Portfolio Assurance Resources
Guide To Portfolio Governance
The information in this guide is intended for general purposes only. For more specific guidance around your organisation’s projects, please get in touch with our team.
- Importance of good governance at the portfolio level
- How project and programme governance supports the portfolio level
- Reporting functions within a portfolio
- Roles and responsibilities in a portfolio
- Governance to support high stakes decision making
- A valuable function for measuring strategic progress
- Communication to the wider organisation
- Framework to manage risks that affect multiple projects
- Discuss your portfolio with us
- Where to next?
- Latest Portfolio Assurance Articles
We work with a huge range of organisations on their project portfolios, providing assurance that their practices are giving them the best possible chance of success. Through our work, we’ve helped clients connect the governance of individual projects to centralised governance practices in which the leadership team can get a birds-eye view of the business’ progress to a set strategy.
In this guide, we take a deeper look at governance when it comes to a portfolio of projects. We’ll explain why this is important and we’ll identify the key elements that will help make a governance framework successful for the leadership team.
Importance of good governance at the portfolio level
Now expand this to 5-10 individual projects and you can see why there’s a big risk without governance. Governance at the project level is similar to governance at the portfolio level – ie. both concern the visibility of progress and status. However, the portfolio level may take on a more strategic lens, such as reporting on the overall progress of each project.
Having governance in place at the portfolio level helps senior leaders:
- understand how well the business is tracking against the business strategy and plan
- see any problems across the organisations’ project delivery practices (e.g. is a particular stakeholder slowing things down across the board)
- discover any risks or threats that warrant discussion and decision-making to mitigate
- ensure that the business is not too reliant on any one business unit for the portfolio to progress
- determine where the budget is being allocated and whether a reallocation of funds is needed.
It’s also important as a time-saving function for busy senior leaders to get a temperature check of the project activity without having to read multiple reports at once.
How project and programme governance supports the portfolio level
The relationship between governance at the individual programme or project level and the portfolio is reasonably straightforward.
- Projects and programmes have risks, reporting and success measures that pertain to their own scope. The governance should ensure that these operate the way that they’re meant to.
- A portfolio’s governance demands the management of multiple projects ensuring that the right budget, priority, and timeframes are in place to bring about the desired strategic outcome.
Whilst project governance is very detailed, the governance around a portfolio should pull top-level information from each project as required. A well-designed reporting framework will have mapped functional delivery KPIs up to the more strategic portfolio-level KPIs. The time spent to get this right is a major advantage later down the track.
This centralised or top-level governance for a project portfolio is, therefore, a valuable tool to use.
Reporting functions within a portfolio
But reporting is not all about the metrics – there should also be ongoing commentary and insights provided by each programme and project. This should then be summarised at regular intervals into a portfolio status report. Whilst leadership teams may want access to each individual project update, the business can provide far more efficient reporting by having a process of pulling out key facts and trends to analyse the portfolio.
Roles and responsibilities in a portfolio
The portfolio will need to have its own personnel to ensure it meets its objectives. At the project level, there will be project managers, delivery teams and stakeholders, and at the programme level there will be programme directors, owners etc. But, the portfolio’s roles and responsibilities will sit at the strategic level giving it close ties to the business strategy and goals.
The portfolio governance framework should expressly identify responsibilities, such as, sign off of projects, gathering data for reporting, leading risk mitigation and so on. There may be one or more roles involved with the day to day ‘managing’ of the project portfolio. They will likely spend a lot of their week meeting with programme and project leaders to build a clear understanding of progress. They may also be tasked with providing directives such as reprioritising the budget.
These roles are just as critical as those at the delivery level. Good governance should record this and make it accessible for reference later.
Governance to support high stakes decision making
A valuable function for measuring strategic progress
Perhaps the measures will need to include external KPIs, such as customer feedback or market research. That measure will depend on the business and project, but there should be a measure.
Governance is about making hard questions easier – something that will be welcomed by busy leadership teams when trying to ascertain if the portfolio is taking the business in the right direction.
Communication to the wider organisation
Another important element of governance is communication. This includes the initial buy-in and definition of the project’s benefits. But it should be present throughout the project, including progress updates, sharing success and ultimately celebrating completion. For a portfolio, the communication may not be expressed as ‘a portfolio’ as such, but more the business strategy. The portfolio of projects may be better illustrated as a ‘series of initiatives’ or other language that means something to the entire business.
The governance framework should lay out how often updates are provided to certain stakeholders and what will be shared.
Framework to manage risks that affect multiple projects
Portfolio risks can come from the underlying programmes and projects, or they can present themselves from other sources – such as market changes, financial issues, technological developments or otherwise. Either way, the governance around your portfolio should ensure that these risks are captured, rated for severity and prioritised for action.
Often the benefit of good risk governance is that trends can be highlighted and addressed at once. One such example might be a bottleneck in security testing for multiple technology projects. A portfolio risk assessment may help to provide a compelling business case for hiring more resources to remove this.
Discuss your portfolio with us
We know first-hand that when organisations implement good governance at all appropriate levels, the machine runs much more effectively. Our team doesn’t just provide recommendations on delivering projects better, but we help you establish practices that make your organisation inherently better at standing up projects and managing multiple initiatives in a portfolio. We’ll provide an assessment and guidance on the practices you need to implement and support you with embedding these. We’d love to chat about your needs with governance and portfolio management, so get in touch with us to discuss more.
Where to next?
Managing risks In a project portfolio
Risks exist in every project portfolio. It’s not possible to eliminate them, but it is possible to be well-prepared.
Learn More >>
Designing a portfolio delivery plan
Any good organisational initiative needs a strong plan. A portfolio approach to projects relies on good planning to ensure the health and success of each underlying activity. We explain what this looks like in our guide.
Learn More >>
Guide to portfolio governance
Governance doesn’t just exist at the project level - good practices around the reporting and management of the portfolio in its entirety helps organisations stay in control and on budget.
Learn More >>
Prioritising projects in an organisation
Priority of business initiatives is complicated - there are financial, strategic and even political aspects to project portfolio management.
Learn More >>
The secret to successful portfolio delivery
What makes a business adept at delivering on multiple initiatives concurrently? We offer some insight in this guide.
Learn More >>
Building a balanced project portfolio
The balance of your project portfolio between activities that help drive towards strategic goals is critical to get right. We explain why.
Latest Portfolio Assurance Articles
Common Risks Within A Project Portfolio
Every project has its risks – it’s part of the territory. And a careful risk analysis of a project will typically surface a fair few items for a risk register to keep on the radar. It doesn’t take long then, for an organisation with multiple projects running, to become overwhelmed with understanding its business risk at any one time.
Why an organisation’s portfolio needs everyone’s input
Portfolios of projects or programmes require careful management to ensure that the overall strategic objectives and budget is properly balanced. But who is accountable for ensuring this happens?
How assurance has your back – helping you deliver successful projects time after time
There’s many benefits to having QA involved in portfolio management. Here’s just a few.
Signs it’s time to cut back the number of active projects
Is your organisation trying to do too much in too short a space of time? If so, it might be worth reprioritising projects to give each the best shot at success.
How to identify recurring issues in your projects
There’s a lot to be learned from assessing common themes across all projects. We offer a few ways to get insights from your own project portfolio.
5 reasons why you should reprioritise a project
In a business with multiple projects active at any one time, it’s sometimes hard to know which of these is a priority in a world of competing objectives. We talk about reasons why you might reprioritise the portfolio.
Explore our other QA services
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