Managing Portfolios: Optimising strategic contribution

Fourteen years ago, Steve Jenner and Craig Kilford wrote Management of Portfolios for the OGC/Axelos. Now they are back with a new, enhanced and up-dated guidebook: Managing Portfolios. Steve will be outlining some of the key themes of the book at the APM Portfolio Management Conference on May 15th 2025, but in the meantime, what is portfolio management?

At its core, portfolio management is about ensuring we optimise strategic contribution from our available resources. This is achieved by the three ‘rights’ (illustrated in the Managing Portfolios Model below): doing the ‘right’ things, doing things ‘right’, and crucially, doing things at the ‘right’ time.

Digging a little deeper into these three ‘rights’:

Doing the ‘right’ things: To ensure we invest in the set of projects and programmes (what we refer to as initiatives) that collectively offer the greatest strategic contribution, subject to their risk/achievability and affordability.
Doing things ‘right’: So that portfolio performance matches the promise. This doesn’t mean that portfolio management takes responsibility for initiative delivery or micro-manages individual initiatives. Indeed accountability for benefits realisation remains with the sponsor and responsibility for project delivery continues to reside with the project manager. Rather, portfolio management is concerned with ensuring the constraints, risks and dependencies that too often de-rail delivery, are identified and effectively managed at a collective level, and that benefits realisation and strategic contribution are optimised in practice. Portfolio management is thus an enabler for both strategy execution (by ensuring we do the ‘right’ initiatives) and initiative delivery (by ensuring we address the barriers to delivery).
Doing things at the ‘right’ time: Evidence shows that where the active portfolio exceeds the availability of limited resources, progress rapidly deteriorates – much as when traffic density on a motorway exceeds a certain level, the result is phantom traffic jams. Sequencing and scheduling initiatives to avoid overloading the organisation’s capacity to deliver and to absorb business change, thus enables the portfolio to deliver more by doing less at any one time.

Sounds great, but in the real world achieving this is rarely easy. As Steve says in Managing Portfolios. “Nothing works for ever, organisational politics are a reality, and the people dimension adds a degree of complexity that shouldn’t be underestimated. I spent some time with a large multinational organisation that has won awards for its approach to portfolio management. The portfolio manager was presenting a session outlining the progress they had made and their priorities going forward. At the end of the presentation, one of the most highly regarded portfolio analysts leaned over to me and said, ‘Steve, it’s like Game of Thrones round here, all the senior managers are stabbing each other in the back’. I say this not to denigrate the progress this organisation had made, but to highlight the challenges faced in that weird and wacky place we call the real world.”

Want to find out more? Come along on May 15th and Steve will outline the key success characteristics of effective portfolio management – what’s the difference that makes the difference? Steve will illustrate his case with stories and examples from successful organisations from around the world. He’ll also highlight the advice we should follow from Shakespeare, Kenny Rogers and the Navy Seals; and he’ll challenge you to consider whether like Neo, you’ll take the red pill or whether you’ll continue with the blue pill.