I was working on PDU for my project management certification this week (at the last minute, but that’s a different Note) and came across a way of defining a program vs. a portfolio that caught my attention.
A program is put together to make sure we doing our projects right. A portfolio asks whether the org is doing the right projects. These are two distinct questions, but most of the time we only get around to asking one of them.
Like most of you, I’ve spent a lot of my career working on the first question. How do we execute well, hit the date, and make a clean handoff? Those questions often have clear answer, making them feel productive to chase.
The second question is less cut and dried. It requires honesty with ourselves in a way that doesn’t show in a project plan. Honesty that’s counterintuitive. Honesty that says we’ll get more done if we try to do less. There’s no clean finish line when we ask if a project deserves the time we’re planning to give it. Or what we’d actually miss if we never started.
So we skip those questions for the ones that feel more like progress.
You probably know which three priorities on your list would survive if you had to cut that far. The more difficult part is admitting the nine that never should have been there in the first place.