The questions we try to answer when talking about managing a portfolio of projects are always the same: what do I start with? What do I throw away? What can he wait for? And how long can he wait? Who will work on it and when?
The traditional approach typically generates problems such as over-allocation of people and teams and/or too many initiatives tackled in parallel. This causes delays, increased costs and an inability to react quickly to changes in market conditions and demands.
Starting initiatives costs us money: only when we complete them do we make a profit. Leaving initiatives half-finished, blocking them or slowing them down also costs a lot of money.
In the traditional approach, you typically decide what needs to be done and allocate people, who are sucked into what they are doing – as if it were an alien spaceship – thrown onto new projects, and sent back when the project is finished. Only to be sucked into yet another spaceship, another project, and so on… This is how companies normally work.
Modern Portfolio Management is the right approach for all contexts in which multiple initiatives and projects to manage coexist. It’s about everything beyond the work of a single team or a few teams working on a single project.
It enables the connection between all levels involved: strategic (high), operational (low), and everything in between.
It is that approach that allows you to visualize and create a connection between projects and company strategy, to balance Demand and Capability, applying contextualized decision-making mechanisms to choose what, when and why.
In line with the Agile and Lean principles, Modern Portfolio Management aims to overturn this perspective: from the idea of being guided by projects and deadlines, we move on to the idea that it is people, teams and flows that guide initiatives, so that the projects adapt, and not the other way around. This way you avoid being guided by decisions taken from above, which follow logics that are foreign to the way you should actually work.
To put it simply, we follow a pull and not a push approach: we take things when we have the ability to do so, and we don’t think about “infinite capacity” or 100% capacity.
In this workshop, Gaetano Mazzanti will guide you in understanding and adopting principles and practices useful for addressing the typical problems of traditional portfolio management in favor of management aimed at achieving the best time to market and maximum effectiveness and adaptability.
Target Audience
The Modern Portfolio Management Workshop is aimed:
- CIOs
- CTOs
- PMOs
- Portfolio & Project Managers
- all those involved in Organizational Development and Change Management
And anyone working with portfolio management’s strategic, organizational and operational aspects.
Are you a coach or a consultant, and do you want to join the workshop? Please involve representatives of your clients who fill the roles mentioned above – this will help us focus on real-life cases.
Topics
- Traditional Portfolio Management: problems and challenges
- Flight Levels: Strategy, Coordination, Operativity
- Upstream and Downstream Portfolio
- Triage and Cost of Delay
- Selecting vs Prioritizing; Risk Profiles
- Managing Dependencies
- Forecasting
- Metrics and OKR.
Agenda
Session 1
- Check-in
- Presentations
- Traditional Portfolio Management
- Flight Level Model
- Participant Case Studies.
Session 2
- Check-in + Options Pool
- Modern Portfolio
- Commitment Types
- Participant Case Studies
- Triage & Cost of Delay
- Participant Case Studies.
Session 3
- Check-in + Options Pool
- Risk Profiles & Demand Shaping
- Scheduling
- Dependencies
- Participant Case Studies.
Session 4
- Check-in + Options Pool
- Cadences
- Participant Case Studies
- OKRs
- Team Topologies
- Parking Lot + Q&A.
What will you learn
- How to apply the flight level model to connect strategy and operativity
- How to visualize ongoing and potential activities, connections, dependencies, and ongoing issues at all levels
- How to select which initiatives should progress, when and why
- How to monitor and optimize activity, model and process.
Why should you attend
This workshop is for you if you want to:
- get it right when it comes to the principles behind Modern Portfolio Management
- experiment with practices of portfolio management that you can adapt in your own context
- gain more awareness about the necessity of an end-to-end approach that is aligned with the company strategy.
How it works
Participants will be divided into groups and will work on real cases (cases from their own work context or on a fictitious case), on which to apply the concepts covered.
The course will take place online and live for a maximum of 14 people: the teacher and all participants will be in video conference and will have a series of digital tools available to interact with each other and work hands-on.
Despite the online mode, the course maintains its interactive and participatory approach.
