The next edition of the workshop will be held in Italian. Please visit the Italian page of the workshop Modern Portfolio Management.
Modern Portfolio Management is a suitable approach whenever you manage multiple projects simultaneously. It involves anything beyond the work of a single (or few) team(s) working on a given project.
It enables a connection between all the levels involved: strategical (high level), operational (low level), and everything in between.
Thanks to Modern Portfolio Management, you can visualize and create a connection between projects and company strategy. You can balance Demand and Capability by using decision-making tools to choose what, when and why.
Following a traditional approach, a decision is made about what to do; then, people are allocated to that project. As if it was an alien spaceship, these people are sucked in from what they were doing, given a new project, and sent back once it is over. And then another spaceship comes with another project, and so on. Here’s how companies usually work.
Following Agile and Lean principles, Modern Portfolio Management aims to overturn this perspective, from being guided by projects and deadlines to the idea that the people, the teams and the workflows are driving our initiatives. This way, the projects will adapt to the situation rather than the people. By doing so, we’ll avoid “decisions from above” that are not aligned with how people work.
To summarise – we follow a pull, and not push, approach; we only start new things when we have the capacity to do it, and we don’t manage our business as if we had “infinite capacity” or 100% capacity at all times.
This, and much more, is the topic of Modern Portfolio Management Workshop by Gaetano Mazzanti.
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.
Program
Some of the questions we try to answer when managing a portfolio of projects are always the same; what project should I start? Which one should I cancel? What can wait? And how long for? Who’s going to work on it, and when?
The traditional approach is responsible for problems such as the over-allocation of people and teams and having too many ongoing activities in parallel. This then causes delays, a rise in costs and the inability to react rapidly when conditions and requests from the market arise.
Kicking off new activities is costly – we only profit once they’re completed. But starting an activity and leaving it unfinished, blocking it or slowing it down is equally expensive.
We need to learn how to facilitate a decisional and operational flow to know what to start and when and make sure that every activity we start can go to the end of its cycle smoothly.
During this workshop, Gaetano Mazzanti will guide us to understand the principles and practices to adopt to manage the traditional problems we face in portfolio management. All of it aims to reach a better time to market and increase effectiveness and adaptability.
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.
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.
Online Workshop – How does it work
The workshop is aimed at a maximum of 14 people and it will be delivered remotely and in live-streaming: the trainer and all participants will be in a video conference and will have a series of digital tools to interact with each other and work hands-on.
Despite the online mode, the workshop maintains its trademark interactive and participatory approach. Very few, if any, slides and no pre-recorded videos.
We will apply some principles of the Training From the Back of the Room method, with a prevalence of activities over lectures.
Numerous exercises and practical activities accompany the few short theoretical sessions.
