SPRING 2024 // Canadian Government Executive / 23 PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT to score well in this knowledge area the organization must (among many other things): • Select, prioritize, and resource its portfolio of planned projects according to their contribution to the organization’s strategic objectives as outlined in the Program Alignment Architecture (PAA) • Consider human and financial resource capacity and capability in determining the timing and amount of project work it undertakes • Employ a process by which redundant projects are eliminated A second element supporting the Government’s project management policy/directive is the Project Complexity and Risk Assessment (PCRA) Tool. This risk assessment consists of 64 questions covering 7 risk areas with a maximum possible score of 320. The Treasury Board Policy on the Management of Projects requires deputy heads to ensure that each planned or proposed project which is subject to the Policy is accurately assessed to determine its level of risk and complexity for the purposes of project approval and expenditure authority. How are the OPMCA and the PCRA related, and why are they important? The dollar value threshold for which a department is required to prepare a PCRA for individual projects depends on their Capacity Class. Departments with a low Capacity Class must submit a PCRA for any project over $2.5 million, while those with the highest Capacity Class are exempt from the PCRA for projects under $25 million. On the surface, this all seems reasonable. Both the OPMCA and PCRA are based on widely accepted project and investment management frameworks. But as is too often the case, these frameworks have been implemented in a way which is so bureaucratic, complex, and time / effort intensive that they are not nearly as effective or efficient as they should be. Specifically: 1.92 questions for the OPMCA and 64 for the PCRA is far too many. The questions themselves take at least 30-50 screens to scroll through if not more. I have seen an OPMCA submission from one Department take over 3 months to complete and involve 10 or more senior managers at the Director and DG level. Fortunately, the OPMCA is only prepared every three years, the downside being that for most staff, their first time participating in the process will be the only time they participate. The PCRA uses a computer system supPortfolio Management (also known as Project/Program Portfolio Management) “Portfolio management evaluates and prioritises programmes within resource and funding constraints, based on their alignment with strategic objectives, business worth (both financial and non-financial), and risk (both delivery risk and benefits risk), and moves selected programmes into the active portfolio for execution.” Here is how the Project Management Institute describes PPfM: “The Business Problem Nearly all organizations have more project work to do than people and money to do the work. Often the management team has difficulty saying ‘no’. Instead, they try to do everything by cramming more work onto the calendars of already overworked project teams or by cutting corners during the project. Despite a heavy investment of people and money in projects, the organization still gets poor results because people are working on the wrong projects or on too many projects. Trying to do too much causes all projects to suffer from delays, cost overruns, or poor quality. The Solution Effective project organizations focus their limited resources on the best projects, declining to do projects that are good but not good enough. PPfM enables them to make and implement these tough project selection decisions. Note that this echoes the “productivity destroyer” described in the Lynch-Mitchell article. We will now discuss how the government has implemented PPfM, which they refer to as Investment Portfolio Management, the problems with that implementation, and how the process can be improved. Investment Portfolio Management, the OPMCA, and the PCRA One of the elements supporting the Government’s project management policy/directive is the Organizational Project Management Capacity Assessment (OPMCA) Tool. The assessment consists of 92 questions covering 13 of what are called knowledge areas with a maximum possible score of 460. Based on their OPMCA score, departments fall into a Capacity Class rated from 0 to 4. The first knowledge area in the assessment is Investment Portfolio Management which “refers to the selection and support of projects or investment program investments. These investments in projects and investment programs are guided by the organization’s strategic plan and available resources”. In order In many cases, the solutions which the article refers to already exist in government, but are so lost in the layers of policies, directives, red tape and diffuse oversight that they do not achieve the intended results.
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