Programmes & Portfolios
logical & flexible ways to group work
Key Features of Programme & Portfolio Approach
- Socialise Programmes and Portfolios as logical and useful ways to aggregate information for governance, management and oversight.
- Define Programmes and Sub-programmes for your business, and add additional information, including Objectives, Benefits, Strategic Contributions, Investment Profile, Statues Review, Stakeholders and Benefits.
- Collate Activities, Business Services and Projects within the relevant programmes.
- Define cross-initiative Portfolios for your business, and populate with relevant initiatives.
- Use programmes and portfolios for reporting to mid-management, Executives and Boards, including the use of Storyboards.
- Use programmes and portfolios to support teams and groups within the business.
Purpose of Programmes & Portfolios
Programmes are structural only and consist of inter-related and inter-dependent projects focused on a managed roadmap that achieves [usually] a single key business objective.
Programmes:
- Enable the coordination of strategic change.
- Ensure inter-dependent projects maintain coherence, achieve strategic alignment and maximise business benefits.
- Capitalise early on incremental achievements.
- Respond quickly to market changes and customer needs.
- Remain flexible in the approach to problem solving.
Portfolios focus more on cross-business views and:
- Control and monitor large initiatives.
- Establish the resource profiles and capacity for delivering change.
- Define investment thresholds.
- Evaluate, prioritise, select, defer and cancel initiatives.
- Coordinate the overall business change.
- Monitor and report on business change performance.
Providing Corporate Oversight
Executives and Boards are responsible for steering the business, including maintaining oversight of how well the business is executing to strategy.
Programme and portfolio views must focus on aspects of both Value and Delivery, as well as indicating areas needing intervention, additional resourcing or enterprise-level refocusing or remediation.
Aggregate Value Views
Following on from the theme of Programmes and Portfolios as management vehicles, then tracking Programme and Project Benefits is a way to provide organization-wide oversight.
This also supports the concept that the business must take ownership of benefits from inception to final realization and review. At all stages of the lifecycle senior management must be aware of the true state-of-play and intervene, when required.
Always look past the financial benefits to the non-financial benefits. Every project, for example, is an opportunity to build project capability and IP. This means you can focus on your project people, while also considering the desired project outcomes.
Programmes & Portfolios - Quick Tips
- Use Programmes and Portfolios as working vehicles for managers.
- Ensure the aggregated views add an oversight perspective to the work grouped in the Programmes and Portfolios.
- Carry out Programme Status Reviews, similar to Project Reviews.
