Portfolio Management Consulting

Change activity is increasingly interconnected across the client organisation and often part of a broad business transformation. In these sorts of scenarios we’ve found that strong management of the overall portfolio is vital. Often though we find that these functions fall short of delivering the control and transparency that senior management need.

We do this by focusing in on what the function should be delivering and just as importantly how it should operate in the client’s environment. Our recent article on portfolio management sets this out in more detail.

Priorities vary across organisations but in our experience the outcomes below are the ones that help clients focus on delivering the most value from their portfolio functions:

We help our clients define and put in place portfolio functions that do these things well and in a sustainable way. We work with lead teams to define the mechanisms needed to realise these and put them into practice and help people capabilities required to deliver these effectively.

Delivering all of the above successfully and efficiently places a range of demands on how a strong portfolio operation needs to function and how it operates within the wider organisational context. In our view the following principles are core to driving success:

We help clients put portfolio capabilities in place in line with these principles so that they become an effective part of the organisation from the off and deliver value early. We believe this is vital to ensuring the function “earns the remit” in the organisation and not just with leadership.

We also place an emphasis on supporting clients do this without resorting to large teams – we are firmly of the belief that a small high powered team can make a significant difference

We place a real emphasis on skills transfer from our consultants into client teams. We work best when we work alongside new or established portfolio functions to strengthen their approaches and build their ability to manage change at scale as an internal capability.