Risk At the Portfolio Level

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   Risk Management   ProjectsAtWork  

The portfolio is the cornerstone of applied organizational risk management, but it is also where there is less day-to-day focus so risks can slip through the cracks. In response, we must identify risk owners at the portfolio level and connect project activities with business concerns such as idea-generation and benefits realization.

In this series we have discussed some foundational organizational elements required for organizational risk management, including how organizational-level risk processes differ from project-level processes (see “Building A Risk Foundation”). Let’s now look at how organizational risk management impacts different elements of the project execution framework, starting with the portfolio.

Portfolio management can mean different things to different organizations, but for the purposes of this discussion I consider the largest possible scope — from idea generation to benefits realization. It follows that strategic risk management should have the same scope, and that’s going to be a new experience for a lot of organizations, so an example may help.

Let’s look at the idea of generating and developing ideas that will ultimately be validated and the best ones presented to the planning and approval process as project candidates. There are two significant risks that can be considered here:

• The risk that …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.