Project Backlog – a single view of all projects in your business

A Project Backlog is a tool that gives a single view of all projects in the business.  It is a prioritized list of tasks that teams need to work on. Important tasks are usually shown on top of the list to indicate that the team needs to work on these first.

As a business leader, your mind is constantly looking for ways to improve your business and ways to achieve your strategy.

A common challenge I see is the large number of active initiatives or projects throughout the business, with no single view of the various initiatives they are busy executing and how they are performing against it.

I always find it amusing when we do an audit and the leadership see the number of active projects in the business.  They often don’t know the projects exist or they question the decision that was made to do it.

Project Backlog

A simple starting point is to create a very simple Project Backlog for these initiatives.

It can be very sophisticated or as simple as an Excel spreadsheet with 1 line per initiative. We call this a Project Register or a Project Backlog.

The next question is then what should this spreadsheet look like.

What to include in the Project Backlog

Simply put, each initiative requires the following information:

• Project background e.g. key stakeholders, where it is in the journey, key problem or opportunity, etc.
• Project planning e.g. cost, timeline and progress.
• Project benefits e.g. financial return per year over the next 3 years, the strategic objective it supports, etc.

There is much more information that typically lives behind this, but you’ll need a more robust database to handle it.

Get a free Project Backlog template

Click on THIS LINK to get a free copy of a Project Backlog template we’ve used with great success over more than 60 clients over the past 13 years.

This template will help you to:

• Get a 1-page view of all the active projects in the business,
• Enable you to balance your investment across the 3 horizons we mentioned in our innovation post, and
• Track the progress of all the projects.

Conclusion

Create a simple project backlog and have a view to manage the progress on your investments made to improve the business.

Creating a Project Backlog is a single step in our Profit Improvement Signature Solution where we help business leaders grow their profits in a #bestpractical way.

If you would like to discuss the template, or how to create your own project backlog, then reach out to us for a free consultation to get you unstuck. Reach out to us on THIS LINK for a quick Discovery call.