Summary: Play Now: This episode is sponsored by The Agile PrepCast for The PMI-ACP Exam: This interview with Jack P. Ferraro was recorded at the PMI Global Congress 2013 North America in New Orleans. In his congress paper and presentation, Jack P. Ferraro, PMP (http://www.myprojectadvisor.com/) argues that due to three, seemingly beneficial policies, some widely accepted project management practices, and the prevailing organizational structure, most businesses that continually share resources across projects experience enough multitasking to cut their productivity in half. In our interview we look at the root cause of project portfolio underperformance and ways to increase the speed of benefit recognition through improved productivity of portfolio components. We start out by looking at what exactly the problem is with multitasking on your portfolio, why it is still so prevalent, how to double your project throughput and we look at the "What You Can Do" section from Jack's paper that discusses what everyone involved on a project can do in order to help achieve this 100% increase in throughput. Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only. Podcast Introduction Cornelius Fichtner: Hello everyone! We are still at the PMI Global Congress 2013 here in New Orleans and with me today is Jack Ferraro from My Project Adviser. Podcast Interview Cornelius Fichtner: Hello Jack! Jack Ferraro: Hello Cornelius. Good to see you. Cornelius Fichtner: You had your presentation yesterday and it is titled "The Real Problem with Your Portfolio Multitasking". How did it go? Jack Ferraro: It went well. We had a good turnout and we were able to present I think some new concepts to the audience. Cornelius Fichtner: Right. The unfortunate bit you mentioned earlier was it was at 4:45, right? Jack Ferraro: Yes, late in the day. Everyone were getting ready, anxious to get out to go to the party afterwards. Cornelius Fichtner: I can imagine. And now, it's early in the morning. You have your coffee. I have my tea and we want to see why multitasking is the big problem here with the portfolio. So what is the problem? Jack Ferraro: Well, I think the problem really started and what got me interested in this was some research that was done on PMOs. I think the industry knows the challenges PMOs have had over the last several years. I saw a stat today in the conference that after 3 years, 75 of PMOs fail. There has been some more research done that basically shows that from 2006 to 2010, 50% of PMOs failed or closed down. And one of the biggest challenges that was cited in this research, even from mature PMOs was that only 37% of them actually have a resource management process for optimally estimating and allocating resources, then only 24% of all PMOs. So basically 3 out 4 PMOs do not have an optimal process for estimating and allocating resources and what they cite in the research is that resource conflicts are probably the greatest challenges for PMOs going forward. So that got me interested and this is something I see every day in the consulting, practice that we run at My Project Adviser is that organizations that share resources across projects and portfolios have tremendous challenge in operating a shared resource system efficiently and there are tools and techniques that we're trying to bring to the community to allow them to more optimally share those resources to improve the throughput of their portfolio. Cornelius Fichtner: When you say resources, are we talking about human resources or any kind of resources? Jack Ferraro: Well it's actually both. It's mainly human resources where you have critical resources, subject matter experts that are needed on multiple projects and often times are needed on at the same time on multiple projects and that causes them to start this multitasking working across various projects without completing work, the task that they're working on. However, there's
