70% of all projects in organisations fail. Shocking isn't it? But it's the reality. And most often than not, projects fail because of competing priorities. 

We move too fast and work on too many things at the same time. Many leaders want everything done now. Program and project get assigned to multiple projects at the same time alongside other stakeholders from the companies. And because there's so much to do and little prioritization to everything that needs to be done, project teams have to choose shortcuts and many times jump right into doing without planning. But by skipping planning, project teams are bound to see surprises later for their initiative.   

That's why I see the job of the project or program manager to push back to leadership and ask for prioritisation, to really look at where do we get the most impact among all the projects and to work with leadership to identify what to 'kill'. Organisations have the habit of just adding things but we never look back at what's actually not working and just stop it so we reuse the resources and talent for the initiatives that will bring an impact. 

In fact, the ROI from quitting the wrong thing is far greater than the ROI from doing the right thing.

I promised to write more about project management this year based on your interest so I'm starting a project management series today. 

First, we'll cover important project management fundamentals - we've gone through an overview of them with three infographics and we've also discussed the most popular project management methodologies and the differences between projects and operations.

Today, we'll go through another foundational topic: projects, programmes and portfolios. 

A lot of people don't know the difference between these and intercept them, making their work less focused and less specific which in turn leads to an organisation that's not as well organised as it should be so that it's efficient and effective. 

What are Projects, Programmes and Portfolios?

Let's take a quick look at these three terms:

There's no doubt that organisational culture impacts the behaviour, values and practices of anybody working at that organisation. 

As a program manager, I've always thought of myself as a different type of leader who acts as a change agent to help create a positive organisational culture among my project or program team.  

But since I've always worked in an international environment and with multi-cultural teams, that's not always been easy. 

I've written about cultural differences before and they play a huge role in the success of any project or program. 

In fact, knowledge and awareness of cultural values can enable leaders and managers to effectively manage and work through intercultural conflict and interactions.

To learn more, I found a research a while ago performed by GLOBE that maps leadership within cultural groups around the world. 

The GLOBE research team defines leadership as the "ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organisations of which they are members."

The team found that members of different societies have differing expectations from their leaders that are influenced by their cultural values. They also identified leadership attributes that were culturally-endorsed.

Everyone is a project manager. Even if your job title or job description doesn't contain 'project management', you still manage projects in your professional and personal lives all the time.

Think about it: planning your next trip or your wedding is very much a project so is the launch of a new product or a service or simply the process of planning and executing the next meeting you have to run. 

So what is a project? 

A project is a certain outcome or a task that is timebound and has an end game to it - something you're aiming to achieve. 

I've been running projects my entire life - moving to Germany, UK and then Ireland were all projects so were my dissertations about PR and social media for sustainability as well as all beauty blogger campaigns I run when I was working in my previous PR agency and now so are the multiple things that I do in my current Program Management job that by definition is all about managing multiple global projects at the same time. 

It took me a while to figure out how to excel as a program manager without formal project management education. If you've never run a project at work, it's helpful to start with an understanding of what project management is in the first place and what are the key methodologies that will help you make a decision on how to run your project.

Almost every day at work, I find myself in a situation where I need to persuade someone to do something and most of the times, this someone wouldn't even report to me. 

As you can imagine, this is extremely difficult to do because others have their own jobs and priorities and trying to impose yours on them isn't as simple. 

I've found that to make someone to agree to a proposal (a pitch for an executive yes or a request to someone to do pieces of work) you need to rely on one particular weapon - influence. 

Becoming influential, though, is a lengthy process that in my opinion revolves around building relationships with people and growing your own reputation. 

But sometimes, even if you are the most influential person in the company, you'll inevitably get pushback. 

Ideally, you should be prepared for such an outcome in advance. A helpful strategy I've used in such tricky situations is analysing and planning with Cialdini's six principles of persuasion.