Is There Enough ‘Management’ in Portfolio Management?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Portfolio Management  

Over the last several years, I have been spending an increasing amount of my time involved with the portfolio management function of different organizations. In some of the organizations I have worked with, the quality of that portfolio management has been truly exceptional. But those organizations have been the exception. In the majority of cases, portfolio management has been a lot of portfolio, but not a lot of management.

Instead, the focus has been on reporting consolidated information, communicating decisions made by leadership, and generally facilitating efficiency across the projects and programs that make up the portfolio.

That’s valuable, but is it really portfolio management? Not to me.

The portfolio management disconnect

A lot of this approach stems from two main causes:

1. The software used to consolidate projects at the portfolio level and integrate with planning, which is generally referred to as project portfolio management (PPM) or strategic portfolio management (SPM) depending on the capabilities
2. The perspective by business leaders and strategy execution functions that portfolio management is more closely aligned with project delivery than strategy delivery

I’m not blaming the companies that develop the tools here. The software does what it claims; it manages the work involved in the portfolio, just as project management …

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