Portfolio Managers
Providing integrated intelligence for program reviews
The value delivered by program reviews critically dependent on the quality and completeness of the information provided.
Individual projects provide information about their world: progress, milestones, risks. Integrating that information across a set of projects, and understanding where to focus attention can be difficult. Often the program or portfolio manager is dependent on a key person being ‘in the room’ to provide a perspective, or to address or highlight a pattern that only emerges after several projects have reported.
It’s possible of course, that because an issue is being addressed at a lower level in the projects, then it never reaches the review. Portfolio Manager can help to surface issues that may otherwise be missed.
Dependent projects
The Portfolio Dependency map shows all the projects of interest, and highlights those that are working on the same part of the business. Relationships and dependencies are made visible. They are flagged as soon as (EA) work on the project begins, and the status is updated at any time it’s needed, all the way through the project.
- Does everyone know about these inter-relationships?
- Do individual project deliverables need to change?
- Have the right people been engaged?
Portfolio Manager helps you have the right conversations with the right stakeholders at the right times.
What's the scope? What's the status?
Another really useful view is the Portfolio map. This gives the program or portfolio manager a summary of what’s happening in all the projects in their portfolio.
What is being done by each project (what changes are they building? what new stuff is being introduced? what things are being retired?) and the status of each, showing how far through the process those things are.
With a drill down to see detail, this view facilitates the right questions being asked. It could become the program managers new best friend…