Portfolio Review Meetings
Portfolio review meetings are a great way to review and assess the entire project portfolio with the governance team. Unfortunately in practice, these meetings can be overwhelming, time consuming, and unproductive. There are many ways to conduct a portfolio review meeting, but one of the key questions of the governance team is “what do they want to accomplish at the end of the portfolio review”? For some organizations, portfolio review meetings are about getting project status of every project in the portfolio. For other organizations, portfolio review meetings are designed to evaluate each project in the portfolio with the intention of updating priorities.
Options for Portfolio Review Meetings
With this background in mind, we can look at four options for conducting portfolio review meetings:
- OPTION 1: A review of all in-flight projects, current status, relative priority, business value, etc. Some projects may be cancelled, but the primary purpose is to inform the LT of the current in-flight projects.
- OPTION 2: A partial review of projects in the portfolio consisting of high-value/high-risk projects. This provides more in-depth information of critical initiatives and may result in a possible change of priority of certain projects.
- OPTION 3: A high-level review of all projects in the portfolio with the intention of updating project priorities for every project in the portfolio.
- OPTION 4: A review of portfolio scenarios that meet current business needs followed by a selection of a recommended portfolio
Option 4 comes courtesy of Jac Gourden of FLIGHTMAP in a 2012 blog post and is the best approach I have seen for conducting portfolio review meetings. I also have sat through long sessions (although not all-day sessions) of reviewing all the projects in the portfolio and it can be painstakingly tiring. Moreover, these types of portfolio review meetings wear out governance team members and do not yield much value. While there is certainly a time and a place for review the status of all projects or conducting a lengthy review for the purpose of re-prioritizing projects in the portfolio, taking a strategic view is the way to go. Rather than merely focusing on individual projects, a portfolio team can compile a few portfolio scenarios that should be reviewed by the governance team. In many instances, there is significant overlap between the portfolio scenarios, but the emphasis is on the business goals of the portfolio and how a portfolio scenario supports a certain goal. Some examples of portfolio scenarios include:
- Revenue Growth Scenario
- Customer Growth Scenario
- Market Growth Scenario
- Reduced R&D Spend Scenario
- Balanced Portfolio Scenario
These scenarios are easier to produce when efficient frontier analysis is applied. Even after a portfolio recommendation is accepted, there is further work to screen out the projects not included in the portfolio, and in some cases to make worthy exceptions for some projects that would have otherwise been removed from the portfolio.
What do you think? Have you tried this approach before? How successful was it? Let me know.
- Prioritize Projects With A Scoring Model - October 11, 2018
- A Guide to Building a Project Prioritization Scoring Model - September 4, 2018
- Know The Difference Between Work Intake Versus Stage-Gate - April 1, 2018
Hi Tim,
Thanks for linking to my blog; can you please correct the name to FLIGHTMAP (not Flightpress)?
Anyway, I’d like to get in touch about joint business development, since we seem to share a view on best rpactice portfolio management.
Let me know?
–Jac
Hi Jac, the change is made. Thank you.
It would be helpful to put Portfolio Review Meetings in the context of all organizational planning meetings. For example, strategic planning, initiative planning, product planning, release planning, etc.