Portfolio management

Good day...

I guess the natural career progression of a project manager is to becoming a program manager and portfolio manager. As a portfolio manager you will be responsible not only to lead one project but more to oversee a number of projects running together in parallel, with each project has its own project manager.

Here, your task is more to coordination, projects alignment assurance, and managing the key stakeholders to maintain high satisfaction level of the respective stakeholders. In many cases, becoming a portfolio manager also serves the function as an account manager, whereby the main responsibility is to understand incoming business initiatives, do the necessary assessment whether the initiatives are recommended to be delivered, perform initial assessment of the involved budget, timeline and resources, and providing regular updates to the respective business owners on the progress of each project of their concern.

As a portfolio manager, in my experience the key tool is a concise dashboard, consolidating progress and health check status of all projects under your portfolio. The dashboard can be distributed to your internal (or external customers) via e-mail, newsletter, or a regular account meeting. For me, the last one is most preferred, as account meeting fosters interactive discussion, which sometimes go beyond project status, but also covers idea exchange and brainstorming of an emerging initiative.

Internal to an organization, your customers usually include business heads of a particular business or support function. Key success criteria to becoming a well respected portfolio manager in my case is the relationship with the business owners themselves. Maintaining personal rapport outside of meetings and informal discussions is always essential in both directions, namely to obtain the necessary support in doing our work, and to show personal ownership to the portfolio we are managing.

As with other leadership and management role, I found that communication and relationship are inevitable should you like to be successful in the portfolio management role.

Edwin

Picture credit: geralt