Structuring the project portfolio and making arbitrations more effective at Panzani

At Panzani, structuring project steering happened in stages. First, structure had to be brought into project management. Then, fairly quickly, another need emerged: finding ways to make arbitrations and decisions easier and, above all, to manage workload.

It's in that context that Guillaume Marlois, today Project Portfolio Director & PMO at Panzani, launched a portfolio management initiative with AirSaas, supported by Joanne Deval. The goal wasn't to add one more tool. The goal was to create a single source of truth, to better equip the steering rituals and to move the organisation forward on a key topic: continuously seeing its collective capacity to deliver.

The starting context: a project culture under construction, heterogeneous practices

At Panzani, the project culture is relatively recent. A first significant piece of work laid the foundations with a simple logic: define a project method specific to the company, fitted to its reality, its teams and its stakes.

As Guillaume tells it, the first challenge was to bring structure where it was missing. Processes, roles and responsibilities had to be clarified. In short: go back to fundamentals.

That first base was built with pragmatic logic. On the tooling side, the teams started simply, with Excel files, PowerPoint decks and in-house templates. It was a deliberate choice: start with everyday tools to avoid a double change management.

That work made it possible to structure the basics of project management. A few very fine successes, but no scaling. Above all, it wasn't enough to support the teams on one fundamental point: managing the workload tied to projects

That base was a comfortable place from which to structure the next stage of the “project rocket”: portfolio management.

The challenge: moving beyond a project-by-project logic to steer the portfolio as a whole

The main challenge wasn't methodological.

At Panzani the teams are committed and projects generally ship.
The real cross-cutting issue was workload.

Projects pile up, priorities arrive from several departments, and the same teams find themselves called on for many topics in parallel. The result: a strong project dynamic, which speaks to Panzani's ambition, but which calls for stronger coordination to gain legibility in the short and medium term and preserve collective effectiveness.

For Guillaume the picture is clear: the project methodology had made it possible to frame execution better, but not yet to deal with the underlying problem. Projects were still being worked on too independently of each other, without a strong enough filter at the entry point, and without a genuine portfolio read.

In other words, Panzani had begun to structure project management.
Now it needed to accelerate on portfolio steering.

That shift began with awareness-building work: putting everyone in front of the reality of the volume. Making visible what had until then stayed scattered across several silos, several files, several reporting habits.

And that's where a first realisation happens.

The solution: create a single source of truth and anchor steering through rituals

The answer wasn't to launch a big theoretical programme. Guillaume chose a very gradual, very field-driven approach, starting from concrete use cases.

Several scopes were worked on:

• a first overall view of the major initiatives;
• a second use case centred on activity management and new product development;
• a third, more portfolio-oriented use involving the IS teams.

What those use cases have in common: gathering the information useful for steering in a single place.

The objective was simple: no longer depend on scattered slides, on files that differ from team to team, or on overly siloed reads of the projects. It had to be possible to find quickly, within one consultation logic:

• the projects under way;
• their progress;
• their weather;
• the attention points;
• the decisions taken to share, or to take and escalate;
• the successes worth celebrating.

The approach took shape catalysed by AirSaas, but also with initial support from Joanne Deval and Thomas from AirSaas on usage, pain points, rituals and how to embed those processes over time.

It's a point Guillaume insists on a great deal: for him, AirSaas didn't make the difference as a tool alone.

In other words: start from the real pain points, build the right rituals, give stakeholders views that speak to them, and make sure the data stays useful, live and actionable.

The results: more effective rituals, fewer slides, and better-secured decisions

At Panzani, the practices gradually took root in the steering rituals.

Today, within the scope concerned, AirSaas is used in team meetings, project check-ins, one-to-ones and portfolio steering committees.

The most visible change is cultural: gradually moving away from PowerPoint as the main steering medium.

Guillaume even talks about a “no PPT” logic.

Before, the teams prepared slides. Now they work directly in the tool to update the weather, surface decisions, share attention points and follow projects live during the rituals.

The first benefit is concrete: operational time saved. Teams spend less time producing meeting materials, and more time documenting information that can be shared and reused.

But the real gain, for Guillaume, lies elsewhere.

The real gain is in securing projects and in decision quality.

The topics that need arbitrating are surfaced better. Decisions are more formalised. They are recorded over time. Leaders gain effectiveness during meetings, and the teams know better what they should draw attention to.

Finally, the project weather plays a central role. It makes it much quicker to see a portfolio's state of health, identify the projects under pressure and focus discussions where they really count.

Panzani has a solid base and is progressing towards capacity-based project management.

Guillaume stays clear-eyed about what has been achieved.

The capacity topic isn't “solved” in the strict sense. It is, however, far better framed.

The first step forward was making the backlog, the active projects, the tensions and the real volume visible. That made it possible to move prioritisation higher up in management discussions.

The next step is more ambitious: objectify the capacity constraint even further, to go beyond gut feeling and better factualise and visualise the teams genuinely under pressure.

The goal, in time, is clear: use that portfolio read to arbitrate better, de-prioritise better and commit the organisation to what it can genuinely do.

Value-based governance follows the same logic, and the work done on identifying benefits across the new-product portfolio is set to grow.

Guillaume's 3 keys to a successful portfolio-management initiative at Panzani

• Always start from the teams' real pain points.
  As long as a setup doesn't answer a need perceived as concrete, the data doesn't live.
• Move forward use case by use case.
  Trying to bring everything on board at once slows adoption. Better to demonstrate value on a targeted scope, then widen through proof.
• Anchor the tool in the rituals.
  A single source of truth only holds if it's used in meetings, arbitrations and weekly — even daily — exchanges.

About Panzani

A benchmark food group, Panzani has in recent years undertaken work to structure its project practices, with a strong will to clarify roles, harmonise methods and steer its initiatives better.

The experience led by group PMO Guillaume Marlois with a cross-functional internal team illustrates a challenge that is central for many mid-market companies: moving from better-framed project management to a genuine portfolio-management logic, able to make workload visible, equip arbitrations and improve decision quality.