Breaking Down the Portfolio

Kenneth has 14 years of healthcare experience in government and private industry. Over eight years of experience managing healthcare IT projects, operations, contracts, and personnel. His work experience includes project management, contracts and procurements, data analysis, claims adjudication, business writing, and business process modeling. Kenneth was certified in 2006 as a Project Management Professional.

  Portfolio Management  

The project portfolio can contain almost any number of projects--and they can be as disparate as possible so long as they all belong under the portfolio manager’s purview, which could be as large as a company or a governmental organization. The portfolio manager will need to learn to break down the portfolio in manageable chunks if he or she desires to have any impact whatsoever on the work beyond just keeping up with his spreadsheets and tables of projects. How you break down the portfolio can have a great impact on the business and the projects on hand.

Team-Based Work
When looking at a large group of projects in a portfolio, you need to understand who is going to do the actual work. Some organizations are split into functional areas so that everyone who will work on a given project is based in one specific team. Unfortunately, that is not the norm in today’s working environment. Most organizations use either a strong or weak matrix; resources are borrowed and loaned in order to work on projects.

Whatever organizational model is used, the portfolio manager must understand where the resources are that need to be engaged on the different projects. Once you understand the different resources that need to be on the team for each project, then you can map the connections between the projects, noting the resources that need to be involved in multiple …

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