Using Portfolio Management

So you have talked to an Expert, and you are ready to get a prescription for Portfolio Management.  How do you ensure you have the best experience possible? 

 Know What to Expect

• Portfolio Management enables you to make better decisions about where you invest your money.  It is not a silver-bullet and your performance will not improve immediately. 
• But it does work.  And the benefits of Portfolio Management don’t go away after use.  As the organization learns to make better decisions, Portfolio Management continues to improve the organization’s performance through continued better investment and project decisioning.
• To get the fastest and best results, ensure you have a plan to tackle both the process and behavioral elements required for Portfolio Management.

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 Make Sure You Get 100% Real Portfolio Management

Many software vendors and consultants will try to sell you fake Portfolio Management.  So before you undertake Portfolio Management, learn what to look for in a Portfolio Management Expert.

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 Getting the Best Results

When undertaking Portfolio Management, remember these tips.  This way, you can focus on what really matters – making your Portfolio Management effort most successful and ensuring satisfying organizational performance.   

1. Assess Where You are Starting From – You need to know where you are starting from to know where you are going.
   • Understand your process, culture/behavior and systems strengths and development areas
   • Systematically, analyze your organization to create a credible and effective plan
   • Benchmark yourself against competitive peers
2. Get the Organization into the Mood – To get people excited about Portfolio Management, you can do a few things:
   • Find a senior champion
   • Create a compelling business case which identifies the ROI of Portfolio Management
   • Determine how much your organization is losing today because of ID
   • Understand challenges and what detractors are saying
   • Build a coalition with other like-minded folks
3. Don’t Move Too Quickly – There are no organizational panaceas to solve deep-rooted and long-standing issues so it will take some patience and effort. 
   • You can still win quickly to keep momentum going.  Piloting with one area to demonstrate success is often recommended.
   • Ensure people know you have a plan to make Portfolio Management successful and get their buy-in
4. Educate Everyone – Educate senior management and everyone in your organization about the benefits of Portfolio Management.
   • Create a compelling case for all levels to understand Portfolio Management
   • Create a vision for Portfolio Management which the organization supports and which excites those throughout the organization

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 Find the Right Dose of Portfolio Management

Portfolio Management has been shown to help organization suffering from Investile Dysfunction (ID) achieve better performance.  So if you and your organization aren’t getting the performance you want, don’t give up.

Portfolio Management generally comes in three doses:

• Total organization – For those who want to deploy Portfolio Management across the entire organization, this dosage will apply to all business units, products and functional groups, e.g., IT, marketing, R&D, operations, etc.  Experts usually start their organizations with a smaller dose to enable learning and to achieve results, but in some instances, a Total Organization dose may be needed and work better.
• Functional dose – This dosage of Portfolio Management is applied to specific functional areas with significant discretionary investment spend such as IT, marketing, R&D, innovation, sales and operations.  This is a very popular application dose for Portfolio Management.
• Vertical dose – This application of Portfolio Management to verticals (also referred to as the org chart view) is used on particular product groups, business units or geographies interested in optimizing their investment decisions.  This is also a very popular dosage of Portfolio Management.   

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