Projects Not Delivering Value

When a company is created, its main purpose is generate profit for its investors, however, in various companies I have seen the maintenance to old projects without any specific objective or used by a couple of users. I would like to elaborate how complex is the value evaluation and the monitoring along the project lifecycle.

Internally a company producing soap can has its portfolio for projects related to its core business, so it makes sense not include projects out of the core, for instance outsourcing IT projects or external consultancy services. I can remember a company where I worked, they were providing the maintenance to old projects with old-fashion technologies and nobody was using such system, but on their mind, they pay a lot of money for the system, so they did not want to change it for a new one. As a project manager, our duty is reveal those issues rightly with cost estimations and driven by the business strategy.

Any new project should have a purpose to deliver value to the portfolio outcome, during our proposal phase, we should keep on mind this principle and communicate it to the involved teams, so they are going to know the big picture and the targets planned for their work. Additionally, the corporate culture should be our best ally to empower our teams to make significant contributions and help the company stay in business.

As expected for any project is achieve results based on well-defined metrics, so the project manager should perfectly know what the value is and how it is transformed to deliverables of the project.