While a project review zooms in on specific tasks and milestones, portfolio reviews take a broader, strategic view, focusing on overall performance and long-term success.
When you’re in the thick of managing your project portfolio, it’s easy to blur the lines between a project portfolio review and an individual project review. While it’s easy to mistake one for the other, particularly since they both aim to assess performance and ensure things are on track, they serve very different purposes.
The key difference lies in their focus – and keeping this distinction clear is essential for successful leadership of the portfolio.
Project vs. Portfolio Reviews: Mastering Both for Strategic Success
To truly appreciate the difference between a portfolio review and a project review, consider the perspective you take in each process.
For individual projects, your focus is narrow – like being the pilot of a plane, you’re concerned about getting your cargo and your passengers to their destination and having access to the runway when you need it. You see the details: the benefits the project is set to deliver, the milestones ahead and the immediate roadblocks that need attention for that one project.
Your goal, in this case, is straightforward: ensure this particular project stays on track to achieve its objectives.
During a portfolio review, on the other hand, it’s time to put on your portfolio air traffic controller hat for a 40,000-foot view. From this perspective, you’re no longer looking at individual projects but rather at the entire portfolio’s performance. The mission? Maximising return on investment (ROI) for the portfolio as a whole requires knowing each project’s contribution to the portfolio’s goals, how the projects potentially impact each other, what access to shared resources they need, etc.
The success of one project matters, but only in the grand scheme of how it impacts everything else. At the portfolio level, it may be necessary or even desirable to make certain trade-offs.
Take this scenario: your digital portfolio is projected to deliver $10 million in sales benefits over next year’s sales forecast. If your review reveals that a single digital project is now forecasting to deliver 25% of that value and is therefore falling short, it’s bad news for the digital project team – but that’s not all.
The bigger picture is working out how that affects the portfolio’s overall return. Where else in the portfolio will you find the benefits to cover that gap and meet the target?
At this point, your job as a leader in the PMO isn’t to micromanage the digital project back to deliver the full benefits – in fact, that task may even be impossible. Whilst the PMO may provide support to the digital project, they must also need to ask three critical questions:
- Does this change in benefits still warrant the full investment given?
- Can the 25% benefit be delivered with part of the funding?
- Are there more critical projects that can close the gap, and should funding be diverted or priority given for access to resources and stakeholders?
Two streams of action
Keeping your perspective at the 40,000-foot level during a portfolio review is as challenging as it is crucial. Yes, you’ll dive into detailed data from individual projects but resist the urge to get bogged down in the weeds of any one project. The data is there to serve a larger purpose: to give you a comprehensive view of the portfolio’s health.
That said, if you spot something like one project being tangled in scope creep or another project lagging behind on deliverables, don’t just shrug it off. It’s still important to address those issues, but the magic lies in how you respond.
A savvy portfolio leader would take a two-pronged approach: First, delegate the detailed troubleshooting of the underperforming project to someone else. Second – and most importantly – keep your focus on the bigger picture. Continue reviewing the portfolio as a whole, spotting where you can tweak or reallocate resources to balance things out.
The key to a successful portfolio review lies in managing these two streams of action: keeping the big picture in mind while addressing specific issues separately through effective delegation.
Longer-term optimisation
A portfolio review isn’t just a “fix it now” exercise. It’s also an opportunity to unearth insights that can supercharge your portfolio management long-term. Once you’ve made the necessary tweaks and course corrections, it’s time to mine the data for future improvements. Could you have prioritised projects better? Did communication break down between teams? Were there efficiency gaps in sharing data?
Every portfolio review should leave you with a handful of lessons to streamline future operations. It’s these continuous improvements that will help sharpen your portfolio management skills and make the whole process smoother next time around.
Streamlining portfolio reviews with technology
It’s important to acknowledge that managing a portfolio review manually, while possible, can be a daunting task. Each project brings a mountain of data that needs to be carefully analysed to draw meaningful conclusions. Staying at that 40,000-foot view can be next to impossible without the right tools, especially when balancing individual project needs and portfolio-level outcomes.
This is where collaborative work management tools come in handy. By using technology, you can automate data gathering and analysis, allowing you to focus on the strategic decisions that need to be made at the portfolio level. Tools designed for portfolio management can help you track project performance with real-time data, simplify data collection across multiple projects, visualise portfolio health through dashboards, and identify trends and areas for improvement.
With these digital solutions, portfolio reviews become a smoother, repeatable process that still delivers big-picture insights without the manual headache.
Getting started with your portfolio review
If you’re looking to kick off a portfolio review, it’s important to set out knowing which questions to ask and which data points to focus on.
Download our guide to conducting a project portfolio review below for an actionable framework that will help you stay on track and ensure that your portfolio review process is strategic, streamlined, and (most importantly) successful.