Business Agility and Portfolio Management

A few years ago, I contributed to a report entitled ‘Moving from Portfolio Reporting to Portfolio Management’. The report was written to highlight the fact that having a rolled-up report of all the projects and programmes in an organisation, doesn’t constitute portfolio management. Don’t get me wrong, there are huge benefits for an organisation to get a consolidated view of their portfolio of change. Getting to this point is often the result of significant effort from the PMO in conjunction with the delivery teams and other supporting functions such as HR, Finance and Procurement. The report allows questions to be asked of individual projects and programmes in terms of progress and budget that can drive improved delivery. The report went on to document the journey and challenges of a number of organisations that had moved on to use the information in the rolled-up report to support decision making in the proactive management of the portfolio.

In the current VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) environment (clearly evidenced by COVID, The Great Resignation and the current economic climate), the ability to pivot our portfolio is the critical factor in business agility and continued organisation success.

To move from portfolio reporting to an agile approach to portfolio management requires changes to organisation governance, culture and processes – a level of transformation that will need top-down commitment and support from across the organisation. Very often, this transformation is not seen as a programme of change, but delivered as a series of incremental steps facilitated by the PMO and the services it offers.

Somebody who has worked with many PMOs and organisations to deliver this transformation is Holger Heuss, a KPMG Senior Manager within KPMG’s Technology Strategy and Business Agility function. We are thrilled to have him deliver our ‘Unlocking Business Agility through Portfolio Management’ course where delegates have the opportunity to assess the current situation in their organisation, gain an understanding of the building blocks for strategic portfolio management and start building a roadmap for transforming their organisation.

If you’re new to portolio management – another great course to consider is the Management of Portfolios (MoP®) Foundation certification – which will teach delegates the scope and objectives of portfolio management and how it differs from programme and project management, the benefits from applying portfolio management and the context within which it operates and the principles upon which successful portfolio management is based

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