Portfolio Management Summit (PfMS)
Friday, June 2, 2023 | 10:00 AM to 6:30 PM U.S. E.T
As the inaugural event, the theme of this summit is “Making Project Portfolio Management Work: Current and Emerging Practices”. The main focus will be on sharing good practices, currently being implemented by portfolio management professionals around the world. In addition to gaining new insights, each of the sessions will also provide practical tips and tools to aid in the implementation of these concepts.
GET THE $99 VERY EARLY REGISTRATION BIRD TICKET NOW!
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About our first Project Portfolio Management Summit
Project portfolio management is emerging to become one of the most important developments in project management field for three primary reasons: 1) To stay competitive, organizations are striving to work on projects that are deeply aligned with their strategies; 2) To better tackle big challenges such as risks, resources, governance, and performance; 3) To improve investment performance and achieve even higher results by “doing the right projects” that compliments with “doing them the right way” (through program and project management).
But forums for project performance management are rare, and we know of many project portfolio professionals seeking to find suitable gathers. This problem is especially acute for those with the Portfolio Management Professional (PfMP) certifications who needs to earn sufficient “Way of Working” or technical Professional Development Units (PDUs) to maintain their certifications.
PMO Advisory, a PMI Authorized Training Partner and a leader in project portfolio management, is organizing a virtual summit where portfolio professionals of all levels can gather, learn, network, and explore the rich field of project portfolio management.
More about the event:
Portfolio management has played a central role in strategic execution since the development of business strategy in the 1960’s. Organizations recognizes the importance of portfolio planning, not only to align strategies and develop robust scenarios for various situations, but also to ensure organizations can effectively tackle risks, resources, governance challenges, and other grand issues. More recently, project portfolio management is starting to take center stage as organizations strives to compete successfully by “doing the right things”, “doing more with less”, and “doing them well”. In 2012, recognizing the growing importance of project portfolio management, PMI introduced a new certification, Portfolio Management Professional (or PfMP) credential that raise the bar of the entire project management discipline. Portfolio management serve not only as a bridge between planning and execution, but it also serves as a bridge between the “doers” and the “executive suites”.
Yet, even with this growing importance, there are few if any conferences dedicated to this emerging discipline.

CONFERENCE AGENDA
How can PMO Advisory provide value in this event?
As a leader in project management, PMO Advisory has been offering portfolio management training and consulting since 2013. We were one of the first, if not the first, to offer PfMP training. Our CEO, Dr. Te Wu, was the eighth in the world to obtain that certification (and with attribution, he is likely now the first in the US to attain and maintain this certification). He has published or contributed to a number of portfolio management publications, including serving as a PMI core committing member that developed the Standard Portfolio Management Fourth Edition, leading as one of the main editors for “Implementation Project Portfolio Management” (a PMI publication), writing two additional books on the PfMP Exam Preparation (The Sensible Guide to Passing the PfMP Exam and Making Choices).
PMO Advisory is planning to organize a virtual summit for project portfolio management professionals to achieve the following objectives:
- To promote learning and advancing project portfolio management through presentation by experts in the field
- To network with project portfolio management experts and practitioners
- To encourage and enable project portfolio management professionals to consider obtaining the PMI PfMP credential
- To earn “Way of Working” or technical PDUs (professional development units) for current PfMP credential holders

Who should attend this conference?
This conference is perfect for project management professionals who are interested in the portfolio management. Specifically:
- Project management professionals who are interested to learn and expand their responsibilities with regards to project selection, prioritization, resource capability and capacity, strategic alignment, risk management, and governance.
- Project portfolio management professionals of all levels, from those who wants to learn the art of possibilities and advance their career

Why Should You Consider Attending?
- Learn about good and practices in project portfolio management to further your knowledge.
- Develop and refine your career development plans to further your career, including obtaining the PfMP certification.
- Ask questions about Project Portfolio Management.
- We plan to publish a Q&A page shortly after the summit.
- Network and socialize with project portfolio management experts.
- You too can serve on the Expert Panel for Q&A (more information is in the Registration Form).
- Earn Professional Development Units (PDUs), especially the hard to find “Way of Working” PDUs for current PfMP credential holders.
Pricing & Registration
- When: Friday, June 2nd, 2023 @ 10 am – 6:30 pm US ET
- Where: Live virtual, TBD
- PDUs: Up to 8 PDUs (We will provide the claims code, and individuals can file their claim on www.pmi.org.
All participants will earn a coupon equivalent of the fee paid and good for one year. The coupon is valid for one year and can be applied to any one of the PMO Advisory courses.
GET THE $99 VERY EARLY REGISTRATION BIRD TICKET NOW!
Day(s)
:
Hour(s)
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Minute(s)
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Recorded Access Only
Pre-Registration is closed | Update: Starting March 1, 2023: this fee is for recorded access only- For those who paid on or before
- March 1:
- Virtual Conference Seat
- Verifiable Certificate
- E-book
- Up to 7 PDUs
- Recording
- For those who will purchase
- this package from
- March 1 onwards:
- This will be a recorded access
- only.
Very Early Bird
Limited to the next 50 People and registrations before Mar. 31, 2023- Virtual Conference Seat
- Verifiable Certificate
- E-book
- Up to 7 PDUs
- Recording
Early Bird Special
Registrations from Apr. 1, 2023 - Apr. 30, 2023- Virtual Conference Seat
- Verifiable Certificate
- E-book
- Up to 7 PDUs
- Recording
Regular
Registrations from May 1, 2023 before day of the event- Virtual Conference Seat
- Verifiable Certificate
- E-book
- Up to 7 PDUs
- Recording
For Companies: If you have more than 5 people from your team attending, please email us at cert (at) pmoadvisory.com with details for a special quote.
SPEAKERS AND TOPIC

State of Portfolio Management
Presenter: Te Wu, CEO & CPO of PMO Advisory
Abstract:
Even though portfolio management as a discipline has been in existence nearly as long as project management, project portfolio management is relatively new. Even though the exact date of its formation is unknown, it was clear by the early 2000’s that there is a growing need to formally recognized this discipline. PMI developed the Standard of Portfolio Management in 2006, followed by more work such as Axelo’s Management of Portfolio in 2011.
Rather than “doing projects well”, portfolio management focuses on “doing the right projects”. Because of the recency of development, there are many different practices and variations. In short, the state of portfolio management is still emerging. This presentation highlights the top five findings of a recent portfolio management study that asks portfolio management professionals on how portfolio management is actually being practiced. With over 150 respondents, we believe the insights here will be invaluable to the participants.
Detailed Description
Project portfolio management is a relatively new discipline under the broader umbrella of project management. To date, comparatively little research has been done in this field, but it is evident that the gap between research and practice is growing. Partly this is the nature of research, examining a narrow area of inquiry to find relationships. But the practice of portfolio management is often ambigous and complex. To advance the field, we initiated an exploratory empirical study to look at the landscape of project portfolio management in practice in order to better shape our understanding. Around 150 project portfolio management experts from various industries, regions, organization sizes, and portfolio levels have responded to this research as of this writing.
The research findings, which we will discuss in this session, show that project portfolio management (PPM) is a remarkably complex and diversified practice, reflecting a complex and varied terrain. The top 5 findings, which address questions such as 1) Where do portfolios exist in organizations; 2) The degree of portfolio managers’ accountability; 3) What are portfolio managers’ primary goals? 4) Are there formal management procedures for portfolios? 5) What is the current level of portfolio management maturity?
We believe responses to these and other questions provide invaluable insights. These findings enable portfolio management professionals to benchmark their own management practices as they build and improves their portfolio management practices.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand how portfolio management are being practices in the industry.
- Enable portfolio management professionals to compare and contract their practices with the findings in this study.
Key Takeaways:
- Develop insights and improved understanding of portfolio management.
- Start to improve their practice of portfolio management through benchmarking.
Leading Change in a VUCA World: Efficiently Managing Project-Based Work at the Enterprise Level
Presenter: Panos Chatzipanos, President, Green Athens S.A.
Abstract:
This presentation will describe the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) environment and how it affects change initiatives, aka project-based work. Throughout the presentation, the presenter will discuss good practices and lessons learned derived from the five most important disciplines of Project Portfolio Management. The five most important knowledge disciplines, from the presenter’s long experience, have been:
- Portfolio Governance
- Continuous Alignment with Organizational Strategy
- How to Maximize Portfolio Throughput
- How to Optimize Portfolio Reliability
- How to navigate the Portfolio within the ubiquitous VUCA environment – Uncertainty and Risk.
Detailed Description
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:
- Sustainable and Effective Portfolio Governance.
- Building Structure, Developing Executive buy-in and Utilizing Verified and Timely Information.
- Governance Principles (Transparency, Responsibility, Accountability, Fairness)
- Portfolio Oversight: When the organizational context changes faster than the organization itself, prepare for a multitude of emergent problems and risks.
- Continuous Alignment with Organizational Strategy
- Start with and understand the WHY you do what you do
- Selecting the right portfolio components
- Alignment across the Portfolio, Program and Project Space
- Acting with yesterday’s logic and tools is the greatest danger in turbulent times.
- How to Maximize Portfolio Throughput
- Controlling portfolio performance
- Integrating Governance along the three levels (Portfolio, Program, Project).
- Embedding Benefits Realization Management in Organizations
- The Benefits / Value Life Cycle
- How to Optimize Portfolio Reliability
- Decision-Making
- Plan for Benefits Realization and Adding Value Consistently
- Assessing, Documenting, Reviewing, Deciding.
- Portfolio Team: Acquiring the necessary Skill Set – Using the appropriate Tools.
- How to navigate the Portfolio within the ubiquitous VUCA environment
- What is VUCA and its challenges?
- Which phenomena of VUCA do you experience most in your project-based work and particularly within your leadership?
- Change Management and Transformation (Change makes the system better, faster, cheaper…Transformation creates new systems)
- Managing uncertainty and risk at the portfolio level
- Portfolio Team Power Skills
- Systems Thinking
- Awareness of Cognitive Biases
- 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.


Pivot with Purpose – Introducing Agile Portfolio Management
Presenter: Gary Sikma, Eurasia Senior Field Coordinator (Portfolio Director), Wycliffe USA/Global Partnerships
Abstract:
Reflecting back to January 2020 with the Covid-19 just starting to appear on the horizon, what were your corporate strategies and objectives? Whatever they were, I can almost guarantee that just five month later, the original objectives experienced significant changes and was possibly thrown out.
In a world faced with ever-changing variables, it is essential for executive leadership and the rest of the organization to stay nimble and adapt to the shifting environment while keeping an eye on the strategic direction.
Detailed Description
This presentation aims to introduce the concept of Agile Portfolio Management, its benefits, and how it can be implemented in our organization.
Agile Portfolio Management is a framework that enables organizations to manage their portfolios in an agile way. It is a proactive approach that allows organizations to adapt quickly to changing market conditions, customer needs, and business priorities. This approach is particularly beneficial in dynamic environments where traditional portfolio management practices are often ineffective.
The presentation will cover the following topics:
- Introduction to Agile Portfolio Management
- Definition
- Key concepts and principles
- Benefits of Agile Portfolio Management
- Better alignment between business goals and investments
- Faster time to market
- Improved project visibility and transparency
- Greater flexibility and adaptability
- Enhanced collaboration and communication
- Risks of Agile Portfolio Management
- Lack of predictability
- Difficulty in managing dependencies
- Inadequate prioritization
- Potential for scope creep
- Lack of standardization
- Reduced visibility
- Agile Portfolio Management in practice
- The Agile Portfolio Management process
- Tools and techniques for implementing Agile Portfolio Management
- Success stories and case studies
- Next steps
- How to get started with Agile Portfolio Management
- Best practices and tips for implementing Agile Portfolio Management in our organization
The presentation will be interactive, with opportunities for questions and discussions. Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of the benefits of Agile Portfolio Management and how it can be applied in our organization.
Learning Objectives:
After the presentation, the participants will be able to clearly describe Agile Portfolio Management from a high level including:
- Definition
- Benefits
- Risks
- Agile portfolio management in practice
Key Takeaways:
While it is unlikely that participants will be able to create an agile portfolio, with deeper research and communications with company leadership, they will be able to begin the planning for a portfolio that leverages agility with scalability.
Synthesizing Various Portfolio Management Approaches: SPM, LPM and APM
Presenter: Ross Eagar, Associate Director, Enterprise Project Management Office, ArcBest
Abstract:
In today’s competitive business environment, modern organizations are under intense pressure to digitalize, innovate, and produce results or OR become irrelevant and risk being acquired or, worse, dissolved. Portfolio management ensures the right initiatives are being completed at the right time to maximize value delivery, but understanding the different techniques, and when to use them, can be challenging. This session will outline each portfolio management approach and demonstrate scenarios where each is most applicable.
Detailed Description
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.


Multidimensional Portfolio Management – A Decision Support System
Presenter: John Driessnack, Thought Leader and Principle Investigator, Olde Stone Consulting and University of Maryland
Abstract:
The presentations explored how organizations can use a multidimensional portfolio management approach to enhance performance management insights across the organization’s projects, programs, and operations. The concept of a model-based programmatic (MSProg) structure is introduced.
Detailed Description
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.
Cancellation Policy
- Cancellations made before 4/30/23 will receive a 100% refund.
- Cancellations made between 5/1/23 and 5/15/23 will receive also 100% refund minus a processing fee of $50.
- Request for cancellation after 5/15/23 will no longer be available.
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