From Efficient to Effective Project Teams

Abstract

Purpose and Originality: The purpose of the study is to analyse the throughput of projects in project portfolios that share common resources. The study is focused on demonstrating drawbacks of traditional practices of managing project portfolio, while on the other hand showing sequential improvement steps how to significantly improve project portfolio throughputs. Notably, this study presents the benefits by changing policies and rules on how project tasks are planned, queued, and scheduled in such an environment.

Method: The analysis was carried out using a quantitative approach that involves use of simulator, which was capable of recreating conditions similar to the conditions in a controlled project environment. In the simulation we provided the means to control different policies and rules how project work is managed, especially staggering of project tasks and addressing human behaviour such as Multitasking, Student Syndrome, Parkinson Law, which are necessary for the systematic evaluation. In particular, we looked into the Theory of Constraints applications for project management and how we can apply it in a project portfolio that uses shared resources to increase throughput.

Results: The results shown in this study emphasizes the need for a change of traditional working policies, rules (and measurements), and even a culture within an organization when managing project portfolios with shared resources. The simulations demonstrate that staggering the release of work into the system reduces workload on most critical resources and increases predictability of project deliverables and throughput. Moreover, introducing the Theory of Constraints methodology in project portfolio, also addressing human behaviour additionally improved the performance of the portfolio – system.

Society: We strongly believe that this analysis will help to understand the benefits of managing project portfolios differently, compared to a traditional approach that focuses on a system (organization) and not at an individual level. Moreover, significant increase of the project portfolio throughput is expected and, as a consequence improved competitiveness of organizations on the market.

Limitations / further research: We suggest further research using Theory of Constraints tools and applications in Agile / Dev(Sec)Ops environment.