What is MoP?

Management of Portfolios (MoP) is a guide to best practices in portfolio management.

Organizations must continue to evolve in order to be successful. This means improving how they conduct their day-to-day operations and adapting to the changing expectations and requirements of markets and customers. Portfolio management helps an organization implement the right changes in its day-to-day operations. These changes are carried out through programs and projects. Portfolio management does not deal with the detailed management of these programs and projects; rather, it examines the management of the resulting changes from a strategic perspective and focuses on key aspects from a holistic viewpoint, such as

• Providing an overview of all programs and projects in the portfolio (both in planning and implementation)
• their costs
• their risks
• their current status
• how you contribute to the organization's strategic goals

Portfolio management is defined as “a coordinated set of strategic processes and decisions that, together, enable the most effective balance between day-to-day operations and strategic changes.”

MoP Training Sessions

As the link between an organization’s strategy and its implementation through programs and projects, portfolio management answers the following fundamental questions:

• Have we selected the programs and projects that best support our strategic goals, and are our programs and projects achievable with our existing, limited resources?
• Do these programs and projects meet the projected and expected performance in terms of time, quality, and budget?
• Are we realizing the full potential for benefits?
  This involves not only tracking actual benefits against the forecast, but also identifying unplanned opportunities for benefits and determining and implementing so-called “lessons learned.”

MoP provides best practices across two cycles: “Portfolio Definition,” in which the right programs and projects are selected, and “Portfolio Delivery,” in which proper implementation from a strategic perspective is ensured. Furthermore, MoP provides guidance and recommendations on organizational embedding and offers alternative approaches for implementation in different organizations and under varying conditions.

MoP enables you to make more informed decisions about cost reductions by establishing clearly defined priorities and gaining a true understanding of the short- and long-term impacts of those reductions. It helps you successfully achieve efficiency gains and actually realize the savings. MoP provides the means to implement changes more efficiently by improving resource planning and dependency management and streamlining processes, and it gives you the foundation to continuously improve resource allocation, implementation, and benefit realization.