What is the best way to show the value of your project portfolio?

One criterion that, in my opinion, can never be missing when implementing project portfolio selection is Maturity. This criterion is fundamental because the greater the maturity of the idea/possible project, the more accurate the scope, cost, deadline, and alignment with other criteria will be.

💡 In my experience, defining value criteria goes beyond just identifying metrics. 🛠 Tailored Metrics Value isn't one-size-fits-all. Tailor metrics to your organization's unique objectives, ensuring they are reflective of your goals. 📊 Continuous Monitoring Don't just set metrics. Continuously monitor them to ensure they remain aligned with organizational shifts and market changes. 🔄 Feedback Loop Value metrics should be revisited. Create a system to gather feedback, ensuring metrics evolve with stakeholder needs and expectations. 📌 As the organization grows, its definition of value might change. Stay adaptive and keep communication channels open.

Upon project initiation, the proposal should articulate the problem at hand and highlight the anticipated benefits of the proposed solution. This approach facilitates the establishment of distinct goals and metrics for each project, ensuring transparency across the project portfolio while maintaining relevance to the unique nature of each endeavor.

I would also use Wardley maps to convey the explanation on how every project is moving the company capabilities in the right direction and speed.

The power of the balanced scorecard is exceptional when the focus is on growth. Financial growth is the revenue or savings generated. Customer growth is from new customers and the demonstrated ability to retain customers. Internal growth can be difficult and exciting to display; this could be in output, upskilling, capacity improvement, satisfaction and reduced turnover. Growth obtained from learning can be highlighted in terms of organizational maturity, new systems, processes and procedures to facilitate ongoing growth. It’s about communicating value and ensuring that your stakeholders see growth and value created holistically across the organization.

Definitely, creating a balanced scorecard to define the organization's main goals is essential. It is important to maintain a short, medium and long-term vision/goals. Bringing it to a portfolio environment, this must be broken down through the use of OKRs aligned with the 5-year plan.

This should definitely be one of the first internal goals within a portfolio management environment, if one does not exist. Creating a dashboard creates transparency for leadership and agility in decision making. However, before the creation itself, we need to understand what data we need to create a dashboard that will generate value. The generation and maintenance of this data is fundamental.

When creating a dashboard, pay attention to things like readability, data placement, relatability and the ability to address multiple target audiences...mid/senior level people and C-suite execs will want to see different things. Gather requirements, same as any other product!

I have found bubble charts to be useful to review values for my portfolio. I have made use of a set of quantitative metrics (x axis) and set of qualitative metrics (y axis) to determine dependencies between them. The size of the bubble can then be the NPV factoring all future outflows and validating that initiatives continue to add value to our stakeholders.

A firm's vision has to be supported by various objectives which act of pillars to keep the vision afloat. Step1: Rank the pillars to establish weights. Step2: Use the pillars along with their weights to rank your portfolio items to identify their positive impact. Many times, the derived ranking will surprise the management especially when the pet projects won't get the top rank. That's when fruitful discussions happen. Ranking may not determine what gets funded, however it forces everyone to think through.

Another very intuitive way of planning and executing the value chain around your portfolio is to make use of a concept called “Benefits Breakdown Structure”. It is a simple way of top-down, bottom-up approach to look at the desired benefits out of a portfolio. It is laid out horizontally from left to right such that we have a pair of “Why” and “How” elements. The Why is always placed on the left side of How. Each level re-uses the How from previous level as Why until we reach the individual project level. The Why answers: Why are we doing it? While How answers: How are we going to do it. This way in a single view we can effectively describe the complete benefits value chain.