
a telecom client. I was later hired
by that client’s primary business
stakeholder to direct planning and
analysis for a company that of-
fered technology services to small
businesses. Seeing an opportunity
to better manage the supply and
demand of the IT organization, I