Presenting Portfolio Status

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.

  Communications Management   Portfolio Management   Stakeholder Management  

Portfolio management involves managing disparate projects across the business line. These projects may be totally disconnected by resources or scope, or they may have some connections with each other beyond the company that is executing them.

The portfolio manager must keep track of the entire line of projects and will probably be asked to present the status on the portfolio at some point. Presenting this status is much different than presenting the status on one project or even a large program. The portfolio manager must learn to condense his message and tailor it to the audience so that they will have a good understanding of what is going on within the portfolio and what needs to happen next.

Condense
Condensing is the art of taking a lot of information and simplifying it to the essentials of what is needed at that very moment. In portfolio management, you are often collecting a lot of information about the different projects, anything from the list of resources, the budget, the overall risks and so on. While all of this data helps the portfolio manager and the project managers make decisions about the projects and the portfolio, all of it may not be suitable for a presentation to a group of stakeholders that need to know the overall status of the portfolio. Cramming a PowerPoint slide full of information that is essentially useless to your audience is a good way…

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