What's your strategy for keeping your project portfolio team sharp?

To keep our project portfolio team sharp, we prioritize continuous learning through conferences, workshops, and online resources. We foster a culture of knowledge sharing, encourage cross-training to develop versatile skills, and emphasize collaboration and teamwork. Regular performance evaluations help identify areas for improvement, ensuring our team remains skilled, motivated, and ready to tackle any project challenges.

Focus on Maturity Model Level! This suggestion should not only be applied to the portfolio team, but also to all stakeholders involved. A good plan focused on increasing maturity aimed at portfolio management is essential. A very interesting one that I recommend is P3M3 from Axelos' P3O methodology, if you don't know it, it's worth researching.

Teams are people - so what motivates them? What are their life plans? What career objectives do they have? If your only focus is what the team capabilities are and ignore the human dimensions then you may not get the results you desire. For example, what happens if you identify a gap and want a team member to train to fill it... yet this isn't something they want to do? Conversely someone may have a strength but they really don't want to be pidgeonholed by it. Of course you have to manage the capabilities and there are bound to be some areas of tension. However if you can minimise these, you can have a more productive team full of people who stick around longer!

?? In my experience, after assessing strengths and gaps, certain proactive measures further hone a PPM team's effectiveness. ?? Continuous Training Regular, structured training sessions can keep your team updated on the latest trends, methodologies, and tools. ?? Mentorship Programs Pairing less experienced members with senior members can facilitate knowledge transfer and provide hands-on guidance. ?? Cross-Functional Exposure Encourage team rotations across different portfolio projects, enabling diverse experience and broadened horizons. ?? Finally, remember: a holistic approach that combines continuous learning, mentorship, and varied exposure ensures a razor-sharp PPM team.

Insist that your team members become certified in the PPM and PM skills; e.g. PMP, Prince2, MSP, MoP, Benefits mgmt, Change mgmt, Risk mgmt etc. One new certification per year is a reasonable expectation. Often, challenging them to get these certifications will motivate them to up their game stimulate knew thinking. Also, for those doing PPM, it’s important that project teams being monitored know that the monitoring team have these certifications - it improves their advice and adds to their credibility.

Consider OKR goal-setting. OKR is a framework that emphasizes setting ambitious, qualitative, Objectives, transparent, and measurable Key Results to track progress. It encourages aspirational targets and fosters innovation. SMART goals focus on Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound objectives, promoting a more structured and realistic approach to goal setting. Both methods have their strengths, OKRs lean towards encouraging innovation and challenging teams, while SMART goals prioritize clear and attainable targets. OKRs tend to focus on the organization's long-term strategy while SMART tends to be more tactical.

Consider having your team members deliver presentations or speak at events to reinforce the learning. Acquiring knowledge is wonderful but its value can be increased significantly by sharing it. That’s because knowledge will grow exponentially when it is shared with others.

Allow your team to give you feedback. What are you doing that is not helping them to succeed? What are you doing that is helping? What could you start doing that would help them to be more successful? We often forget oursleves in this conversation, whislt we lead, we are also a defacto part of the 'team' and the team is a collection of individuals with their own life goals and objectives.

One thing I suggest is to encourage knowledge sharing within your team, the more knowledge is leveled up, the better!It's important to plan periodic meetings, incorporating brainstorming sessions, and also encourage participation in lectures and forums on the subject.

I believe that these steps are applicable to almost any area, not just to project portfolio management. They could be used for a sports team, a software development or even a sales team... They are great, I just believe that they are not specific for Project Management but instead applicable to any team.