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PORTFOLIO ASSURANCEWhat’s most important to your business? How do you know what’s worth focusing on, and what can be deprioritised? When is the best time to deliver one initiative over another? If your portfolio management process can’t answer those questions then Portfolio Assurance is what you need.
This is all about aiming for the organisational goal. Portfolio assurance is viewed through a strategic lens, ensuring the necessary projects and programmes are in play and the unnecessary are out of the mix.
How
How We Conduct Assurance For Your Portfolio
What
What Our Portfolio Review Covers
Our Portfolio Assurance offering measures:
- The effectiveness of your portfolio definition and delivery approach in managing your organisation’s programme and project delivery
- The effectiveness of the EPMO in supporting your portfolio definition and delivery needs
- Whether the portfolio and EPMO structure, engagement model and processes are aligned with prudent practice and fit to your organisation nature and needs
- The effectiveness of your portfolio governance approach in supporting good decision making, prioritisation of investment and monitoring of outcomes
Is it right
How Do I Know If IQANZ Can Help Me?
For an organisation with a portfolio strategy that demands multiple sets of processes, governance and objectives, QA can help ensure all initiatives are on track and working well together. Placing assurance at a level above any one programme or project can provide a senior leadership team with peace of mind around a portfolio’s likelihood to deliver to KPIs. External quality assurance will also help ensure the mechanisms to prioritise parts of your portfolio over others are effective – a challenge for many organisations going through periods of significant transformation.
Common reasons to engage portfolio assurance include:
- Misalignment of priority projects within a portfolio.
- Concerns around visibility and governance across an organisation’s projects.
- Struggles with setting KPIs for a portfolio that ladders up to broader objectives.
- The need for impartial expertise to review a portfolio.
Engagement
When Is Portfolio Assurance Carried Out?
However, it’s very typical for businesses to seek out assurance once they’ve established a clear portfolio of initiatives and start to experience the challenges. Often businesses treat each programme or project as an isolated entity with its own budget, people and process. When overlap occurs and creates friction, such as conflicting objectives between projects, external assurance is a smart move to provide senior leadership teams the clarity to give clear direction to their business units.
Helping your portfolio succeed
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.
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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.
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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.
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Prioritising projects in an organisation
Priority of business initiatives is complicated - there are financial, strategic and even political aspects to project portfolio management.
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The secret to successful portfolio delivery
What makes a business adept at delivering on multiple initiatives concurrently? We offer some insight in this guide.
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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.