Portfolio Management Summit (PfMS)

In today’s VUCA environment, quite often so much is changing on so many fronts that an effective way forward for project-based work may become a major unknown. The context of many projects nowadays is “messy”. Senior management has to understand that this is a characteristic of complex adaptive systems (CAS) and that all change initiatives are in reality CAS. Additionally, practitioners need to be aware and acknowledge that in many situations, human rationale is limited and our capability to predict with certainty is largely a delusion.  

For most organizations today, the utilization of an agile portfolio management toolkit, together with the establishment of a disciplined, standardized Project Portfolio Management Framework, has been proven to be of paramount importance. Implementing approaches to enable short feedback loops regarding portfolio information, processes, and component activities, having portfolio components ‘failing fast’ under certain circumstances, and building-in resilience in the portfolio, are all principal issues.

 If project portfolio management is viewed in its systems context, it contains a set of sub-systems that make up the whole system. The effectiveness of the whole system depends on the effectiveness of each of the supporting subsystems, as well as how these subsystems interact with each other and are synergized into the whole system.

 In this presentation, proven principles and practices of setting and navigating these subsystems will be presented, namely the human, the resource, the managerial framework, and the value delivery subsystems.  Both the challenges that practitioners face due to our VUCA world environment and the principles of project portfolio management that need to be encompassed by the above management subsystems for the successful delivery of the envisioned portfolio value-add, will be presented in brief.

 The discussion will briefly mention the Good Practices and Lessons Learned derived from the five most important objectives of Project Portfolio Management. The five most important objectives, from the presenter’s long experience, have been:

1. Sustainable and Effective Portfolio Governance.
   1. Building Structure, Developing Executive buy-in and Utilizing Verified and Timely Information.
   2. Governance Principles (Transparency, Responsibility, Accountability, Fairness)
   3. Portfolio Oversight: When the organizational context changes faster than the organization itself, prepare for a multitude of emergent problems and risks.
2. Continuous Alignment with Organizational Strategy
   1. Start with and understand the WHY you do what you do
   2. Selecting the right portfolio components
   3. Alignment across the Portfolio, Program and Project Space
   4. Acting with yesterday’s logic and tools is the greatest danger in turbulent times.
3. How to Maximize Portfolio Throughput
   1. Controlling portfolio performance
   2. Integrating Governance along the three levels (Portfolio, Program, Project).
   3. Embedding Benefits Realization Management in Organizations
   4. The Benefits / Value Life Cycle
4. How to Optimize Portfolio Reliability
   1. Decision-Making
   2. Plan for Benefits Realization and Adding Value Consistently
   3. Assessing, Documenting, Reviewing, Deciding.
   4. Portfolio Team: Acquiring the necessary Skill Set – Using the appropriate Tools.
5. How to navigate the Portfolio within the ubiquitous VUCA environment
   1. What is VUCA and its challenges?
   2. Which phenomena of VUCA do you experience most in your project-based work and particularly within your leadership?
   3. Change Management and Transformation (Change makes the system better, faster, cheaper…Transformation creates new systems)
   4. Managing uncertainty and risk at the portfolio level
   5. Portfolio Team Power Skills
   6. Systems Thinking
   7. Awareness of Cognitive Biases
   8. Developing the necessary Emotional Intelligence.

Learning Objectives:

The presentation will discuss principles and good practices for successfully navigating enterprise project-based work in our VUCA environment by practicing a disciplined, standardized Project Portfolio Management Framework.

Key Takeaways:

How to navigate through a VUCA environment and effectively manage a Project Portfolio – Lessons Learned from the trenches.

A strong portfolio management practice is a key competency leading to business success.  By aligning limited resources to focus on the most important initiatives, companies can maximize value delivery and stakeholder return.  However, each business entity is unique, and it is essential to choose the right portfolio management approach based on the needs and maturity of the organization.  At a minimum, the following factors should be considered when deciding which method to implement: leadership approach, process maturity, delivery methodology, and level of change rigidity.

The willingness of a company’s leadership team to relinquish control to self-functioning teams can vary greatly, even among individual leaders within the same organization.  A deep understanding of this dynamic is critical to select a portfolio management approach.  Established companies with a more command-and-control leadership style often elect a centralized portfolio management approach.  Startups or companies in growth phases are typically more open to portfolio decentralization.  Organizational culture plays a key part in this decision.

The maturity level of implemented project and program management processes can further impact the decision.  This includes the delivery methodologies being utilized within the organization (i.e., Agile/Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, SAFe®, hybrid, etc.).  Furthermore, new processes are likely to encounter varying levels of employee resistance, which must be assessed before implementation.  Defining and executing a formal change management plan will foster acceptance.  With that in mind, buy-in at the appropriate leadership level is crucial to success.

During the presentation, we will discuss three common approaches to portfolio management found in the industry:

• Strategic Portfolio Management – The primary focus of SPM is to align the work that teams are performing with the strategic direction of the enterprise. This implies that the enterprise has established clear, strategic goals and priorities that are aligned down the full organizational stack.
• Agile Portfolio Management – APM takes a more decentralized approach by empowering teams to rapidly build, test, and adjust solutions that ultimately deliver value to the organization. Guardrails are established to keep the teams within boundaries, but the control is not maintained as tightly at the enterprise level as is necessary for SPM.
• Lean Portfolio Management – LPM was introduced by the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)® and incorporates elements of both Agile and Lean philosophies into portfolio management. It includes visualizing portfolio work via a Kanban board, establishing work-in-progress limits, setting up regular LPM events, and budgeting via team participation.

Participants should leave this session with a high-level understanding of the options available for portfolio management and pragmatic insights on when to select one over another. 

Learning Objectives:

Help to clarify some of the confusion in the industry about the different approaches to Portfolio Management.

Key Takeaways:

At a high-level, understand the key points of each approach as well as the pros and cons of choosing one over another.

This paper will discuss approaches for management across multidimensional portfolios to expand and enhance performance management insights across complex organizations with set of assets.  The presentation is based on University of Maryland’s research on Department of Defense’s revamping of the agencies complex decision support systems and portfolio structure for weapons, communications, and other systems.  The presenter will discuss methods for developing a model-based programmatic (MBProg) structure that allows for multidimensional views and interfaces to Systems Engineering models, which are reviewed along with potential for utilization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The result is an improved analysis and thus decision-making across multidimensional characteristics of the organizational decision support systems.

Learning Objectives:

Understand that portfolio management should be used to help strategic decision making beyond prioritization.  It can also be used for capacity and capability planning, which should be linked to the organization’s strategy to maximize value across its programs, projects, and operations.

Key Takeaways:

• Use portfolio management for more than prioritizing projects and programs.
• Expand strategy of programmatic data at project level in a way it can be used for multiple dimensions of the organizations decision making.