More and more organizations decide to organize project portfolio management considering the needs of different business areas and the maturity of the operating methods.
Multi-portfolio management is a phenomenon that is gaining strength. More and more companies and public organizations want to use project portfolio management in decision-making by means of multi-portfolio management. In this way, business sector-specific information models, prioritization, project models, risk management and budgeting can be used in a way that supports the industry or business area.
With the experience of more than 350 portfolio implementations, Thinking Portfolio sees the trend of multi-portfolio management arising above all from the concrete needs of customers. If the entire organization must raise its capabilities in project portfolio management to the level it needs most in a certain business or business area, overdevelopment is ahead. The operating model will then not produce value in the right way for those for whom a lighter operating model would be sufficient for good decision-making and guidance. In this case, the information model and functionalities of the project portfolio can be built so that they are flexible within the same common project portfolio. Another popular option is to create two or more portfolios according to maturity level, needs and requirements.
A key feature of a good project portfolio is to support multi-portfolio management so that the parallel use of several portfolios is easy. Special things are e.g. centralized resource planning that connects portfolios, hourly records, user management, dependencies, risk management, financial reporting and a clear snapshot that easily connects all portfolios.
In this way, each business sector or business area-specific portfolio can have operating instructions, a development path and a portfolio owner that take into account different needs. Multi-portfolio management brings flexibility and facilitates the development and implementation of portfolio management. In addition to project portfolios, multi-portfolio management also includes e.g. application, service, risk, premises, M&A, strategy and metric portfolios as well as sustainability and various compliance portfolios.
Good portfolio management is 80% looking ahead and forecasting and 20% monitoring what has happened
The operating environment is an important unifying factor for portfolios. Changes in the operating environment and risks such as raw materials, energy, interest rates, pandemics, legislation, demand, competition, geopolitics and war are common challenges for all portfolios. In this way, risk management and monitoring that connects portfolios can be centralized in a multi-portfolio environment to support forecasting, prioritization and risk management of the entire organization.
