Unlike a project, which has a specified end goal or deliverable, a portfolio represents a more strategic planning committee to continuously optimize the allocation, prioritization, and scheduling of resources across many projects. Hence, project portfolio is a term referring to an organization’s group of projects and the process by which they are selected and managed. Above all, all these factors and more make it clear that project portfolio management is a procedure that can serve any organization with a portfolio of projects. Stay tuned to learn about how to create a project portfolio.
Overview
Generally speaking, organizations will have an opportunity for far more projects than funding can support, so the selection process must choose a subset of projects to maximize the company’s profit goals while obeying budgetary restrictions. Together, executives wish to manage the overall risk of the portfolio while ensuring that cash flow and other such requirements are satisfied.
Thus, Project portfolio is a term that refers to an organization’s group of projects and the process by which they are selected and managed. In addition, The project portfolio is strategically selected groups of different projects or programs appropriate to the different activities involved in the project to advance the corporation’s organizational goals.
What Should a Project Portfolio Include?
Your project portfolio should focus on project work that is, unique undertakings that have specified deliverables and projected start and termination dates. Determine who, what, and when is doing or will be doing the work, what the project is, and over what time period the work is expected to flow.
What Are the 2 Main Types of Portfolios?
There are two main types of portfolio assessments: “instructional” or “working” portfolios, and “showcase” portfolios. Additionally, The showcase portfolio is often used to share a student’s best achievements or evidence of learning. Students are generally given the choice to decide what is published. Also, they assist with self-marketing, online branding, or building a positive digital footprint.
In higher education, we see commonly see showcase portfolios that highlight a student’s CV or resume to suit a particular purpose such as attracting potential employers. And, working portfolio the second type of portfolio that we commonly see is more of a running record of learning. The purpose is to capture the learning process. It’s also called a development portfolio, a reflection portfolio, or a formative portfolio.
How to Create a Project Portfolio
If you have a few projects with similar goals and strategies, you can place them in the portfolio, so you’ll be able to observe all the information related to multiple projects at once. Let us take a look at the steps to create a project portfolio.
#1. Determine the Guiding Objectives of the Business
Before you start thinking about portfolio management, you’ll need to understand your organization’s business objectives and strategic goals. The idea is that your project portfolio aligns with the strategic planning of your organization, so you’ll need to check if it’s financial objectives and customer value are good enough for your organization.
#2. Capture and Study Requests and Ideas
Project ideas could come from anywhere at any time. It’s important to have a regular intake process to capture these ideas so they can be tracked and evaluated. This may be as simple as a spreadsheet maintained by the portfolio manager, or it could be an online database where anyone in the company can enter ideas as they think of them.
#3. Choose the Best Projects
Once ideas are captured, portfolio managers must go through a standard process to assess and select the projects that will move forward. This requires more than just ensuring they are aligned with the company objectives, such as:
- Money involved?
- Estimated time?
- What is the return on this project? (Interest?)
- Are the resources available?
- What are the dangers associated with this project?
Since decisions are being made on multiple projects at once, this can become even more complicated. But, a common way to simplify the project portfolio management process, and remove any disposition, is to create a simple list of criteria that each project is measured and scored against, such as return on investment (ROI), which is a common ranking factor.
#4. Validate Portfolio Feasibility and Start Projects
Once a conclusion has been made on which projects to move forward with, it’s important to validate the portfolio as a whole. This includes making sure the mix of projects chosen isn’t too large, risky, expensive, or interdependent. Also, the portfolio should be properly balanced and aligned with business goals. Once the portfolio is validated, project managers can be assigned and the projects commenced.
#5. Manage and Monitor the Portfolio
Projects change and grow over time, and new ideas may be added to the list of potential projects. This is why it’s important to continually manage both the ongoing portfolio execution and the intake process. Managing and monitoring the portfolio may include the following:
- Working with project managers to monitor the performance of projects
- Identifying and resolving conflicts between projects
- Making changes to the portfolio as needed, including putting projects on hold, canceling projects, and adding in new projects
- Ensuring projects are still aligned with the business objectives
Project Portfolio Management Software
It’s abundantly clear that managing a portfolio without the proper software to oversee concurrent projects is a daunting task. Storing and analyzing data with traditional software can also cause project inconsistencies and cost overruns. Therefore, Project portfolio management software offers businesses the capability to organize numerous programs and projects into a portfolio and gather critical data across projects.
Thus, project portfolio management software is designed to handle overarching projects, programs, or products with the aim to show the performance and resource demands of current projects, as well as projects that are being bid, sold, or will start at a future date.
Example of Best Project Portfolio Management Software
Below are the best project portfolio management software and tools currently available that can elevate the way you work.
#1. Monday.com
monday.com is an award-winning work and project management software that helps teams of all sizes plan, prioritize, manage, and execute their work more effectively. The software offers solutions for a wide range of use cases such as marketing, sales, operations, IT, HR, and more.
#2. Kissflow Project
Kissflow Project is a growing name in the world of project portfolio management for its sleek design and involuntary interface. With a simple but highly efficient workspace, Kissflow Project allows users to extensively integrate processes across multiple channels and automate data collection on a single platform.
#3. Smartsheet
Smartsheet is an online project management and collaboration software. It includes automated alerts, instantaneous updating and sharing across team members, resource management, nested tasks organized in a hierarchy, a Gantt chart view, exportable and automated reports, and integration.
#4. Oracle Primavera
Oracle’s Primavera is a software suite designed for construction and other asset-intensive industries. It contains a variety of project planning, management, and execution components for buyers to select from.
#5. Micro Focus
This is a cloud-based hybrid software that integrates data with workflows to align business strategy with corporate investments. Its portfolio management module lets users mull over different what-if scenarios and create an ideal mix of proposals and projects.
Factors to Consider When Choosing Project Portfolio Management Software
There are several basic areas you should consider when choosing a portfolio management software solution.
#1. Cost
Just as every company needs to find something that fits into its overall budget. When considering cost, look at the monthly costs as well as any third-party costs (such as integrations with other software) that may be necessary to have an efficient system. With that said, you also want to make sure you’re investing in a system that can keep up with your daily workflows.
#2. Efficiency
Choose a system that helps keep your people efficient in task management. The ability to create tasks and track them through a project timeline helps you make sense of complicated projects with a lot of moving parts. Having the right management features is crucial in service of this kind.
#3. Flexibility
Things change quickly in many company operations. Your project portfolio management software should give you plenty of options for customizing workflows, tasks, and other options. This way, you have a solution that morphs into what your company needs to organize projects rather than something you need to change systems to fit into.
#4. Software integrations
This can fill a lot of gaps in your system when it comes to flexibility. Many leading providers offer the ability to connect data with other types of business apps, from customer relationship management (CRM) systems to cloud storage systems and beyond. These integrations can automate a lot of tedious work on your end by automatically connecting information from these other platforms and bringing that data into your project management solution.
#5. Transparency to all stakeholders
Parties should be able to see the whole slate of projects, where each is at, and review which take priority on the list. With that said, having a robust set of permissions options can help you maintain project security. While some workers on your team may need full edit access to task items, there could be scenarios where you’re dealing with sensitive information and want to block out unrelated parties from the project. You should also be able to toggle view-edit access for users depending on their involvement in the project.
Project Portfolio Management
Project portfolio management is a formal technique used by organizations to identify, prioritize, coordinate, and monitor projects that align with their strategy and goals. This approach examines the risk-reward ratio of each project, the available funds, the likelihood of a project’s duration, and the expected outcomes.
By organizing and converging every piece of data regarding proposed and current projects, project portfolio managers provide forecasting and business analysis for companies looking to invest in new projects. In essence, with project portfolio management, you gain visibility across projects and initiatives to connect your team’s daily to-dos with your company’s organizational strategy.
Hence, Project portfolio management is aimed at reducing inefficiencies that occur when undertaking a project and eliminating potential risks, which can occur due to a lack of information or systems available. It helps the organization to align its project work to meet the projects whilst utilizing its resources to the maximum. Additionally, all the project managers of the organization need to have an awareness of the organizational project portfolio management in order to contribute to the organizational goals when executing respective projects.
Benefits of Project Portfolio Management
By leveraging the benefits of project portfolio management, companies can plan out all the pieces of their project to get the best results. While that may sound easy, significant effort, time, and resources are required to successfully create a project portfolio management strategy that works. Below are the benefits
#1. Aligns Project Goals with Business Strategy
The ultimate mission of any company is to meet both short and long-term objectives, and every project embarked upon takes that company closer to its goals. Project managers need to ensure that all projects align with the company’s strategy and objectives. Therefore, when projects don’t align with the objectives of the company, this can result in a waste of resources and workforce efforts, together with the damaging prospect of project overload.
#2. Accurate Project Performance Data
Project Portfolio Management is identified for its monitoring and control capabilities, enabling project managers to connect high-level portfolio data with project indicators, at the ground level. This helps ascertain if the portfolio is performing as expected. By establishing performance guidelines and tolerance levels, it becomes easier to identify potential trends that can negatively affect the portfolio.
#3. Makes Decision-Making Easier
Stakeholders may struggle to manage disputes that can arise with different project teams focusing on their priorities and contending for limited resources. By employing a standardized approach to decision-making, they subjectively evaluate the demand from competing project teams. Also, management teams make important decisions constantly, and they need to get as many of them right on the first try.
#4. Helps to Prioritize Projects
Good project portfolio managers focus their limited resources on their most valuable projects. When customer requests, regulatory requirements or strategy demands arise, teams use project portfolio management to work on viable projects that help achieve organizational goals.
#5. Builds Governance and Oversight into Project Management
Project portfolio management builds a natural governance model for all the projects of an organization. While project management looks at a single project, it provides a holistic overview of all projects. Project managers can create a contingency plan, employ data-driven techniques, and lead the company on the right path.
What Types of Industries and Companies Benefit from Project Portfolios?
According to research by PM Solutions, 71% of companies have a project portfolio management system. Its growth is evident in the rising number of companies adopting project portfolio management solutions. Project portfolio management is not geared toward any specific industry if your company handles multiple projects, your team will benefit from it. such as:
- IT
- Marketing
- Construction
- Financial services
- Project management team
Project Portfolio Manager
The Project Portfolio manager is the person who groups and organizes all your projects, finds similarities and conflicts, intertwines the resources, and finds suitable timelines for releases and deadlines. Also, the project portfolio manager develops, establishes, and maintains the standards and procedures for managing all the projects and collects feedback to ensure that every project result meets customers’ and stakeholders’ expectations regarding deadlines, costs, and performance.
Additionally, their job is done by working with various portfolio management tools, financial algorithms, criteria, standards, and models to help the project portfolio manager align the projects to the strategic goals of the organization. Below are the necessary skill and requirements for the project portfolio manager,
Skills and Requirements:
- Determination
- Analytical ability
- Competitive spirit
- Emotional intelligence
- Communication
- Creativity and agility
- Managerial skills
- Knowledge of relevant products and procedures
- Years of experience in project management
- Applied master’s degree in management
- certification
What Is the Role of the Project Portfolio Manager?
The project portfolio manager evaluates all projects and programs from a strategic perspective. They have the authority to prioritize projects based on how important they are to the organization and allocate resources accordingly. The role includes the following responsibilities
- Creating a pipeline of projects and programs;
- Aligning pipeline to enterprise goals;
- Managing project portfolio risks, progress, and issues;
- Continuously monitoring and reporting on the portfolio;
- Communicating to enterprise leadership the expected ROI for planned projects and programs.
- Effective application of project governance & active engage stakeholders at all levels
- Proactive issue & risk management
- Definition of project plans including the identification of key project activities, business & project resource requirements, and critical path
- Proactive tracking of project schedule to agreed targets
- Lead project ensuring project scope is managed, project objectives are met and an Appropriate level of detail is applied
- Drive execution of internal projects
Final thoughts
There you have it. You need to know that as a company grows and takes on more projects, portfolio management becomes more and more critical. Project portfolio management provides a big-picture view of all potential and ongoing projects. Which allows executives and managers to make more informed decisions about their business. In essence, Project portfolio management has helped managers effectively manage time, skills, resources, and budgets. Also, made it much easier to accomplish many tasks, especially in situations where managers have to multitask.
References
- PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE: Top Investment Software In 2023
- HOW TO CREATE A PORTFOLIO: Quick and Easy Steps to Create a Portfolio in 30 Minutes or Less
- PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT: Definition & Everything You Need To Know
- HOW TO GET INTO PROJECT MANAGEMENT: Definition, Guide, and Requirement
- Portfolio Management Systems: Definition, And Guide to the Processes
- PROJECT PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT: Meaning, Top Software, Processes & Benefits
