Course Description

As organizations reach higher levels of maturity in managing projects individually, they shift their focus to managing them collectively as a project portfolio. This transition seems to occur when you realize that projects are investments—not expenditures—requiring justification that they are aligned with organizational goals and will create value for the owners and other stakeholders of the organization. Managing project investments collectively brings coherence to implementing the strategic as well as operational initiatives and helps the organization create sustainable value in the long run. This workshop offers tools, techniques, and best practices for managing a project portfolio. It presents a “how to” methodology to design, build, and manage a portfolio.

Learning Objectives:

This workshop will help you develop skills to:

• Define the role of a portfolio in converting strategy into desired results.

• Align projects with organizational goals and strategy.

• Establish project/portfolio governance structure.

• Apply agile principles to portfolio management.

• Develop key design requirements of a balanced portfolio.

• Monitor and control portfolio performance.

• Employ various techniques to prioritize projects.

• Allocate resources to competing project and operational demands.

• Analyze and manage portfolio risks.

• Apply quantitative techniques for project evaluation.

• Evaluate a project for its own merit and relative merit vs. other projects.

• Use weighted scoring models to quantify intangible benefits of projects.

• Build a business case for a project.

• Identify criteria to terminate a project.

• Implement a practical methodology to build and manage a portfolio that will maximize business value and return on investment.