Remote work recommendations due to the coronavirus pandemic and a rapidly accelerating tendency to move from Excel spreadsheets to more presentable and visual reporting spurred the growth of Thinking Portfolio’s portfolio management.
Coronavirus pandemic accelerates the trend of leading with knowledge
“Our customers have proven it: effective strategy implementation is made possible by a multi-portfolio environment, that is, the active management of several portfolios. Having all your portfolios conveniently in one place allows this strategy to be implemented effectively. This is especially important because most of the good strategies fall into execution – the challenges of management during remote working and the challenges of information management revealed by remote working are probably the most important,” says Managing Partner Esa Toivonen.
Finland is a strong forerunner in cloud services and portfolio management
Our customer base doubled compared to the year before the coronavirus pandemic in the Netherlands, as well. The fact is that there is a strong demand for Finnish portfolio management and leading with knowledge in the world.
Finland has the advantage of a 5-year lead in cloud services – and Thinking Portfolio when it comes to portfolio management – compared to larger EU countries such as Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Austria and Spain.
The future lies in portfolio management platforms
The implementation of the strategy can be broken down into different portfolios with their own data models, such as project, investment, risk, HRD, product development, service, application, marketing and various customer-specific portfolios.
In this way, the overall picture is clear and prioritisation, resource planning and risk management can be easily done for the organisation on the basis of a common situational picture. The strengths of Thinking Portfolio are the 15-year product development of our SaaS service, an experienced and passionate portfolio management development team, and a continuous 20% investment in net sales for our own application and service development. For years, we have been introducing a new version of our portfolio management platform three times a week, and development needs come largely from our internetworked active customer base.
“Good portfolio management increases an organisation’s motivation and resilience, irons out kinks and ensures peace of mind.
My question for management is this: is Excel your only risk or project portfolio management tool in 2021?”
Esa Toivonen
Thinking Portfolio
Business environment change cannot be stopped
“Decision-making is always ongoing – even right now, because no one can stop the business environment,” reminds Toivonen and continues: “Portfolio management is as important to an organisation as is decision-making.” At the heart of portfolio management there are new ways of acting, communicating, making decisions and drawing conclusions from the situational picture. It is a matter of leading with knowledge through portfolio management, in which case the organisation takes over decision making.
“Good portfolio management increases an organisation’s motivation and resilience, irons out kinks and ensures peace of mind,” Toivonen states. He notes at the same time that “over-resourcing is not better productivity – but an absolute burnout and quality risk.”
“My question for management is this: is Excel your only risk or project portfolio management tool in 2021?,” Toivonen asks.
Identifying the right moment is crucial in decision making: 80% of success in decision making is based on making the decision at the right time. Sufficient information about the situational picture is needed for successful timing. “Success requires a situational picture – no one dares to drive a car with one eye closed. Right now, the business environment is determining what is the required rate of change and one needs to respond quickly to everything that comes up.
Without a common situational picture, decisions cannot be made at the right time,” Toivonen describes the need for portfolio management as a critical success factor.
“As an accelerating trend, we see that our customer organisations are expanding their portfolio management into new areas of leading with knowledge and new portfolio models, as well as investing in integrations. The trend is clear – without portfolios, organisations are like orienteers in a dark forest without headlamps. Then even a good runner will not be able to unleash his or her potential. Developing skills and culture also takes time – like when learning to swim, you have to start when your feet still reach the bottom,” explains Toivonen and gives thumbs up to comprehensive portfolio management with the experience of having seen more than 200 different portfolio deployments. The outlook for 2021 promises strong growth in usage for the portfolio management platform, similar to the growth during the exceptional pandemic-dominated year that has just come to an end.
Customer centricity is today’s way to ask for customers’ permission to succeed
Customers gave Thinking Portfolio a permission to succeed. The past exceptional year gave Thinking Portfolio a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 77 compared to 65 the previous year. Surprisingly, the era of remote work has improved customer satisfaction across the board. It seems that portfolio management has a well-established place in leading with knowledge. Thinking Portfolio’s customers include many pioneering organisations who have realised the potential of portfolio management ‒ now up to some 250,000 registered users in more than 50 countries.
