An early project portfolio review ensures your initiatives stay aligned with strategic goals, reducing risks and maximising value. By evaluating progress at the 30% mark, leaders gain critical insights and opportunities to make impactful adjustments before it’s too late. 

The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and you’re about to reach the mid-point of the financial year. So, is it time to sit back and let your project portfolio run on autopilot, with each project kicked off running as planned, based on the approved business cases that were submitted at the close of last financial year? 

Absolutely not. 

Conventional project wisdom tells us that the early execution stages are the most precarious and where the seeds of success or failure are sown. If you’re not conducting a Setup For Success Review within the first six weeks of your projects, you’re already inviting risk. This same logic applies just as strongly to your enterprise-wide project portfolio. 

In fact, it may be even more vital to perform a Setup for Success Review across your full portfolio than for individual projects. Here’s why. 

The ideal time for a reality check 

An unoptimised project portfolio can have far-reaching consequences. As the year unfolds, projects start to compete for resources and attention, leading to inefficiencies and delays. Planning becomes challenging, if not impossible. Ideally, as a leader, you’ve gone through project portfolio optimisation and prioritisation to help with all this in the recent past. However, it’s not a “set and forget” activity – it requires constant attention, especially in large portfolios. .   

The landscape can shift quickly. In the space of just a few months, priorities may have evolved, dependencies fail to deliver, team capacity could have been reallocated and unforeseen events impacting progress could arise (look no further than March 2020 for evidence of that).  

What appeared to be a well-balanced portfolio three or four months ago might now be an entirely different picture. You might no longer be working on the right projects, or they may no longer be working together to meet the organisation’s broader strategic goals.  

This exposes you to both obvious and hidden costs. Quality could decline, key teams might become overloaded, or deliverables could be delayed in an effort to meet time and budget constraints. None of this bodes well for your portfolio’s overall performance. 

At the 30% mark, you’re in the sweet spot – armed with both enough practical insight, and enough time to make meaningful adjustments. Review too early, and you’ll lack real-world data. Wait too long, and the time left for course correction shrinks dramatically. 

Strategic success – more than alignment 

While many like to talk about “strategic alignment” in relation to broader goals, we prefer to consider how each project contributes strategically to the overall picture – especially when evaluating the entire portfolio. It’s unrealistic to expect every project to align perfectly with the stated goals. Some will, but others may be more tactical, required to solve an immediate need that is important right now, although limited in long-term strategic value.   

The danger of focusing solely on alignment is that it allows some project leaders to justify actions that may, in fact, work against the broader strategy. Take, for instance, a situation where cost-cutting is the top priority. You might have a project that’s going to reduce costs in one area but will do so at the expense of another, like customer service. While this project technically aligns with the goal of reducing costs, it could also be hurting revenue – a trade-off that undermines the overall spirit of the strategy (to be more profitable). 

This is where the value of a reimagined, strategic EPMO becomes clear. Instead of viewing each project in isolation, you gain an enterprise-wide perspective on overall ROI and the organisation’s capacity to deliver meaningful value. 

Now is also the perfect time to identify projects that may have passed the investment committee’s scrutiny at the end of the last financial year, but no longer make sense as delivery progresses. This happens more often than you might think, particularly when business cases are assessed in isolation and do not take into account environmental factors of a large portfolio.  

Optimise today, prepare for tomorrow 

There are two potential outcomes to a Setup for Success Portfolio Review. The first is identifying immediate course-correcting actions to optimise the portfolio for the remainder of the year. This could involve pausing or even stopping certain projects, restructuring others for greater efficiency, revising work breakdown structures, or adjusting resource allocations. 

The second outcome offers a forward-looking opportunity to refine how things are done next time. Perhaps you’ll identify areas where the investment committee could improve its project assessments in the next cycle or make recommendations to elevate the EPMO’s role in the overall process. 

Even if the review confirms that things are (mostly) going according to plan, the most valuable outcome you’ll achieve as a leader is peace of mind. Knowing that your portfolio is on the right track minimises the chance of being blindsided later. With time on your side, you can confidently steer your portfolio in the right direction and avoid costly surprises. 

To find out more about how Quay Consulting can help your team undertake a project portfolio review, please contact us here  or call 1300 841 048 to talk to the team.

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Quay Consulting
Quay Consulting is a professional services business specialising in the project landscape, transforming strategy into fit-for-purpose delivery. Meet our team ...