Your Challenge: As Portfolio Manager, you’re responsible for communicating portfolio results and future capacity to your steering committee. Business and IT leaders need more accurate information on project status and resource availability to decide when to start and stop projects. You need to better understand the needs of the PMO and assess the costs and benefits associated with different tools and approaches to PPM. Our Advice - Critical Insight: PPM is a practice, not a tool. Before succeeding with a commercial tool, you need to establish discipline and trust around reporting processes, which can be done using spreadsheets and other simple tools. Portfolio management is separate from project management. Think of it as the accounting department for time. Project managers report into the portfolio and are held accountable to it, but it isn’t simply an extension of project management. Our Advice - Impact and Result: Decrease the wasted portfolio budget by reducing the number of cancelled projects and other sources of efficiency. Establish the portfolio as the “one source of truth” for project reporting by increasing rigor around project status updating and reporting. Align project intake with resource capacity to improve throughput, quality of estimates, and stakeholder satisfaction.

1. Develop a Project Portfolio Management Strategy
Time is money, spend it wisely
The Portfolio Management Officer (PMO) and/or Portfolio Manager and/or CIO interested in optimizing their Project Portfolio Management (PPM
Processes and Tools).
The optimal Project Portfolio Management (PPM) strategy involves the full participation of the CIO. If the member is one of the few with highly evolved
PMO models that have conveyed authority to the PMO, then the CIO is less vital to this process.
Situation:
As Portfolio Manager you’re responsible for communicating portfolio results and future capacity to your steering committee. You need to help them make
insightful intake decisions based on accurate information.
It is your duty to maintain the frequency of currency of the portfolio. A PPM Strategy is needed to help direct the PMO towards a higher level of capability.
Complication
The portfolio is not seen as the ‘one source of truth’ when it comes to project reporting. There are multiple conflicting reports circulating around
stakeholders and management.
You have a commercial tool that is not well-adopted or does not suit the needs of your organization.
You need to better understand the needs of the PMO and assess the costs and benefits associated with different tools and approaches to PPM.
(Resolution/this research will help you: )
Objectively assess PPM maturity by analyzing the costs and benefits of different levels of PPM capability to find the right level of maturity for your
organization.
Select and implement the right type of tool for your organization by exploring Info-Tech’s current catalogue of research in the PPM space to find the
blueprints that are most applicable to your needs (i.e. a home-grown solution vs. a commercial tool).
Document a strategy that will:
Establish the portfolio as the ‘one source of truth’ for project reporting by increasing rigor around project status updating and reporting.
Improve intake and prioritization by starting only those projects that your organization has the capacity to complete.
Implement resource optimized processes and tools by reconciling supply and demand
Maintain and apply your portfolio data to optimize and revise your PPM strategy over time.
Get senior management approval or buy-in for organizational changes to ensure that there is continuous support for the PPM Solution.
If time is money, think of the PMO as the accounting department for time. As the Portfolio Manager, it is your responsibility to ensure that time is spent
wisely in pursuit of the goals handed down by the portfolio owner. Use this PPM Strategy to master the art of resource optimization and portfolio
throughput.
These are mostly all the step-insights so I don’t have a lot to offer here that wouldn’t be repetitive. Email me if this is a problem we can try to work
something out.- a lot of the intro/member understanding stuff from the old infographic is still relevant, but we have to take out the whole
goals/processes/tools triangle idea because that is no longer our thought model.

17. http://www.infotech.com/research/ss/develop-a-project-portfolio-
management-strategy