The Secret To Successful Portfolio Delivery

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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?
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Delivering projects within a portfolio is more complex than merely delivering a single project. Having a project portfolio introduces extra layers of complexity that need to be considered. But there’s many benefits to viewing business initiatives through the framework of a project portfolio. Setting up the portfolio delivery plan is absolutely critical to guiding the business, but there are several other factors that contribute towards the success of each of the projects. These will, ultimately, contribute towards the business strategy.

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.

Secret to successful portfolio delivery IQANZ

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.

Leadership teams that don’t communicate are rarely high performing. Siloed business units are often a direct result of the senior leaders not coming together and not speaking the same language. This culture may trickle down to business units and cause teams to beat odds with each other. Communication comes in many different forms, and should not be confined to formal meetings. For example, senior leaders should be interacting each day outside of meetings, on away days, at lunch, on video calls etc. The more personal trust built between leaders and an open-minded understanding of each other’s perspective, the easier it will be to have robust conversations when needed. It’s a lot easier to disagree constructively with people you know and respect.

A clear strategic direction

Does the business have a well-defined position on where it’s going? It might sound like a fundamental question but it’s important to focus on the ‘clarity’ of strategy. Strategic directions exist across various documents, board papers, annual reports, and so on. But can anyone in the business easily describe what the business is looking to achieve?

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

Governance is the framework on which projects and programmes are managed, reported on, signed off and measured. It is simply a necessity for any well-functioning portfolio. Governance ensures that the scope is adhered to and it provides preventative and corrective measures throughout the life of the project.

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

Even highly mature organisations go through restructures. The evolving needs of the business may have fallen out of step with the current hierarchy. An ambitious business strategy may require a long-term plan around how the business itself is structured.

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

Managing the time to deliver milestones and the usage of the budget are paramount to any project manager’s role. Projects are usually measured on these things before other factors – often ahead of the quality and benefits.

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

Governance of a project or programme should take a mature approach to identifying risks and threats. A portfolio plan will also have its own risks. The portfolio risks will include the collective impact of all the risks that each individual project has identified.

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.