how to prioritize a project portfolio using innovation games
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How to Priortize a Project Portfolio Using Innovation GamesTRANSCRIPT
www.conteneo.co © Copyright 2014 Conteneo, Inc. 1
How To Prioritize a Project Portfolio Using Innovation
Games®Luke Hohmann , Founder and CEO of Conteneo, Inc.
www.conteneo.co
Agenda
• What do you have? A portfolio to prioritize.
• What do you want? A prioritized portfolio.
• How will you do this? This deck will show you!
• Why should you care?Because this approachproduces better resultsfaster. And it’s fun.
• Is it real? Case studies from Cisco, HP, and VeriSign included.
• When can I get started? Right now. Contact us at:
www.conteneo.co
The Essential Summary
small project
big project
other project
another project
big projecteven more projects
You have more projects to do than you can afford.
We prioritize your projects by engaging your global team in online tournaments.
We reduce execution risk by ensuring that you have checked your resources against your priorities.
1. …2. …3. …4. …
And yeah, the process is seriously fun… so keep reading!
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What You Have: What You Want:
• A list of potential projects to prioritize.• Some must be done
“Run the Business”• Some are new
• A fixed budget.• A motivated team.
• A prioritized list of projects.
• An understanding of which projects can be funded given available resources.
This presentation will define a process you can use for strategic portfolio prioritization.
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Here is the High-Level Process
We’ll review each of these steps!
Organize Your Portfolio
Prioritize Your Portfolio Using Innovation Games® Online
Tournaments
Confirm Resource Requirements Using
Innovation Games® Resource Games
Execute on Your Portfolio!
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Start By Gathering Your Portfolio
Start by making a single list of all your potential projects.
Some are “Run the Business” (RtB) projects.
Some are “New Projects”.
Just throw everything into the same list.
small projectbig project
other project
another project
big projecteven more projects
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Remove The Obvious
You probably know right away that some projects just won’t get done. Since we don’t want you wasting time prioritizing projects you know you’re not going to do, file them away so you can examine them again in the future.
small project
big project
other project
another project
big projecteven more projects
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Split the Big List Into Two Smaller Listssmall project
big project
other project
another project
small project
big project
other project
another project
big projecteven more projects
small project
big project
other project
another project
These are your existing projects. We call these “Run the Business” (RtB) projects. For example, publishing a monthly newsletter is a RtB project.
These are potential new projects. You can identify these by playing Innovation Games® like Prune the Product Tree or Speed Boat.
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Why Split the Big List?
• Most corporations want to guarantee that they will allocate some money to new projects. Splitting the list ensures that you’re not letting all of your existing work crowd out all of your new work.
• The people playing the online prioritization games need the chance to think differently about each group of projects.
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Prepare Each Project For The Games
small project
big project
other project
another project
small project
big project
other project
another project
Make sure each project has:
1. A short and snappy name.2. A brief description.3. An outline of the benefits. 4. An estimated cost.
Your estimated cost can be fairly precise (e.g., based on past experience, you might know an RtB project costs $150K). Your estimated cost can be a rough estimate (we recommend “shirt sizes”, like S, M, L, XL). As long as you are consistent in how you price your items you’ll be OK.
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How Many Projects Are On Your Lists?
• If you’re like other companies, chances are good that each of your lists contains 20 to 80+ projects.
• And you probably can’t afford to do all of them.
• The next step is to learn how to collaboratively prioritize a list of 12 to 20 items through the Innovation Game® Buy a Feature. We’ll then extend this to many games to prioritize your entire list through a Buy a Feature Tournament!
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How to Get a Group of People To Prioritize a List of Projects…
And Have Fun Doing It!
The Innovation Game® Buy a Feature
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Buy a Feature: A Collaborative Prioritization Game!
• 12-20 items described in terms of benefits and costs
• 5 to 8 players given limited budget
• Purchased items represent shared priorities
• Chat logs shape resultsA Game ToPrioritize Stuff
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To illustrate how Buy a Feature works, let’s imagine you make coffee makers and you want to prioritize a list of potential features (or projects) with your global product planning team.
PortfolioTeam
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First, You Will Load Items Into Our System
A list of features with prices. See any
you like?
“Shirt Sizes” help you quickly price your
features – or you can enter a price directly!
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Players are given a limited virtual budget to buy features.
Player bids.
Highly desired features are purchased through collaborative
negotiation.Players chat during the game providing you with rich insights that shape the projects.
Players Collaboratively Purchase Projects
G
H
F
E
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Analyze Results to Identify the “What and Why” of Important Projects
G
H
F
E
ANALYZEWho purchased what?
How much did they bid?
Who negotiated with whom?
What did they say?
How did they shape the projects?
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Play Several Games To Identify TrendsWe’ve played 35 Coffee Maker games with more than 150 people from around the world. Here are the results.
The “red” bar means that in some games players spent MORE money than needed.
All data from the games can be downloaded into Excel for detailed
analysis.
These results are scaled based on the number of times an item was purchased.
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And yes, it is FUNV1-388 Luke Did you enjoy this experience?V1-388 Toni Yes - fun!V1-388 Greg Sure.V1-388 Greg I enjoyed it.V1-388 Vladimir thanks for the chance. B)V1-393 Luke Did you enjoy the experience? Would you be willing to play again in the
future?
V1-393 Tom yes, and yesV1-393 Mike Yes -- it was funV1-393 Sarah DefinitelyV1-393 Dominic Yes, and I think VersionOne are getting great info here
V1-393 Patrick I would be happy to play again.V1-394 Luke Team, are you now satisfied with your bids?V1-394 Mike YES!V1-394 Rene yupV1-394 Andre Indeed.V1-394 Jim I want more money!V1-394 Andre It was hard. But lots of fun. And yes, I want more money too - do you take
credit cards?
V1-394 Mike hahahaV1-394 Mike ok, gotta go guys.... it was fun
Chat log extracts from three games played to
prioritize a product backlog.
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We Use a Tournament For Large Numbers of Projects
Example: Suppose you had 46 projects. We would run a 5 game tournament. Since each game will have 7 players, you’ve just engaged 35 people!
small project
big project
other project
another project
46 projects…
Game 1 15 Projects
Game 216 Projects
Game 3Winners of
games 1 & 2
Game 516 Projects
Game 51. …2. …3. …4. …
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To Increase Confidence Run Several Tournaments
Tournament-1 Winners Tournament-2 Winners Tournament-3 Winners
Business Continuity
Easy Contract Admin
Joint Browsing Joint Browsing
Dedicated Support
Improve Corporate Search Improve Corporate Search
Increase BRIC Sales
New User Interface New User Interface
Salesforce.com Integration
Diagnostic Tools Diagnostic Tools
Mobility Enablement Mobility Enablement Mobility Enablement
Product Help Integration
Single Sign On
Training Content on Web
Unified Pareto Process
Each Tournament produces a unique result based on the employees invited to play each game.
Patterns always emerge!
Three Tournaments will engage more than 100 of your global
employees!
Mobility Engagement is the obvious winner!
This is an example inspired by real projects for a F500
company!
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Tournament Results & Benefits
• What: A prioritized list projects.• Why: The reasons behind the priorities.• Who: Instead of asking a few leaders to
make the decision, our approach leverages the wisdom of your “employee crowd”.
• Engagement: Instead of a few long and boringmeetings, you play many one hour
games.• Buy-In: Employees’ engagement creates
tremendous buy-in and fast execution.
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Leaders Still Lead – Even When Results Might Be Surprising
This is how the VeriSign employees prioritized their list.
The VeriSign leadership team felt a project that didn’t win ANY games was important. Solution? The VeriSign leadership team chose to pursue the
project they felt was important. To maintain buy-in, they implemented a careful education plan that explained why this project was ultimately chosen.
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Resource Allocation Through Buy a Feature
Priorities Aren’t Enough.Execution Matters.
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Do You Have the Resources?
• Even with a prioritized list, you may not have enough resources to fund all desired projects.
• Insufficiently funded projects fail to realize their potential and frustrate teams.
• Solution? Run ANOTHER set of Buy a Feature games, this time using resource requirements and resource capacity as the game currency.
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Start By Defining YourStrategic Allocation Model
This is your total budget. Allocate by percentages.
70%
30%
This is the portion of the budget that will be allocated to existing “Run the Business” projects. This example allocates 70% of the budget to RtB.
This is the portion of the budget that will be allocated to “new” projects. We find that companies typically allocate between 20% - 50% of their budget to “new” projects.
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Allocate Budgets Based On The Model
Actual Budget Dollars• Assume a $6M budget.
• RtB = $6M * 70% = $4.2M
• New = $6M * 30% = $1.8M
Person-Days• 20 engineers work 220
days/year. 20 * 220 = 4400 person-days
• RtB = 4400 * 70% = 3080pd
• New= 4400 * 30% = 1320pd
Now you have a sense of your organizational capacity and how it should be roughly allocated.
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Resource Allocation For New Projects
1. Develop a realistic cost (not shirt sizes):New Project A 370 pd -- or -- $222,000New Project B 560 pd -- or -- $336,000
2. Put the projects into a Buy a Feature game. 3. Give each player their portion of the capacity.
Total “new project” capacity is $1.8M. If you have 8 players, each gets $225K.
4. Play the game. Analyze the results.Which projects are fully funded? Which are partially funded? Can it be simplified?Should you fight for more resources? Should you take on fewer projects but execute them better?
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Which Currency is Best?
• You can use any currency for the resource allocation game: person-hours, story-points, estimated project costs, etc.
• The requirements are:1. The projects must be reflective of actual cost.2. The resources given to players must be reflective of
organizational capacity.
Don’t play a game claiming you have a $45M project budget when you really only have $30M!
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34 P
roje
cts
Game 1 17 Projects
Game 217 Projects
Game 3Winners of
games 1 & 2
Phase 1: Innovation Games® Tournament Establishes Priorities
Phase 2: Confirm Resource Allocations
Putting Everything Together In 1 Slide
• Each online game has 6 to 8 players and takes about one hour.
• Winning projects are “promoted” into the next round.
• Results? The prioritized projects AND the reasons behind the priorities!
1. …2. …3. …4. …
One final game is played with the top
items to confirm resource allocations.
1. …2. …3. …4. …
• Now you have a prioritized list – AND the confidence that you have the resources to get things done!
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The Essential Summary
small project
big project
other project
another project
big projecteven more projects
You have more projects to do than you can afford.
We prioritize your projects by engaging your global team in online tournaments.
We reduce execution risk by ensuring that you have checked your resources against your priorities.
1. …2. …3. …4. …
And yeah, the process is seriously fun…
www.conteneo.co
Case Study:
Cisco Collaboration Business Technologies (CBT)
Problem The Cisco CBT team wanted to prioritize >50 tactical and strategic projects for fiscal year budgeting.
Context Mix of 50+ RtB and new projects, globally distributed team.
Engagement Profile
CBT project managers prepared the portfolio for the games. TIGC structured the process into multiple tournaments involving everyone in the global CBT organization.
Results • Distinct patterns of projects emerged allowing some projects to be merged and others to be sensibly delayed.
• The resource allocation games helped structure healthy conversations about which projects could be simplified.
• Some games were “managers only” which allowed Cisco to compare/contrast managers and individual contributors.
• Participants considered the process fun.
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Case Study:
HP.com FutureWorks Team
Problem The HP.com wanted to tap into the wisdom and creativity of a globally distributed team.
Context No initial projects, highly motivated team.
Engagement Profile
TIGC organized a set of online visual collaboration games to spur innovative thinking. Employees then contributed ideas to a central list. The list was lightly shaped into a global tournament facilitated by TIGC.
Results • Players spent a considerable amount of time further shaping and clarifying projects.
• The process included all members of the global team as “first class” participants.
• Participants considered the process fun.
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Case Study:
VeriSign Global Customer Support
Problem The VeriSign leadership needed to quickly identify the high-priority, most globally supported projects.
Context 46 projects, 200 person globally distributed team.
Engagement Profile
VeriSign project managers prepared the portfolio for the games. TIGC structured the process into three tournaments involving ~60% of the 200 person global customer care organization and facilitated the games.
Results • Very clear separation of the “winning” projects – the original list of 46 was prioritized to the top 9 projects.
• High degrees of collaboration – even when collaboration was not required to purchase a project!
• Participant chat logs provided detailed explanations behind the bidding – the meaning behind the choice.
• Participants considered the process fun.
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Want To Learn More?
• Visit us at: www.conteneo.co.• Contact us at [email protected]. • Call us at (408) 529-0319.• Share this deck.
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Our Core Team
• Luke Hohmann, CEO & Founder• CEO & Founder, Enthiosys• VP Engineering, Aurigin Systems• 1982 US National Junior Pairs
Figure Skating Champion
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Advisors & Investors:• Verne Harnish, Founder & CEO, Gazelles• Paul Gemeraad, President of Intellectual Assets, Inc.• Chris Matts, Financial Systems Consultant• Harry Max, Vice President of Experience Design for Rackspace
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The Book That Started It All
Collaborative PlayIs the Better Way
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Luke HohmannFounder & CEO, Conteneo, Inc.
480 San Antonio Road, Suite 202Mountain View, CA 94040mobile: (408) [email protected]