Portfolio Management – The great (unused) superpower in your organisation

Portfolio Management is an incredibly powerful tool for organisations that are managing multiple projects/programmes/services/products (insert your relevant description of ‘change activity’). It is often underused or maligned. But what if you realised it can ensure that you are delivering what you need in order to meet your organisation’s strategic objectives. This is the superpower of great Portfolio Management.

What is it?

Good portfolio management is most simply defined as the ‘Business as Usual’ management of change. It’s the enduring structure that sits across delivery of ‘change activity’. It ensures that this work is delivering to time, cost, quality and scope, and more importantly that it continues to meet the highest priority needs of the organisation. Its superpower is that it helps to ensure that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It drives real value into your organisation by helping to bring transparency and accountability.

There are two key parts to great portfolio management:

• Defining what should be in the portfolio.
• Managing the delivery of the work.

Unfortunately, in many organisations these two things are often done independently. The definition cycle only happens once a year, aligned to the annual budget cycle, while the management of delivery is done monthly.

This monthly view can often feel overly bureaucratic and of little value to the people delivering the work. They’re made to complete a bunch of paperwork once a month, and get no feedback (except maybe a telling off if things aren’t going well!) The people who review the performance information often do so weeks after it was filled in. In this time risks can materialise, decisions have already had to be taken (potentially in local isolation, where strategic input was needed), and the conversations can feel performative and arbitrary, adding little value.

If that’s the case, what’s the point?

Portfolio management should add real value to an organisation and isn’t a bureaucratic add on. Its superpower comes from being adaptive, responsive and operating at the pace of relevance. It ensures that all the work remains aligned to strategic objectives and is a supportive and enabling function for everyone in the organisation.

If you take the principles of organisational agility and apply them at a portfolio level you can start to do things differently.

• Ensure alignment across teams with clarity on the strategic outcomes to deliver, and measure progress against those.
• A common set of clear metrics that enable you to understand progress, and if you are all moving closer to your strategic objectives.
• Move away from reams of narrative that takes time to fill in (and read) and focus on aggregating the data that people use to make daily decisions; making it more visible and transparent to those that make strategic decisions.
• Focus on trends and how your strategic decision makers who receive the performance information can help teams resolve challenges and prevent risks from occurring.
• Understand what strategic decisions need to be made and when, so that Portfolio reporting supports meaningful, and timely conversations.
• Identify what new strategic decisions are required or can be enabled with new sources of data from the teams. Automating its availability through self-serve dashboards to ensure the most relevant data is available at the right time, to the right people, to make the right decisions.
• Be transparent – let teams see portfolio level data, and understand how it is used. Most of all, make sure that they get feedback from the conversations it facilitates, and are able to understand the decisions that are made.

How do I do that?

The key action to take is to bring together the definition and delivery cycles. These are not discrete processes. Doing this enables your Portfolio Management Team to be truly responsive and adaptive, unleashing their superpowers.

There is always a balance to be struck (primarily based on risk), but we’d recommend that you look at combining the delivery and definition cycle every 3 (ish) months. This enables teams to plan and execute in a sensible rhythm; enabling the review of performance data, strategic decisions and priorities to be a key input into the delivery planning process. It also ensures that there is a cadence of review and focussed prioritisation throughout the year on progress towards strategic goals, that is responsive to the emergent risks and opportunities we all continuously face.

If you really want to make sure that you are delivering the most important things that will ensure you meet your strategic objectives, don’t be afraid to stop things! If something is not delivering the value you need it to, don’t be afraid to pause or pivot away, and start something else that will better support your priorities. Ensure teams have clear ownership of the outcomes they are working towards, and are able to articulate how those outcomes support progress towards your strategic objectives.

Your approach to portfolio management should be proportionate to the complexity and connectivity of the work being delivered. You don’t need expensive tooling and huge teams if you have a small number of simple change initiatives, with few interdependencies.

However, providing your organisation with the right visibility of delivery, demand and definition will improve strategic decision making and delivery of your organisational objectives, while also empowering your teams to deliver. In doing this you can truly unlock the superpower of portfolio management.