PM Network - May 2015

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Teresa (Terri) Knudson, PMP, PgMP, is the director of the enterprise portfolio management office at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, USA. She can be reached at knudson.teresa@mayo.edu.

across our organization, we’re ;nding more and more that it’s necessary to de;ne di;erent categories of portfolios. ;e Mayo Clinic has multiple portfolios in a two-level structure. ;e top level consists of seven executive portfolios that directly align with our high-level business structure and are owned by the senior executives. ;e next level aligns with the operational business structure and provides portfolio management functionality to each department as it becomes ready to use portfolios for its speci;c business area.

All the projects in our portfolio management information system (PMIS) roll up into one of our executive portfolios and may also align to one or more of the operational portfolios. Sounds simple enough, but in our very matrixed environment we are realizing the need for portfolios by other business units, divisions, centers and various specialty groups. Since a portfolio is actually any collection of projects that are grouped together, the various portfolio management teams may have projects that are included in a number of other portfolios as well. Instead of more portfolios, the idea of sub-portfolios may be a better solution for simplifying this structure. ;is maintains the alignment under the executive level while allowing for separate management. A good example is within our IT department, where we have developed multiple portfolios and do sub-portfolio reporting based on organizational structure and sta;ng assignments.

It’s easy to see how this can get very complex very quickly as more projects are added into the portfolios. ;erefore, it’s bene;cial to have an overall framework as you build out your portfolio model. Doing this provides for more comprehensive portfolios, while supporting transparency, awareness and clarity across the organization.

As you think about your own organization, what does your portfolio structure look like?

What’s in your portfolio? How do both of these re;ect and support your organizational management needs? PM

The more I read about portfolio management, the more I learn about what it means. ;e de;nitions seem straightforward enough: PMI’s Standard for Portfolio Management—;ird Edition de;nes a portfolio as “a collection of projects, programs, sub-portfolios and operations grouped together to facilitate the e;ective management of that work to meet strategic business objectives.” ;is sounds very logical and obvious, but putting it into practice isn’t quite so cut-and-dried.

At the Mayo Clinic, we’re still evolving our port-
folio structure to ;nd a model that works best for
our overall organization. As use of this is expand-
ing, it got me thinking about what was actually in
our portfolios today and what we should be put-
ting into them in the future. When we set out
to de;ne our portfolios years ago, the easi-
est place to start was at the beginning with
projects. Once the organization under-
stood what projects really were, we began
expanding into programs, which allows for
us to group projects into a collective set
based on a common outcome or set of
bene;ts. And here, just like our initial
work with projects, is where we are still
working on growing our knowledge of
what constitutes a pro-
gram and how man-
agement of this di;ers
from projects.
As we continue to
maneuver programs, and
as portfolio management expands