Executive Summary
In today’s fast-paced business environment, organisations must maximise the value of every dollar invested in change. Seven Consulting has partnered with over 50 leading private and public sector enterprises—including Qantas, Woolworths, Optus, and Australia Post—to uplift their portfolio management capabilities. This white paper outlines the key principles, frameworks, and tools we employ to help organisations:
- Select the right mix of initiatives
- Ensure robust governance and delivery support
- Build sustainable delivery capability
- Realise benefits faster and with greater confidence
Drawing on proven approaches, including our Portfolio Optimisation Tool and Pathfinder delivery‑design engine, this paper guides executives on steps to implement portfolio uplift. While the paper highlights the benefits of a centralised portfolio uplift capability (i.e. ePMO), the tools and techniques presented here can also be applied individually to achieve transformational outcomes. It is, however, important to note – the highest benefits are achieved with a holistic approach.
1. The Role of Centralised Portfolio Delivery Co-ordination
An effective Centralised Portfolio Co-ordination capability serves as the organisation’s nerve centre for prioritising, governing, and supporting all change initiatives. Its core functions are to:
- Recommend which projects should proceed, and when they start and finish
- Provide governance and escalation pathways for material decisions
- Build and sustain delivery capability across the enterprise
- Increase the likelihood of project success through independent assurance and tools
To achieve this, portfolio delivery management should be designed in alignment with the organisation’s strategy, culture, structure, and current delivery maturity. A typical Seven Consulting uplift design iteration runs for four to eight weeks, assessing the current state, confirming the target maturity, and creating a clear roadmap that sequences initiatives by size, impact, effort, and interdependencies — all while taking the organisation’s change capacity into account.
2. Guiding Principles
Before establishing a Centralised Portfolio Delivery Management function, it is critical to workshop and secure Executive Leadership Team (ELT) buy‑in to a set of guiding principles that aligns capabilities to the organisation desired objectives, culture and structure. Two illustrative examples include:
- Enterprise Visibility and Accountability: Reports directly into ELT, with the Portfolio head attending portfolio forums as an equal member. Maintains a master list of all initiatives with central dashboards showing cost, schedule, quality, benefits, and stakeholder satisfaction.
- Tailored, Pragmatic Delivery: Apply risk‑based, scalable processes (Agile, Waterfall, Hybrid) agreed between the Portfolio functions and project teams. Foster “One Team” behaviour across vendors and business units. Leverage existing fit‑for‑purpose tools and methods, minimising unnecessary complexity.
These principles underpin decision‑making and empower the Portfolio Delivery Management functions to act as a neutral, value‑focused function.
3. Portfolio Optimisation & Prioritisation
Delivering well is only half the battle; ensuring the right portfolio is vital. We recommend that the Portfolio teams facilitate quarterly portfolio reviews where projects are scored against weighted objectives such as ROI, speed to value, delivery risk, benefits risk, and strategic alignment.
Steps include:
- Define and weight executive‑agreed objectives (totalling 100%).
- Score each project out of 100% on these criteria.
- Identify capacity constraints (e.g., architects, SMEs), estimate quarterly demand for each project, and overlay with the ranking.
- Reserve an agreed amount of capacity for unanticipated needs.
- Review “regrets” — projects halted due to capacity — and address systemic constraints.
As an example – Our Portfolio Optimisation Tool automates this process, enabling data‑driven discussions and transparent decisions.
4. Clearing House for Dependencies
Large organisations often grapple with inter‑project conflicts—competing for scarce resources or environmental access. Without a coordinated approach, these conflicts can cause delays, inflate costs, and erode benefits realisation.
The Portfolio Management team’s Clearing House function centrally logs and assesses these issues, prioritising them using critical path day values to quantify impact. Clear ownership and actions are assigned, with weekly forums ensuring rapid resolution and sustained momentum.
This disciplined centralised approach accelerates coordinated delivery, reduces delays, and improves cross-project collaboration.
5. Independent Quality Assurance
Independent reviews by seasoned delivery executives experts help validate project reporting accuracy, surface unaddressed risks, and offer value adding insights. QA activities and timing are risk based and include:
- Casual Reviews: Providing ongoing access and representation at key meetings by seasoned assurance resources to continuously add-value to project delivery.
- One‑Off/Formal Reviews: Full-Cycle review of Project, Program, or Portfolio to address opportunities and strengthen probability of success.
- Post Implementation Reviews (PIRs): Capturing lessons for the broader portfolio re-use.
Standard review outputs include scope, executive summary, strengths, identified issues, recommendations, management responses, and action tracking to ensure follow-through.
This disciplined approach improves decision-making, accelerates issue resolution, strengthens path-to-green and ultimately drives better delivery outcomes across the portfolio.
6. Building a Home for Resources
Centralising project and PMO practitioners within Centralised Program Management capability offers numerous benefits:
- Career development, mentoring, and knowledge sharing.
- Consistent application of standards, processes, and tools.
- Flexible resource deployment to high‑priority initiatives.
- Aggregation of “best practice” gained from multiple successful projects.
- Streamlined recruitment, induction, and performance management.
Ongoing assessment of individual resource capabilities—through artefacts, surveys, exams, and outcomes—aids in driving targeted uplift plans and ensures a pipeline of high‑performing talent.
7. Centralised vs Federated Governance
Projects benefit from right-fit governance models, ones that consider portfolio impact and project needs. A hybrid governance model approach balances “central control with local agility” and recognizes that “one size does not fit all”:
- Enterprise Governed Projects: Projects that are above spend/benefit thresholds or cross divisional impacts are governed centrally to maximise portfolio efficiencies.
- Locally Governed Projects: Smaller, domain specific initiatives with minimum cross-divisional coordination needs are governed locally to maximise agility.
A clear criteria and escalation pathways will promote consistency and coordination, while giving divisional leaders the discretion and agility to pivot quickly when needed.
8. Tailoring Delivery Approaches: Pathfinder
A one-size-fits-all delivery approach creates inefficiency by imposing unsuitable templates, unnecessary deliverables, and overly complex, generic methodologies that fail to meet the specific needs of each project. Right-fit delivery methodologies are essential for improving efficiency, maintaining quality, and embedding lessons learned into future delivery.
One solution is Seven Consulting’s Project Pathfinder tool:
- Asks 30 questions on project and organisational traits to recommend Agile, Waterfall, or Hybrid.
- Drills deeper with 60–80 further questions to define deliverables, templates, risks, and governance.
- Generates a detailed schedule and artefacts in MS Project, JIRA, Excel, or PDF—within 30 minutes.
Clients report a 15–20% reduction in delivery risk and over 99% annual customer satisfaction with Pathfinder guided approaches.
9. Governance Standards & Sponsor Support
Governance levels and cadence should correlate with project cost, benefits, and risk. Key elements:
- Reporting cadences (e.g., weekly 30‑minute steering committees)
- Defined charters outlining sponsor and PM accountabilities
- Sponsor training and support (including Sponsor Contracts)
- Executive‑level clearing house for interdependencies
Strong sponsorship—exemplified by CEO‑chaired committees—drives project success and cultural endorsement.
10. Performance Metrics: OKRs & Balanced Scorecard
Measuring portfolio effectiveness requires a balanced scorecard covering:
| Dimension | Metric |
|---|---|
| Time | Working days vs. baseline |
| Cost | Budget adherence ($) |
| Scope | Benefits realized ($ over 3–5 yrs) |
| Quality | Production defects (severity weighted) |
Adding default weightings (e.g., Benefits 35%, Quality 30%, Time 20%, Cost 15%) produce a composite score across the Project, Program and Portfolio. Scores ≥100% indicate expected or better delivery.
Additional measures (team, stakeholder satisfaction) can be layered to improve measurement.
Aggregating scores by division, sponsor, or PM uncovers areas for targeted improvement.
11. Critical Path & Velocity Reporting
Active critical‑path management and velocity tracking accelerates delivery, reduces cost and improves benefit realisation. Active CPM strategies include:
- Reporting current and upcoming critical‑path tasks in status reports to drive visibility and planning.
- Calculating project specific critical‑path day‑value (e.g., $125K/day in costs + benefits) to enable prioritising resource requests in-line with impact.
- In Agile programs, tracking story‑point velocity; in Waterfall, measuring task completion rate.
- Implementing Dashboards to highlight underperforming streams, spur “league‑table” peer motivation, and drive teams from ~67% to ≥90% velocity.
12. Benefits Management Framework
Despite being the raison d’être for change, benefits often receive scant attention. A robust Benefits Management Framework includes:
- Clear benefit definitions, owners, baselines, and measurement methods.
- Independent benefit attestation every six months.
- Soft‑to‑hard benefit conversion rates to inform prioritisation.
- Portfolio‑level tracking to identify “zombie” projects and reallocate funding.
13. Prudent Project Shutdown
Healthy portfolios retire underperforming initiatives. Shutdown criteria mirror portfolio optimisation steps with a key focus on remaining costs over benefits.
| Right reasons might include: | Wrong reasons might include: |
|---|---|
|
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Including shutdown avoidance costs in benefit analyses ensures executive decisions are economically sound.
14. Continual Improvement
Portfolio and delivery practices must evolve. Continuous improvement tactics include:
- Staff and customer feedback forums with actionable reporting.
- Facilitation of “Centres of Excellence” to share best-practice.
- Rewards for innovation suggestions.
- Portfolio scorecard analytics to pinpoint capability gaps.
Dedicated capacity for process, tool, and people enhancements.
Conclusion & Next Steps
Seven Consulting’s holistic Portfolio uplift approach—grounded in proven principles, advanced tools, and decade‑plus experiences—drives stronger prioritisation, governance, and delivery outcomes. By partnering with us, organisations can:
- Accelerate benefits realisation through data‑driven portfolio decisions
- Enhance delivery quality via independent assurance and Pathfinder‑enabled methods
- Build enduring capability with coordinated talent development and governance frameworks
- Reduce delivery cost through improved delivery efficiencies.
To discuss how Seven Consulting can tailor these insights to your organisation’s unique context, please contact Declan Boylan.
About Declan Boylan
Declan is the founder of Seven Consulting. He established the company in 2002 to create a company where professional services would be delivered to programs in a manner that met his standards.
He has a demonstrated track record of repeatedly delivering large scale programs ahead of schedule, under budget, to scope and to a high degree of quality to achieve transformational business outcomes. His relentless determination ensures delivery of the client’s requirements.
Declan’s clear leadership ability is used to align all stakeholders, team members, vendors and customers to the same objectives and path to success. Further, his tutoring and mentoring of direct reports assists in enhancing their skillsets.
