Managing Your Portfolio
The skills required to lead a portfolio of projects and programmes are more than simply project management skills scaled up. You will need all of your generic leadership qualities including the ability to:
Communicate effectively at executive level
Match action to strategy
Lead on major change
Assess the impact of external factors
Deal with risk and uncertainty
As the Senior Manager responsible for a portfolio of activities your involvement with those activities should be 'as little as possible but as much as necessary'. Whilst Programme and Project Managers can undertake the routine day-to-day responsibility for management, they cannot do so in isolation. Handing over all responsibility for a programme or project and then expecting no further involvement is not an option if successful outcomes are to be expected. This has nothing to do with the skills or attributes of the Programme and Project Managers, but has more to do with their status and ranking within the organisation and how others perceive them and their 'right' to carry out necessary activities.
You are likely to be the Programme Sponsor/Senior Responsible Owner (SRO) of one or more programmes and/or projects. You will need to receive updates about progress of the projects/programmes within your portfolio and give advice and direction to Project/Programme Managers when required. In such a situation you are likely to chair the Programme Board or, where appropriate, a Project Board.
One of your key functions is also to ensure that authorised levels of expenditure are available to the Programme/Project Managers as necessary.
Each project within the programme will also require some form of board to ensure that it will meet its objectives. It may not always be possible or appropriate for the SRO to chair each Project Board. This task still needs to be undertaken by a senior member of staff with the ability to command resources within the areas of the organisation affected by the project. The chair of the Project Board is termed the Executive in the PRINCE2 methodology.
In an ideal situation you will be able to empower Programme/Project Managers to deal with day-to-day management without being micro-managed whilst providing them with a formal route to senior management where necessary. The secret to this is 'Management by Exception'. The approach can be broadly summed up creating the right conditions in the first place then only intervening when things aren't going according to plan. Our infoKits on Project Management and Programme Management will provide your team of managers with the framework and tools they need to manage on a day-to-day basis and alert you if things start to move beyond agreed parameters. You need to find within you the trust to let staff operate within those parameters.
