The Responsible Project Portfolio

For many firms—especially in the design field—social impact happens slowly, spread across our gamut of projects. How do we decide what work to take, and what to say no to? How do we ensure our work aligns with our values, advances the change we hope to see in the world, encourages personal growth, aligns us with partners and clients we respect, and—at the end of the day—pays the bills?

When we talk to colleagues and peers about this, we usually hear something like “I think about that all the time, but I’ve never actually written it down. What’s your model?”

Our team at Field States is passionate and mission-driven, so we wanted to design a tool that helps us understand?our full slate of work, and guides us to choose (or manifest) our projects with intention. The Responsible Project Portfolio (or RPP) helps us account for and balance key criteria across all of our projects.

This article shows a glimpse into Field States' RPP: how it's used, our criteria, and our recent scores (if you’re curious!)

The RPP is currently in beta—we’re still testing and refining it—and we welcome feedback. If you end up trying this out or creating your own, we’d love to hear about it and learn with you. Please reach out!

1. How does the RPP rubric work?
2. When to use it
3. How to use it

1. How does the RPP rubric work?

Every project can’t check every box (impact, revenue, growth, local engagement...), so we need a framework that accounts for our collective effort, quickly surfacing key attributes across our whole body of work; a portfolio approach.

1. Our first step was to translate our values and project aspirations into simple criteria that could be numerically scored.
2. We assembled a spreadsheet (always handy!) to house the rating system, populating it with everything we’re working on and could seriously pursue.
3. We wrote a protocol for when and how to use it—building it into our business development and project management cadence, so we hold ourselves accountable.

The RPP takes a portfolio approach to help us determine:

• Which projects to seek out, and when
• When to accept (or respectfully decline) a project
• How projects are achieving our mission and vision
• How to balance paying the bills with providing other kinds of rewards
• How projects further our team’s personal and professional growth

This is what it looks like!

The Responsible Project Portfolio is a useful guide—more art than science, but a little math helps. Numbers illuminate change over time, giving us a solid foundation for creativity and embracing discovery, enabling us to evaluate and learn from our work in retrospect.

2. When to use it

Prospective

When an opportunity comes in, we score it as a team, going through each criterion and taking our best guess based on what we know at the time. Then, we compare the project to our past and current slate of projects. We consider the project as a way of maintaining balance, or boosting the score in a category that's lacking.

Diagnostic

We periodically (every 3-6 months) check in on our portfolio’s balance. This prompts us to recalibrate with intention, guiding our outreach and business development. We also take the opportunity to tweak our process or criteria, and upgrade our data visualization. For example, we might ask:

• Are we focused enough on local projects?
• Are we veering toward higher paying work that lacks civic and social impact?

Retrospective

We embrace the opportunity to learn from experience. When we complete a project, we score it again in a separate table. Deltas between the before and after scores reveal insights about our mid-project decision-making, project management, and personal/professional development goals. For example:

• When initial optimism about a project was?met with a difficult implementation phase, we learned to?write design principles up front and use them to guide decision-making with clients throughout the project.
• When a client required more attention than expected, we learned to adjust our financial estimates.

3. How to use it

Project scoring

Inbound and potential projects are added to the spreadsheet, to be discussed with the team. Each line item usually only takes a few minutes. For each:

1. The project lead summarizes the project’s details, as needed.
2. We each ask questions, discuss, and take a moment to consider our personal score.
3. On a count of three (!), we each hold out hands and fingers with our scores, and record the average value.
4. We each share our rationale, invite more discussion, and vote one last time.

Painting with numbers

We stress the importance of not overthinking the scores—it's ok if a number feels impressionistic or imprecise. Eventually we will look back at the project and score it again in hindsight. Each team member adds notes that explain their thinking, especially for the "bonus points" criterion. The most important thing is for each person to listen to their colleagues. RPP scoring is a great opportunity to understand their goals and passions a little better.

Bias toward direct (vs. indirect) impact

When scoring, we bias toward direct effects whenever possible. The impact of our work can be challenging to measure (good topic for a future article!), but we can still try to be clear-eyed about the impact we’re truly having. For example, a project centers on engaging with residents and bringing them into conversation about the climate impact of a nearby development—we might decide our work has a direct effect on social cohesion and respect between residents, with an indirect effect on the environment.

CODA

Legible practice, applied values

We believe the kind of work we do at Field States can have a powerful impact, contributing to better futures for people and places—so we shouldn’t be the only ones doing it! The Field States team actively experiments with our own processes, and we share the tools we create with the aim of supporting our peers. Less reinventing the wheel means more time spent doing good design work in the world! We refer to all this as legible practice.

At its heart, the Responsible Project Portfolio is about applied values. We’ve spent time articulating our goals… so we should use them to guide our work! By instrumenting our values with a lightweight heuristic, our values become more tangible, the ramifications of our actions more clear. The system is instructive at key moments: when a new opportunity arises, when we're evaluating a finished project, or during a company retrospective as we reflect on the impact of our work.

Thank you for reading! In between project work, we're writing more articles about the RPP, detailing:

• Field States’ criteria
• How we map out project timing
• Accounting for the delta between expectations and reality