There's no single "correct" answer to this question, as it's dependent on determining which metrics your organization deems to be valuable for meeting its objectives. The culture of your organization, and its values, will determine what is perceived as "worth tracking."
At a bare minimum, however, I'd be inclined to break down the key elements into a few categories, such as "requirements-related," "quality-related," "planning-related," "design-related," and "implementation-related," as well as the obvious "cost-related" items. Each of these domains has their own typical metrics, and each helps to inform the overall effectiveness of your program-management efforts across the organization's portfolio. Be sure to remember that each of these categories should be measured from both the business-side and the technology-side perspective, to get the "big picture" defined accurately. Failing to do this from both perspectives will greatly decrease your organization's success, since you'll likely measure only items of interest to whichever constituency you've favored, at the expense of the other one. Keep your stakeholders involved, and keep them informed...all of them.
Most portfolio management efforts fail to adequately focus on much other than cost... and unfortunately, that's likely to result in only "documenting the downward spiral of cost vs schedule," rather than helping to identify what's actually going on at each phase of each project within the overall program-management portfolio. Avoid falling into the "cost-tracking-only" trap, since it's often possible to prevent much wasted effort by getting the requirements adequately defined, following a meaningful approach (such as IIBA's business analysis approach for requirements management) and then applying recognized project-management methodologies (such as PMI's approach for project/program management.) There are, certainly, other example methodologies for each of these categories, but what's most important is that whichever one you pick, that it be understood and actually used by those impacted by the programs/projects you're managing within your portfolio.
If your organization has a clearly-articulated strategic plan, it's not difficult to define measurements for how well you're actually achieving the goals you've taregeted as important to your org's success.
If you don't have a clearly-articulated strategic plan, there's not a lot of value in tracking metrics just for the sake of keeping score...your effort would be better spent in helping to shape and define which strategic objectives are worth pursuing, and then actively managing the effort to define and articulate how those objectives are supposed to be reached.
The closest thing to a "right" answer to your question is this: provide the key elements that track the Senior Managers'/President's stated goals, but also be sure to provide a statement of the barriers that will prevent you from achieving those goals. One last thought: don't avoid tracking the difficult or politically-sensitive topics, since they're real, and may be significant barriers to your org's progress. They'll also be recurring themes in your "lessons learned" discussions, if everyone's comfortable enough to bring them up. If these are issues of interest in the "lessons learned" stage, why not address them during the active program-management stage?
If you're paying attention to the right things, it'll become apparent which elements are worth tracking/reporting. You'll also need to be able to show progress for each indicator, toward some clearly-stated time-based goal. An additional tip: track a fairly concise but consistent set of indicators across ALL projects/programs within the portfolio, or you'll end up with a rather chaotic, and hence difficult-to-interpret, set of metrics.
More importantly, though, remember that the data-collection and reporting of these metrics isn't the end-point goal -- it's just the mechanism you'll use to inform sound decision-making.
The organization's decision-making itself is the reason you have a portfolio-management methodology, and hopefully, if you've gotten it well defined, that decision-making approach will adequately serve your organization's ability to meet its targeted goals. If it fails to do so, the approach may need to be reconsidered, and, hopefully, improved. Otherwise, you're doomed to repeat the same mistakes from project to project, which rarely makes much sense. An effective program management team will recognize this and is likely to be quite willing and prepared to change direction and methods, when needed.
The final question I'd ask is this: how will the portfolio-related decision-making process itself be measured, and by whom, and how will this process be communicated and evolved as decisions are made, enacted, and then supported over time?
The answer to that question will tell you a great deal about how willingly, and how readily, your organization is able to respond to change, and how well they can recognize the opportunity to capitalize on the results of your portfolio-management efforts as your programs and the projects within them are formed, executed, and implemented.
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