Are you a Weather Station?
I see a lot of people who think they are running a portfolio office, when actually all they are doing is managing a weather station. A weather station is a department that tells you that it is raining when you are standing in the rain getting wet.
This links to the whole conversation about portfolio management value and one of the reasons that portfolio offices get killed is because of lack of value. Being a weather station is a prime example of being as useful as last weeks newspaper.
Here is a brain dump of 10 key indicators that your portfolio office is nothing more than a weather station:
1) The ability to create a monthly status report is viewed as a massive, tremendous, splendiferous success, whooooopeee.
2) The reporting process time is so long that by the time a portfolio status report is issued to the Exectutive Team it contains information from 2 weeks ago and everyone already knows about the issues, or the issues have been addressed. (However, the portfolio office still think people will buy yesterdays newspaper).
3) The Director of the portfolio office does not attend the Executive Board meetings to present the monthly status.
4) At the Executive Board meeting, the Directors who own the Red projects take it in turns to provide a more up to date overview of the status of the red projects.
5) People that work in the portfolio office generalists and not skilled in portfolio management.
6) Customers of the portfolio office feel they experience only two things from the portfolio office. The first is an email reminding them that their report is due next week. The second comes three weeks later which is a bigger report containing the contents of all the other projects and programmes which has been carefully copied and pasted into the the portfolio monthly report.
7) Risks are on the status report, but they haven’t changed for months because they don’t get discussed at the Executive Board meeting.
8) Processes are too rigid, but the portfolio office team are not skilled enough to recognize this and put enhancements in place.
9) People do not enjoy working with the portfolio office
10) If you asked people what value they get out of the portfolio office, most of them would say “not sure”.
If you experience any of the above, you really should take action now. Especially those of you in the public sector because its all about the value for money challenge and if you’re doing the above, you ain’t adding value.
@MrPortfolio
ps: feel free to add more indicators in the comments section
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Fantastic blog.
I am about to send it on to some executive team pals…….
Hi Will, glad you like it. Perfect timing, the next post is about dealing with Exec Leadership teams successfully. regards Craig @MrPortfolio
Like to think I am at least a weather forecaster! But you are right, you need to get folk to listen to the forecast!
OMG this is so true!! We have a Weather Station….all they do is get our reports, collate them into a bigger report, make some mistakes with the copy and paste and then sent it back to everyone. They so need to read your brain dump!
I really enjoy your blog..thanks so much for sharing!
Angie
Ah, dont worry Angie you’re not alone, there’s quite a few about. Get them to check out my last blog regarding Portfolio Welcome Pack – if they can complete that they will be on the road to Value add. if not, then they wont be there for too long anyway :o)
regards
craig
@MrPortfolio
Great post Craig. The people within the portfolio office spend too much time formatting and pratting about with data to get it to look nice – a bit like trying to get an umbrella up when its spokes are broken
Hey Lindsay, glad you liked it. hahah yes great analogy! mind you, if there is one thing that drives me wild its using font less that size 11 inconsistent use of colour schemes, (we have the html color codes on our office wall :o)..opps that was two things. hmm i think i can feel a blog coming on about “the things that drive me crazy” – thanks for the inspiration! :o)
ck
@MrPortfolio
Nice article. Need to share this with my colleagues. Thanks. Martins
cool thanks Martins…sharing is caring as they say :o)
I agree – the problem is often that the portfolio management team are reporting the obvious (“it’s raining”). Sometimes they are reporting that it can’t be raining because they are not getting wet – but perhaps need to look out from under the umbrella!
Risk assessment can be prone to ‘groupthink’ – I would welcome comments on my proposals for ‘agile risk assessment’ and how it relates to portfolio reporting. Look at this example of optimistic reporting at the US DOD:
http://brianwernham.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/the-dod-caught-with-its-pants-down-a-revolution-in-risk-assessment-needed
Brian
if truism was a profession, this blog would be the hedge fund manager
Hi Andy. I’m not entirely sure where the line between truism and common sense lay. However, similar to common sense, there’s a limited amount of real value add portfolio offices out there. So in my mind, anything that helps to increase both is a step forward, maybe just a baby step… but a step nonetheless.
@MrPortfolio