Hi Mat,

Good questions. Input to the portfolio will come from many directions (senior management, employees, internal customers, external customers, etc.). Managing the project pipeline is important. If you take a look at slide 9 from this presentation you can see how work comes and gets reviewed before entering the portfolio.

In my mind, the strategic plan helps senior management lay out their vision of the work that needs to get done, but this needs to be grounded in reality and balanced against all of the other competing project requests.

Strategic ranking criteria can be used to evaluate proposals to determine the strength of strategic alignment.

Did I answer your question?

Tim

Do you considere the strategic initiatives as the only input to the portfolio? How would you represent the connection between the portfolio target, allocation and strategic ranking critiera to the strategies (strategic plan)?

Thanks,

Hi Richard,

Thanks for the reply. I agree with you that these are parallel layers of planning. The strategic plan may extend further out into the future than portfolio planning or project planning, but I did not mean to imply that these are three serial steps of planning. They are definitely parallel. I will update the blog.

Thanks for the post. At the moment this reads as if you are advocating that these three layers of planning are events which happen in series. I think it would be useful to consider them as three parallel processes. I know many organisations make these things a kind of annual or three year event but the results are not often very good.

Regards

Richard