Understanding Your Project Portfolio’s Strategic Value

By Rich Jochems & Jason Roth

Does your organization understand the value the project portfolio is delivering related to the business strategy? Is your organization prioritizing the right work to meet those goals?

Most organizations do not fully understand the value its project portfolio is delivering relative to its business strategy. With a wide range of pain points across the organization, and leaders driving many projects with visions for improvement, there is ample opportunity for potential disconnected priorities. One example of misalignment could occur when resources are asked to work on projects that take focus away from supporting the organization’s strategic goals, thus delivering less value.

According to Gartner, only 47% of enterprises meet their strategy objectives. The lack of alignment between business strategy and portfolio management can be a significant factor in failure to meet organizational goals.

Why understand your portfolio’s strategic value?

As quoted above, an organization’s success is driven by making sure alignment exists between your strategy and what teams are actively working on. With a significant increase in remote work, technology enhancements, and business transformations, the work landscape has changed drastically over the past five years. This changing environment continually shifts business goals and objectives related to strategy. In turn, this requires teams to be able to pivot and adapt to new business decisions more efficiently.

To optimize, organizations must understand where you are and where you want to be to create the most efficient path to get there. Having the ability to adapt by looking inward at your resources, processes, and tools helps you understand how nimble you can be. Ask yourself, is everyone aligned on the business’ key priorities and are the standards in place to effectively execute them?

What are the hallmarks for delivering more value?

Measure Alignment with Strategic Goals

Successful organizations understand your level of maturity to properly measure how well the project portfolio is aligned with strategic goals and assess how much value you are delivering. These organizations also measure performance at the project, program, and portfolio levels.

Positioned to Deliver

Successful organizations understand your level of maturity as it relates to how well the organization is empowered to implement strategic projects and leverage governance and standards to drive metric-based decisions that align with strategic goals.

Governance & Standards

Successful organizations understand your level of maturity is directly related to how the project portfolio governance and standards are implemented within the organization.

5 Key Benefits to Understanding Your Portfolio Value

1. Allows leaders to make informed decisions around prioritizing, resourcing, and managing the project portfolio.
2. Gain insight into the business value being delivered.
3. Leverage metrics to track strategic alignment now and over time.
4. Determine areas of strength and opportunity to increase alignment of the portfolio with leaders and the organization's strategic objectives.
5. Identify strategic gaps and risks allowing leaders to evaluate impact on the organization and determine appropriate actions and mitigation tactics.

If you are looking for additional insight into the maturity of your organization’s project portfolio and would benefit from a report detailing your portfolio's alignment with strategic goals, including recommendations for improvement, get in touch with Avaap.

Rich Jochems and Jason Roth are Principal Consultants at Avaap with more than 25 years of experience in portfolio management strategy and execution. Both have worked with a variety of industry leading companies on everything from portfolio planning to implementations and transformations. Their passion for helping others understand and build their portfolio maturity has led to the development of strategic assessment tools and offerings that support clients in their quest to be self-sufficient in their endeavors.