Portfolio Manager

The portfolio manager is key to business agility and enabling business outcomes, acting as the glue between the Strategy Realization Office, line-of-business executives and the domain PMOs delivering the work. Their success depends on the portfolio manager’s ability to deliver against the organization’s strategic plans.

KEY CHALLENGES:

• Difficulties in flowing the concepts of portfolio management throughout the strategic planning, delivery and outcome management process. Portfolio management is more principle than it is process and procedure and it requires understanding and acceptance from all functions to ensure success.

• Difficulties in expanding portfolio management across business functions. Successful portfolio management will help to eliminate siloes and centralize strategic decision making, but if those siloes are resistant, the portfolio manager could struggle to gain traction, impacting the performance of the entire enterprise.

• Lack of business understanding. Portfolio management isn’t a silver bullet that will solve all challenges. If organizations haven’t invested in enterprise architecture and the related discipline of business architecture, they will still struggle to understand and define value streams, making it harder for portfolio management to succeed. If they’re not committed to strategic portfolio management, they will have difficulty aligning and delivering work, etc.