300.3 PortfolioStep Process Overview

The PortfolioStep Portfolio Management Process has a life cycle that consists of four major sequential phases or activities. These are: Prepare; Plan: Execute; and Harvest. These phases in turn encompass the ten steps described in this PortfolioStep process. The harvesting activity refers to the reaping of the benefits, assessing their value and feeding the findings back into the preparation phase of the process, in order to establish continuous improvement, and thus completing the cycle.

Hence, PortfolioStep™ is a repeatable process of preparing for, planning, executing and harvesting the value of work as a business portfolio. However, you cannot start the planning and executing portions of the process without understanding two fundamental areas.

1. You must grasp the nature and extent of the work that you want to manage as a portfolio. Once this is defined, you will have established the scope of your portfolio

2. You must reach agreement on the things that are important to your organization so that you have the context to make work prioritization and balancing decisions

PortfolioStep takes all of this into account and does not assume that you have any of the prerequisite information ahead of time. However, you can see from the illustration above that managing a business portfolio ultimately involves the whole organization if the true value of the portfolio management effort itself is to be realized in the value of the benefits derived. As we shall explain later, we characterize this "whole organization" in three parts:

1. Executive

2. Project Management

3. Operations

The reason for this separation is because each group has a very different management responsibility and perspective that you need to understand to see how comprehensive portfolio management fits into the whole organization. It means that you must have full cooperation between all three if you are to reap the full benefit of portfolio management.

PortfolioStep Life Cycle

PortfolioStep (PS) and its life cycle consists of ten "steps" that may be viewed as "steps", "phases" or "stages" depending on the terminology used in your organization and these steps are best summarized in tabular form. The following table shows each of the steps in the PS model, where the responsibility falls in the organization, and the TenStep practice that should be followed to execute the step.

Step	Description	Responsibility	TenStep Practice
1	PortfolioStep Setup	Executive	Executive management & PortfolioStep
2	Identify Needs & Opportunities	PS function	PortfolioStep
3	Evaluate Options	PS function	PortfolioStep
4	Select Work	PS function	PortfolioStep
5	Prioritize Work	PS function	PortfolioStep
6	Balance and Optimize the Portfolio	PS function	PortfolioStep
7	Authorize the work	PS function	PortfolioStep
8	Plan & Execute Work (Projects, Programs, & Other Work)	PM	TenStep, LifecycleStep, SupportStep & PMOStep
9	Report on portfolio status	PM &Operations	TenStep, LifecycleStep & PMOStep
10	Improve the portfolio (Launch products, harvest benefits, feedback and change strategy)	PS function, Operations & Executive	Executive management, Operations & PortfolioStep

Figure 300.0-1: The complete PortfolioStep Portfolio Management Process™

Each of the steps listed in the table are consistent with the sequence recommended by the Project Management Institute's standard and form the basis of separate chapters later in this process description. For consistency with the PMI terminology, these chapters are titled and numbered as follows: Categorization (310); Identification (320); Evaluation (330); Selection (335); Prioritization (340); Portfolio Balancing (345); Authorizing (350); Activation (355); Portfolio Reporting & Review (360); and Strategic Change (370). For an overview of these steps, please see 300.3.1 Brief Description of the Ten Steps.

Next Page - 300.3.1 Brief Description of Each of the Ten Steps