Leaders often find themselves swamped by the demands of a large portfolio of endeavors, with some failing to meet expectations, while others face challenging decisions or issues, all under pressure of increasing expectations as delays accumulate. Such situations can lead to a neglect of persistent structural challenges that affect multiple endeavors and influence positioning for future growth, despite these issues not being directly resolvable themselves. In small endeavors, when this decay occurs at the lowest level of the organization, it is often dismissed as overreach, whereas in major endeavors, it may be tagged with the label bureaucracy as if inevitable.
Such situations can tempt leaders to overlook chronic issues until a fire alarm finally forces their attention on some emerging crisis. They should instead ensure they understand and address risks, dependencies, planning gaps, and blocking issues, and provide assurance that their endeavors are utilizing their resources efficiently and effectively.
Since few endeavors have cash to burn, the aggregate resources available must be allocated within whatever resource bargains the business can afford. Within this context, they must make prudent investments across their full portfolio. Inevitably, the evolving constraints imposed internally and externally can lead to resource shortages on some efforts and surpluses on others, despite the best efforts of sponsors and teams.
The resources needed by endeavors can be squandered over many pathways - ineffective planning, poor oversight, and careless execution. These issues not only drain resources but also undermine efforts to prevent such waste. To conserve valuable resources, it's crucial to standardize priorities and status reporting across multiple endeavors, fostering trust and promoting positive practices throughout the initiative.
Instead, endeavors should be implemented through a series of phases that provide incremental delivery of functionality and quality over time. In such cases, these phases should begin with an unambiguous definition of the minimum viable product for the effort and follow with phases that draw from a balanced set of trade-offs between features, available resource allocations, and product quality over the available time horizon that is dictated by business needs.
Sponsors expect leaders to actively collaborate and steadily lessen the uncertainties tied to costs, improve the delivery of necessary outcomes, and ensure these outcomes meet the changing needs of stakeholders. If not effectively managed, these uncertainties can compromise an endeavor's success and indirectly affect others within the portfolio. To meet these expectations, these leaders must embrace a common framework for communicating and evaluating opportunities and risks.
Review gates can be a key element of such frameworks by providing mechanisms to assure that the decisions and actions associated with such collaboration are understood, accepted, and will be supported by those responsible or affected by such decisions. The primary purpose of these review gates should be to determine whether to authorize continued investments on each endeavor as previously planned or instead adjust priorities or resources with respect to others competing for these resources. This is particularly important at the fuzzy front end of new efforts when any business's investments rely upon the often-tenuous credibility of narratives and often-limited evidence available for decision-making.
Since many decision makers are often involved in these choices, reaching a consensus may require a lot of compromises, and inertia is the unfortunately common by-product of disagreements across these parties in how to move forward. The key for decision-makers is to get things right over time and be patient with results while holding leaders accountable for their commitments.
Gate reviews should be scheduled to support the incremental commitments of resources through each subsequent decision gate. In this way, funding for the endeavor's total lifecycle should depend upon the accomplishments achieved, and an extrapolation of this record of accomplishment going forward. Each gate review should also confirm that quality criteria for that gate have been achieved. These reviews should also verify that prior accomplishments meet expectations, are available, and are consistent with defined decision criteria. Finally, the status of outstanding risks and issues must be reviewed to assure that risks are being adequately mitigated, and to assure that these issues will continue to be mitigated and resolved as the endeavor continues.
In Balancing Opportunities and Risks in Component-based Software Development, Barry Boehm and Jesal Bhuta describe the critical use of 'pass/fail feasibility evidence descriptions' which determine whether continued investments in the endeavor are warranted:
Evidence provided by the developer and validated by independent experts that if the system is built to the specified architecture, it will:
satisfy the requirements: capability, interfaces, level of service, and evolution
support the operational concept
be buildable within the plan's budget and schedules
generate a viable return on investment
generate satisfactory outcomes for all the success-critical stakeholders
Shortfalls in evidence are sources of risk, and all major risks should be resolved or covered by risk management plans. Risk items and risk mitigation strategies are a basis for stakeholder's commitments to proceed.
Such evidence is a critical part of conducting effective gate reviews (see Figure 1).
These reviews should be conducted by a cross-functional mix of participants who examine this evidence to determine whether to:
authorize the next phase of the effort
cancel the endeavor
place further investments on hold until some well-defined condition is satisfied, or
provide clarifying directions to the endeavor. This frequently means clarifying leadership's intentions and addressing their concerns; in these situations, it typically will be expected that the current gate review which raised these concerns will need to be repeated within a brief period to assure that this feedback has been appropriately incorporated.
Through this focus, gates provide accountability on progress towards delivering on commitments while assuring that the associated risks and issues are being reduced over time. This focus is essential for stakeholders to trust that desired products will be delivered within cost, schedule, delivery, and quality targets. Review results should include a summary of the status of actions identified at prior reviews, a report of the progress being made in mitigating risk over time, and a description of changes from previously established baselines that could affect stakeholders.
An overview of processing
The detailed definitions of these gates will always be technology, business, and product dependent. The over-arching philosophy is that they should provide synchronization mechanisms that assure that all the necessary planning and coordination has been accomplished across all performing organizations. Too often, organizations instead chose to employ a 'dog and pony' shows whose primary intention is to assure management that they are making progress, rather than providing firm go/no go decisions for proceeding to the next gate
Figure 2 below is a conceptual depiction of how such a flow might be organized. The structure is consistent with the PIANOS model, though that alternate representation provides a full elaboration of feedback pathway and off-ramps.
On many endeavors, an iterative development process is used which produces an incremental delivery of functionality and performance. Early cycles typically focus on demonstrating feasibility, validating the accessibility of value, reducing risk, and maturing the concepts of operation. For major efforts, the iterative development cycles may receive special attention at more detailed review gates, ensuring that prior phases produced plans and requirements of sufficient fidelity so that subsequent development can proceed unimpeded. Additionally, the development cycles often involve teams working in parallel, as depicted in Figure 2.
Methods
To perform such reviews in a consistent fashion, the overall review approach should define:
When gate reviews are expected to be performed
Who has responsibility for organizing and implementing these gate reviews
How the agenda, approach, and participants will be communicated
Where results will be tracked over time
What evaluation criteria must be satisfied to obtain authorization to proceed to the next gate
All performing organizations participating in these activities should align their separate development and planning efforts to these over-arching review milestones. Once solutions have been deployed and are being utilized in operations, products typically enter a sustainment phase. During this phase, an alternative means of oversight must be established, since the work is driven by operational, rather than development, events.
The continued commitments depicted by the green box in Figure 2 need to be negotiated and documented as service level agreements, ideally in ways that tie the funding stream for continuing work back to the organizations that are subscribing to ongoing service. Despite this shift to operations, the ongoing visibility of required resources and their associated asset utilization must continue to be monitored throughout the operational service life product or service. This transparency enhances accountability for the total cost of ownership and provides assurance that its associated resource allocations are provided and aligned with the business's overall objectives. If it is burdensome to demonstrate that these goals are being achieved, something needs adjustment - the methods, the goals, or the people!
