Portfolio Santa

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.

  Estimating   Portfolio Management  

December 26^th is a busy day for Santa. You might think that he would be taking it easy after a long night of global travel, but even though the jet lag is exhausting, Santa is still working hard. The problem is always that there is so much preparation and planning that goes into a smooth and seamless Christmas night, he needs to start as early as possible to stand any chance of getting things done by next year’s deadline. So December 26^th is simply the start of the next year’s planning.

One of Santa’s biggest frustrations is the amount of time and effort that goes into projects that never actually deliver any benefits for him the following Christmas. Just last year, a huge amount of work went into aerodynamic studies of the reindeer. Santa will willingly admit the custom made “body kits” for the reindeer were hilariously funny, but they didn’t make any difference whatsoever to their miles per pound (of oats). This year, Santa had decided to try and find a better way—so he went online and started doing some research.

He came across the site ProjectManagement.com, where he started reading about something called “portfolio management.” Santa wasn’t really up on all these new trends, but from what he could gather, portfolio management should help avoid all that wasted effort on projects that wouldn’t help. It …

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