Defining the Portfolio

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  

Let me start this article with an apology. If everyone reading this knows what a portfolio is in the context of portfolio management, then I am wasting your time and you can stop reading now--I’m sorry that I doubted you. However, before you go, consider this. In my experience, I have come across a lot of people who claim to know what a portfolio is, and very few of them had what I consider to be the right answer.

Now you might argue that the issue there is not with them but rather it’s with me--they know what a portfolio is, but I don’t. Well maybe, but if that’s the case why don’t you read the rest of this article and see whether my view is completely wrong? And if it is, leave me some feedback to say so (I won’t be offended, and I enjoy the commentary).

Let’s start with the easy part--a portfolio is not a roll-up of the projects and programs that are currently underway in the organization. Many PMOs conduct portfolio-level reporting by consolidating reports from all areas under their control and generating a single summary of “the portfolio” in dashboard form. I don’t have an issue with the production of such a dashboard; it’s a good summary of the work underway, but it sure as heck isn’t reflecting the portfolio. For a start, it only reflects the projects that are actively being worked on.

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