What is MoP?

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

Organizations need to evolve to be successful. This means improving how they run their day-to-day business and adapting to changing market and customer expectations and requirements. Portfolio management helps an organization to implement the right changes in its daily business. These changes are realized through programs and projects. Portfolio management does not deal with the detailed management of these programs and projects, rather portfolio management looks at the management of the changes achieved through them from a strategic perspective and focuses on the key aspects from an overall view, such as

• Provision of an overview of all programs and projects in the portfolio (in planning and implementation)
• their costs
• their risks
• their current status
• What contribution you make to the strategic goals of the organization

Portfolio management is defined as "a coordinated collection of strategic processes and decisions that collectively enable the most effective balance between day-to-day operations and strategic change."

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 the limited resources available?
• Do these programs and projects meet the predicted and expected performance in terms of time requirements, quality and budget?
• Are we realizing the full benefit potential?
  This includes not only tracking realized benefits against the forecast, but also identifying unplanned benefit potential and identifying and implementing lessons learned.

MoP provides best practices along two cycles, "Portfolio Definition," in which the right programs and projects are selected, and "Portfolio Delivery," in which proper implementation is ensured from a strategic perspective. Furthermore, MoP provides guidance and recommendations on organizational embedding and offers alternative approaches to implementation in different organizations and frameworks.

MoP enables you to make better-informed cost reduction decisions through clearly defined priorities and truly understood short- and long-term impacts of reductions. It helps to successfully achieve efficiencies and actually realize the savings. MoP provides the means to implement change more efficiently by improving resource planning and dependency management and streamlining procedures, and provides you with the basis to continuously improve resource allocation, implementation, and benefit realization.