Project Leader — The Ranker
Leads: Rank | Event: Office
The Project Leader manages the transformation portfolio. They collect all improvement opportunities with value-capture potential, evaluate their impact, and decide where to allocate limited resources.
Key Responsibilities
- Facilitate the Office event with Progress Leaders, Sponsors, and Financial Leaders
- Track all improvement opportunities and their potential value capture
- Prioritize improvements based on impact, effort, and strategic alignment
- Adjust the transformation portfolio as new opportunities emerge or priorities shift
The Tension
The Project Leader must say "not now" to good ideas — not because they lack merit, but because resources are finite. Prioritization is the discipline of choosing where to concentrate force.
Anti-pattern: The Spreadsheet Manager
The Project Leader tracks the transformation portfolio in detail — every initiative, every status, every metric — but never makes a prioritization decision. The Office becomes a data review session. The portfolio grows because nothing is ever stopped. Resources are spread thin across too many initiatives.
How to detect: The transformation portfolio only grows, never shrinks. The Office ends without a single initiative paused or stopped. Every opportunity is marked "in progress" indefinitely. Teams compete for resources without clear guidance on what matters most.
How to recover: The Project Leader must exercise the discipline of saying "not now." Every Office should produce a ranked list where the bottom items are explicitly deferred. A portfolio without a cut-off line is not a portfolio — it is a wish list.
PDCA Participation
| Step | PDCA | Event | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| S2.1 | Check | Office | Collects all improvement opportunities with value-capture potential and tracks them |
| S2.2 | Act | Office | Prioritizes highest-impact improvements and adjusts the transformation portfolio |