Sometimes it feels like I need trifocals for my mind. That’s because I often have to focus on three different time-horizons simultaneously – past, present, and future. Success in most professional endeavors requires the right combination of leadership, management, and administration. By leadership, I mean the ability to look ahead and to imagine and articulate a future state. More than that, it is about getting others to see the goodness and wisdom of the future we aspire to. It is about helping them see that this future is achievable and worthy of investment and commitment. Management, on the other hand, is about seeing and dealing with the here and now. It is about ensuring that our work will enable us to achieve the future we desire. Lastly, administration is about the past. It is about reviewing results to ensure that we are achieving objects on our path towards our short and long-term goals and ambitions.
The key is finding the right balance of past, present, and future focus for the specific circumstances we confront. Rarely, we are fortunate enough to find ourselves in situations that allow us to concentrate solely on one timeframe. In exercises like strategic planning, we may focus almost exclusively on the future. Auditing and evaluations are almost entirely backwards looking.
Most activities, however, require us to maintain multiple perspectives. One such activity is project and program portfolio management. Our ability to maintain a triple focus – to lead, manage, and administer simultaneously – can mean the difference between success and failure.
Leadership in portfolio management means prioritizing and assessing in ways that keep the portfolio aligned with our organizations’ priorities and strategic objectives. Leadership means that we are getting the right projects done. Managing a portfolio means ensuring that projects and programs are being done right. It means making sure that the resources are available when they are needed and that the projects and programs have the support they need to be successful. Effective administration means that we are looking back to evaluate the quality of the work being performed, assessing the competence of people performing the work, and measuring the value of the work performed.
Too much attention in any one area can cause significant problems. When we over-emphasis the future, we can find ourselves with a portfolio of unfinished, poorly-run projects. Too much management focus, and we risk having the wrong projects being run exceptionally well. Too much attention on the past, and we can find we are applying lessons learned to projects that are inconsistent with our priorities. All three perspectives are essential.
So, how can we ensure that we keep our mental trifocals on at all times? First, simply being aware of our need for trifocals can help us stay focused on multiple timeframes. Second, it is important that we establish processes that require us to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously. For example, we can create prioritization processes that feed and integrate with our resourcing and staffing processes. We can integrate our lessons learned into strategic planning processes. Finally, we can encourage others to help us see when our attention is unbalanced. It is natural to be drawn to one perspective at a time. However, by forcing ourselves to maintain all three time-horizons, we increase our effectiveness and probability for success.
