Has your organization struggled to fully equip your portfolio and program managers for success? If so, rest assured you are not alone! The Construction Industry Institute (CII) membership identified this as one of their top industry issues to address in 2012.
CII members voiced that there are many recommended practices and project tools available to help in the management of individual capital projects. However, they were lagging in support for the complex needs of their portfolio managers.
The Challenge
The increasing need for effective portfolio management comes from some key challenges and increasing pressures to:
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- Achieve consistently high performance across all projects (no outliers; no projects with “footnotes” in the annual report!).
- Align with client expectations.
- Realize economies of scale in our project organizations.
- Consistently achieve organization goals and objectives.
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Help is on it’s way
The compelling results of a two-year research project on “Managing a Portfolio of Projects – Metrics for Improvement” will be rolled out at CII’s Annual Conference being held July 21-23 in Indianapolis. Over 90 organizations (owners and contractors) participated in identifying key business drivers and recommended practices for successful implementation of portfolio management.
CII will be unveiling the Portfolio Management Playbook, an implementation resource developed to assist project organizations in developing and maturing:
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- Portfolio formation strategies
- The role of a portfolio manager
- KPIs for performance management
- Recommended practices for
- Resource management
- Risk management
- Financial management
- Lessons learned
- Front end planning
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Benefits of Effective Portfolio Management
Our participation in this research effort has helped us fully appreciate the significant benefits that can be realized through effective portfolio management, including:
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- Making decisions with confidence in your data. Achieving standardization of the metrics and processes used among projects in your portfolio is critical.
- Improving financial performance with portfolio-centric practices for budget control, management of contingency and cash flow.
- Achieving consistency in schedule performance across the portfolio through effective resource management including sharing and reallocation of resources between projects.
- Reducing risk with a holistic view of risk management for projects at various stages across your entire portfolio.
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Portfolio Management Playbook
If you’re attending this year’s CII annual conference and portfolio management is a focus area for you, be sure and join one of our implementation sessions.
If you’re not attending but are interested in the research findings and recommended practices for effective portfolio management, please reach out to us and we’ll make sure you are on our distribution list when the Portfolio Management Playbook publication is released by CII.