11.1 Enterprise Project Planning

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Hello and welcome to a lesson 11 Enterprise project. Planning of the course Enterprise Project Management.

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We've made it a long way. This is still cane. Um, your instructor.

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We made it a long way. We've talked about a lot of things that apply mostly to projects in general, regardless of the scale or the size

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on. As you recall from the previous lesson,

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we had different size projects that have their own different unique challenges and scope and things of that nature. So

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from this point forward for the remainder of the course, we're going to be focusing specifically on

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enterprise projects. So while we start with today's lesson, we're looking at the project planning part of the Project life cycle. But now we're looking at it through the lens of enterprise projects. So let's go ahead and get started.

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We have some similarities and some differences with enterprise project planning. We're still looking at

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the investment mindset when it when attempting to select the best project, that of all the competing ones that they come in.

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But now we're looking at from an enterprise standpoint, we're either gonna have a P m o or an E P M. o or A S R. O, which is a strategy realization office. You might have a CPO chief project officer in the C suite.

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We're talking about at the highest levels within the organization. We're making these decisions, and these are enterprise wide

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project decisions. So part of the planning process that exists at enterprise projects that's different than all other projects is really the sheer size and the scale and what it is that you're trying to accomplish.

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So if you notice in this image on this slide, our idea funnel is much more crowded than the one earlier in the course.

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And the reason why that is, is because again,

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if you think about an enterprise of 234 30 40,000 employees,

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how many good ideas air out there? How many things make life easier for you for the customer add value to the organization, reduced duplication of effort, reduce costs.

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So it's really almost an infinite number

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of individual

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ideas and people impossible

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options for an enterprise project. So one of the things that you gotta realize at the e. P m o s R O level the executive level for enterprise project

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is two things. One

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you need to get into the business off

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idea mining,

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ideation, whatever you wanna call it.

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The good idea. Very. You need to structure your organization to capture and gather

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those ideas and get them into a single

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pipeline, a single funnel. And that is super important because at the enterprise level,

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there's so much that occurs that may get

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dismissed by a

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supervisor, a manager, a division manager, a director, somebody within the food chain. So that idea gets cut off at the knees if you will, and never rises up to that strategic level. So therefore, the actual

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process of gathering ideas and determining whether the ideas are good, bad or indifferent

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arbitrarily messed with, because there may be a huge demand throughout the agency for a particular

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idea system project, you know, whatever.

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But because each individual division has their own chain of command for those ideas to be generated and those individual division managers or directors or whomever may be like, well, Nath on, that's not a

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a big enough idea. It's not high enough on my radar to be worth funneling up to the PMO or the E P M. Oh well, what that does is it artificially

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colors the landscape when your senior executives were trying to make decisions

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based on that idea evaluation process. So

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when you start looking at True Enterprise Project meant planning, you need to build a structure at the highest level within the organization to actually

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performed the gathering of that process. So they have

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riel time

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first person primary source type data

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with which to make those kinds of business case analysis and

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provide their recommendations to your senior leadership when you're doing your project planning process. So

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one of the things that you you need to look at doing if it doesn't already exist within your organization, is creating that. And again, there's

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multiple names. P m o p p M o S r o excited, excited CPO.

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But what it ISS

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is some body or group of people that is trusted by your C suite at the highest level, as being the expert on getting strategic enterprise projects done

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once that group is in place,

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then you need to build in a system

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whereby you're able to gather

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and aggregate the ideas that across the enterprise so that you can truly see what the actual demand is for certain things.

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Um, so if you look at my little funnel here that I did, you've got some that are different sizes and different colors. And what those air representing is, You know that the amount of effort some projects obviously take more effort than others. Some projects may apply to a different product line or different group. So

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you have these competing

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initiatives,

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and once you have figure out a system in a process by which gather that information, then that

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P. M o S r o whatever that group of people is in charge of that initial business case evaluation, you aggregate the data, you activate the ideas

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and you look at them, provide initial discovery and determine what the true scale of demand, where the true scale of R A Y is going to be for those projects. And that goes back again to that investment mindset. So as the expert

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in the Enterprise Project Planning space,

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part of that initial discovery is getting

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a comparison between projects. And, of course, the thing about money is it's pretty universal measure of value, right? A dollar. The dollar was a dollar, regardless of how you're spending it.

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So

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usually you use some sort of financial analytics with which to judge these projects. Your business case evaluation couples on a couple things that couples on that investment mindset

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that shows

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this project has a higher our ally or a shorter payback period than another competing idea or project. But you also are looking at strategic alignment of projects, So your e. P. M. O P. M. O. Your higher level Enterprise Project Planning Office is

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constantly focusing

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on doing the right things. Your mission is to select the best business case from these ideas that most closely aligns to the strategy of the organization itself. Everybody needs to pull in the same direction.

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We're executing strategy at this level,

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and that means we have to know what the strategy is. And we have to select not somebody's pet project that they want to do because they just want to do it, no matter how high ranking they are. We're looking at projects that align to strategy of the organization,

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so I call this the good idea Funnel. I mentioned it before, and what you're trying to do is a

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build systems that increase the size of the input

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as large as possible so that you gather as much data as possible. And at the same time, you want to create a process whereby you're selecting the most strategically aligned and the most investment savvy ideas to become projects or programs or portfolios.

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So that is the mission

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of enterprise project planning. And obviously this cannot occur in a vacuum. You can't just decide you're gonna be

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become the enterprise project planning person. So it really does take an organizational change in an organizational mindset. And later on we'll talk about project governance and risk and some of these things that you can use to bring to your leadership to say, You know, we've got X Y and the amount of dollars worth of risk

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tied up in these large scale projects. Why don't we have a

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Sr

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executive level

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project manager, chief project officer, project director, whatever, but basically somebody who you can blame, I'm half joking. But somebody who's responsible for making sure that this huge chunk of risk and this huge chunk of money is being properly allocated and spent and that

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projects are aligned, the strategy and all this kind of stuff

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In addition to all that, you have to think about Project dependencies.

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Infamous Iron Iron Triangle strikes again. You're gonna have to look at your or your iron triangle across your enterprise as well as the Iron Triangle specific to each idea.

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I need to be prepared to map across divisions across organizational efforts. Looking at your scarce resource is Remember those dashboards from the earlier video. You have to build some sort of organizational visibility that you can use toe way the

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impact of these new enterprise projects as they come across your desk.

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You need to develop systems member systems or five things hardware, software, data, people in processes to attain

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visibility at the organizational level so that at the highest level of the organization, you can show the C suite executives, the senior leadership,

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what the risk with the effort involved, why it is that this project has a higher rank than this other project after systematize all of that so that you can deliver consistent data to your customer, which in this case is your senior leadership.

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So in summary,

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we went over the Enterprise project planning process. In the next lesson, we're gonna go over project governance, which will be another fairly lengthy process. But it's very, very important,