Our Services

PORTFOLIO ASSURANCE

What’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.

Chat to us about your portfolio assurance Explore our portfolio resources

How

How We Conduct Assurance For Your Portfolio

The right activities make the greatest contributions to an organisation’s strategic goals. Our specialists look at the wider business picture, considering strategic initiatives and operational activity (business as usual). We’ll identify whether you have the best structures and practices to help you define and deliver a balanced portfolio – ensuring you’re doing the right things, at the right time with the best resources. We identify if you’ve got gaps, or if you’re doing too much at the same time and the organisation risks being overloaded with change.

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?

Much like our programme and project assurance services, a portfolio QA should start sooner than later. As various programmes are kicked off, complexity can grow exponentially. Consider the challenges of a single project without governance, process or a sophisticated resource plan – now multiply this out by the number of initiatives in your portfolio. If an organisation doesn’t have a clear structure on which to manage its portfolio, small issues can become large ones rapidly.

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.