Portfolio Assurance Resources
The Secret To Successful Portfolio Delivery
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.
In this section, you will find:
- A cohesive leadership team
- A clear strategic direction
- Strong governance practices at every level
- Excellent organisational communication habits
- A clear organisational structure and reporting lines
- Ensuring every individual project is set up for success
- Close management of time and budget
- Removing threats and reducing risks
- Discuss your portfolio with us
- Where to next?
- Latest Portfolio Assurance Articles
In this guide we’re going to uncover some of the ingredients to a successful portfolio based on our experience working with organisations of all types. Read on for some valuable tips if you’re working in a portfolio environment.
A cohesive leadership team
The best possible plans and governance can be rendered useless without a leadership team that enjoys trust and cooperation between each member. Senior leadership teams are responsible for executing on a business strategy (and often helping to define it), so a portfolio of projects which ideally is designed to execute on this strategy, need the leaders to be on the same page.
Cohesion doesn’t require 100% agreement of all matters. Quite the contrary; opposing viewpoints tabled in a safe trusting environment allows the best solutions to rise to the top.. Cohesive leadership teams share values around the purpose of their roles – to serve the organisation and its customers in the best way possible. Knowing how to tactfully push a view point or idea is as important as the ability to support and execute in a different direction. If a leadership team works well together, all concerns will be heard and addressed as a collective.
A clear strategic direction
A clear business strategy should be summarised in a simple statement or paragraph. The detail behind this strategy should also be easy to understand for people in the business – not just those in leadership roles who created the strategy.
When the business has its strategy in place, the project portfolio can be delivered to a clear anchoring objective. Strategic clarity pulls the business towards the right things, and guides decision-making throughout the financial year. When prioritisation has to happen within a portfolio, clarity of business strategy makes this process much easier.
Strong governance practices at every level
Getting a culture of good governance into an organisation takes time. It needs to be reinforced at all levels, from the project management team through to business unit managers, the programme directors, and the leadership team itself. A culture of reporting and accountability is a huge advantage for portfolio delivery. This ensures there is good quality information and good systems for solving problems along the way. When projects don’t have these practices in place, a portfolio (which is the roll up of all projects) will feel these issues at scale.
Excellent organisational communication habits
We’ve talked about communication between leaders, but this is only part of the recipe. The best laid plans can be totally ineffective if your organisation doesn’t encourage open, safe communication between all staff. Projects being delivered effectively and on time relies on an easy flow of information between delivery teams, management, stakeholders and the leadership team. In the context of a portfolio, communication issues compound, with multiple projects at risk of having unresolved problems or a lack of support.
Communication should manifest in a number of ways for a business:
- Email and group communication by leadership to the staff to keep them in the loop with the business strategy and initiatives.
- Open, informal discussions in the general work environment (i.e. water cooler, lunch room, across a desk area).
- Team meetings within project teams to raise any obstacles.
- Meetings between sign-off stakeholders and project teams.
- Meetings between business units.
- Leadership team communication with stakeholders.
- A clear feedback loop from end users back into the organisation to identify issues.
The portfolio delivery, by its very nature, will involve inter-project communication. Some stakeholders will need to be involved in numerous projects. And there will be dependencies between projects at play too. If communication is poor, all of these elements will be strained. Embedding a good culture of communication is a big advantage for portfolio delivery.
A clear organisational structure and reporting lines
The project portfolio needs reporting lines that are well defined. This will ensure there is appropriate sign-off of initiatives, and involvement of the right people. Good governance should identify the people responsible for each project milestone and the stakeholders that need to be informed/consulted.
If there are unclear reporting lines in the business, your portfolio of projects may be at risk of missing milestones. As with the strategy, a lack of clarity in reporting is a real burden. The fix is often not complex, but may just be a matter of affirming roles and responsibilities. These should be done with the appropriate HR and employment steps if someone’s job description changes as a result.
For the purposes of a project portfolio delivery, fixing these operational issues will pay off down the track.
Ensuring every individual project is set up for success
Great portfolios are made up of well-planned projects. Spending the time on each project to get things right from the outset will create much easier portfolio management. One of the ways the organisation can help projects succeed is by breaking them down into smaller activities with a tighter set of objectives. With a shorter timeframe and less complexity, small but consistent progress can be made. It also means that risks can be isolated and managed more easily.
If you’re interested in reading more about the benefits of shorter projects, check out our article on the topic here.
Close management of time and budget
With a budget that multiple projects draw from, a portfolio needs each project to be tightly controlled to be successful. Even if the budget for just one project blows out, it can put the entire portfolio at risk. Ultimately these projects are pulling from the same money within the organisation – so for one activity to demand more money or time than planned, other projects within the portfolio will suffer.
Like we’ve talked about above, individual projects need to adopt good practices around resource management, delivery of milestones and budget usage in order for the portfolio to work. Taking care of this at the project level, will increase the portfolio’s chance of success.
Removing threats and reducing risks
As you’d imagine, viewing the organisational risks at the portfolio level can look daunting. However, if each project has the support and practices in place to remove or mitigate these risks, there shouldn’t be cause for alarm. A leadership team will want to identify those risks that appear as recurring trends across multiple initiatives. These should be prioritised as ones to address first. Doing so helps to ensure that the portfolio doesn’t encounter a perfect storm of issues that lead to multiple project failures.
There are also efficiencies in viewing your project risks in concert. The solution for many risks will often apply to many other projects. So there can be significant time savings if risks are mitigated at scale.
Discuss your portfolio with us
While the above points are typically applicable to most organisations, there are dozens of other factors that will be specific to your business. That’s why we’d suggest getting in touch today for a no-obligation discussion about your portfolio challenges. IQANZ’ portfolio assurance helps public and private sector organisations to progress with peace of mind and confidence that their portfolio is being given the best chance for success.
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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PO Box 11-757 Wellington,
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info@iqanz.com