Just-In-Time PM #16: Effective ROA

In Part 15, I advocated for multithreading, or weaving together multiple projects to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and synergies.

To take advantage of the benefits of multithreading, it’s critical that you begin to think of yourself not as a lone project manager, but as a project portfolio manager (PPM). Traditionally found only in large companies with hundreds of simultaneous projects, digital technology has made it possible and necessary for each of us to manage a portfolio.

The two most important skills you’ll need as a PPM are:

Choosing the right projects to start (good inputs)
Maximizing project completions (good outputs)

To accomplish these, we’ll need to refine our understanding of Return on Attention (ROA), first introduced in Part 1.

When determining the return on our attention, our natural inclination is to focus on throughput, which is how many projects actually get completed.

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