Ensuring organisations derive great value from their investments is close to our hearts. This includes making sure you get the best possible value when you engage our services. To help focus on delivering the best outcomes, we offer a modular engagement approach focused on addressing the most important aspects of portfolio management.
Modules are scalable to organisations of any size and can be customised to your specific context.
Please don't hesitate to contact us to find out how we can help your organisation:
Your organisational context is unique, differing not only from other organisations, but also from your own past. Even if you do not have a formal Portfolio Management function, your organisation is making decisions about what projects to invest in. To be successful, you need to be confident you are making the right project investment decisions to deliver the best possible value.
A Project Portfolio Health Check is designed to evaluate your portfolio management practices mindful of the specific needs of your organisation today. The Portfolio Philosophy approach goes beyond a standard maturity assessment. We will work with you to identify the aspects of portfolio management most pertinent to your context and conduct a thorough analysis rather than a simple tick-box review.
We are focused on delivering value for your organisation. A report limited to telling you how you are going will not deliver this. Instead, our health checks are structured to provide practical recommendations to help improve your project portfolio decision-making.
Congratulations! If you are reading this, you have probably already made a wise decision to take portfolio management seriously. There are many different approaches, frameworks and permutations on how you should set up your project portfolio function. What works for one organisation could be completely inappropriate for another. Our role is to help you define the best approach in your context.
As a project portfolio consultancy experienced in establishing portfolio management functions, we will assist you in setting your portfolio management function up for success.
Working closely together, we will tailor a workable approach specific to your organisation and support you through critical steps in the transition.
Do you have a clear and consistent approach to making project investment decisions? Are you confident there is a compelling reason for every project you commission? Do executive decision-makers receive valuable and trusted project investment advice? If you answered yes to all of these questions, you don’t need us to help with your value framework. If not, keep reading.
Value is at the heart of our portfolio management philosophy – and a Value Framework is at its core. This is your bible for guiding how you make investment decisions in a way that makes sense not just to you, but also to those proposing project investments and executive decision-makers.
We will work with you to develop and package a value framework tailored to your organisation. This will include a consistent set of criteria acceptable to your stakeholders, clear responsibilities for investment decision-making and communication material for your stakeholders to help you make it real. Armed with this, you will be able to make project investment decisions with confidence.
Unless you have unlimited money, infinite resources and abundant change capacity, you need a way to decide what you are going to focus on. How to effectively prioritise work of different types can be a daunting task, but it is one you need to address if you want to do more than cross your fingers and hope things work out OK.
The uniqueness of your organisation means you cannot simply adopt a standard set of criteria for prioritisation. Similarly, your governance arrangements need to be reflected in your prioritisation approach. We can lead you through defining a practical prioritisation framework sensitive to your specific context.
By engaging your stakeholders upfront, we will establish a clear approach for prioritising your project investments. At the end of the engagement you will have the tools you need to enable you to go from a list of good ideas to a practical program of work focused on delivering the greatest possible value to your organisation.
Planning for tomorrow is essential to ensure your organisation remains relevant in a changing world. It is a dangerous trap to focus limited resources on simply maintaining what you already have. To be of enduring value, your portfolio needs to enable strategic transformation and stoke the engine for innovation.
A coherent approach to driving strategic objectives will maximise the value from your project portfolio. Portfolio-level objectives are invaluable to set context around what types of investment you want to drive and enable ongoing calibration of your portfolio of projects.
Strategic Portfolio Optimisation integrates strategy and portfolio in a symbiotic relationship. We will work with you to establish meaningful portfolio objectives to ensure your strategy informs selection for your investments.
Portfolio Management is ultimately about providing advice to positively influence investment decision-making. How you communicate a complex portfolio of projects to your stakeholders will dictate the effectiveness of your portfolio management function. Get it right and your Portfolio Management function becomes the trusted source of information the executive relies on to make the right calls. Get it wrong and all the process and governance in the world won’t rescue the function from irrelevance.
Portfolio Management touches many stakeholders at different levels in the organisation. We will engage directly with your Portfolio Management function and its key stakeholders to understand their information needs. We will then help you package these requirements into a minimal set of consistent communications and reports with configurable levels of detail and information.
Portfolio Articulation enables you to present project portfolio information in a meaningful, concise and compelling manner. Focusing on defining the right information requirements upfront will allow you to spend less time reporting unnecessary detail and responding to ad-hoc requests while simultaneously promoting re-use and consistency. More importantly, your Portfolio Management function will be in a better position to deliver real value through positively influencing project investment decision-making.
We are happy to offer a range of bespoke consulting services if what you are looking for does not quite fit with any of our tailored services. We specialise in project portfolio management, business case development and review, investment governance and project assurance.
If you do not see exactly what you are looking for please contact us and we can discuss your needs in more detail. We do not claim to be experts in everything, but we are well connected. If we do not feel we are best placed to help you, we will almost certainly know someone who is.
Please don't hesitate to contact us to find out how we can help your organisation:
Portfolio Philosophy was set up with the core mission to help organisations select the right investments to deliver the best possible outcomes. Effective prioritisation involving the right people through a clear and consistent process appropriate to your organisational context is critical to achieving this. We can help you define an approach that will work for you and act as an impartial facilitator, leaving you free to fully participate in the decision-making process.
A Business Case can make or break a project investment before it has even started. Without presenting a clear and compelling case funding will be hard to come by. Worse still, even if you do receive funding, if your stakeholders do not understand what you actually intend to deliver and why it matters, you will find it difficult to find the support you need to succeed. In short, the very success of your project rests on having a great Business Case.
We have authored numerous Business Cases and project funding proposals ranging from a few hundred thousand dollar IT system investments to a $20M+ roll-out of a new operating system and Microsoft Office suite to a major organisation. Our extensive experience in investment governance has also given us experience in the assessment of Business Cases and insight in what questions a good Business Case should ask. We can help your organisation improve the quality of project investment proposals in the following ways:
Getting project investment governance right is a challenge every organisation faces. A lot can go wrong with a project from its conception as an idea to being embedding in your operations. In any complex environment what matters is how you stay on top of a dynamic project portfolio. You need the tools and processes to enable you to make timely project investment decisions in order to deliver the best possible value.
This does not necessitate reams of tedious paperwork, but does require a consistent, transparent and focused approach to collecting the right information at the right time and ensuring it is able to be acted upon.
We would love to work with your organisation to help design standard Business Case templates and risk, strategic contribution and economic analysis tools tailored to your organisation.
When you make a large project investment, you want to ensure it has every chance of success. As a boutique independent consultancy we are unencumbered by organisational politics and have no vested interest in taking over project management. We have the experience to quickly identify and home in on the key factors with potential to impact successful delivery and are comfortable asking difficult questions.
Regardless whether you need assistance for an in-house project health-check or are looking for the right people to participate in a mandated Gateway Review, as a project governance specialist we can help you. It’s what we do.
We love to see people improve. We also have real expertise in project portfolio management and project investment decision-making. Portfolio Philosophy was built on bringing these two aspects together.
While our tailored service offerings are great when you need a step change and our bespoke consultancy services are ideal when you need something specific, sometimes you just need someone to help you evolve at your own pace.
As mentors, we have the experience to help you identify your portfolio management objectives and overcome the challenges preventing you from achieving them. As an impartial outsider to your business, we can provide a valuable perspective not couched in organisational politics or historical baggage.
We are very happy to offer a free initial session to help establish whether we can provide a valuable mentoring service to you. If you are based in or around Brisbane or we happen to be in your home town any time soon, we’ll even buy the first coffee.
Please don't hesitate to contact us to find out how we can help your organisation:
We love talking to people about Project Portfolio Management. It’s what we do.
Give us a call or send an email so we can talk through your needs. If we are in your area any time soon, we can meet for a chat to see how we may be able to help.
Please don't hesitate to contact us to find out how we can help your organisation:
Hi, I am Ian Gomez. Founder and co-owner of Portfolio Philosophy.
Helping organisations deliver value is important to me. So is having a challenge and driving real change.
Back before we called it Portfolio Management, I led a consulting engagement to recalibrate IT services for a major international energy company. By working with business leaders to prioritise what was critical to running the organisation, we improved core services while reducing operating expenditure by 18%. This was my first experience of driving value by focusing on portfolio management at a strategic level. I was hooked.
More recently, I have led the Portfolio Management practice for a $100M+ IT program of work for the Queensland electricity distribution industry. At its inception the practice focused purely on investment governance. However, over time we developed a reputation for providing trusted analysis and advice on all project investment matters and took accountability for planning the annual and 5-year programmes of work.
I began receiving an increasing number of calls from organisations at various points in their Portfolio Management journey seeking informal advice. What’s more, I found I was enjoying helping other organisations looking to make some big changes far more than running what was by now a relatively mature function. As my details were passed from person to person and my reputation grew, I decided to take the next logical step.
Portfolio Philosophy was born in 2017 with one aim: To help organisations build internal capability to confidently select the right project investments to deliver the best possible outcomes. Since then we've enjoyed helping many organisations from governments to gold miners and utilities to aged care facilities (there must be a song in there somewhere). Our customers come back time and again for trusted advice as they continue to evolve and face new challenges. That suits us, as they all happen to be great people we love working with - I'm sure you would be the same!
Value and integrity are the cornerstones of our business – and my own personal portfolio philosophy. We will always strive to treat people as people, keep my promises to you and ultimately make myself proud by delivering great outcomes for your organisation. If that sounds good to you, please get in touch to discuss how Portfolio Philosophy can help you deliver more value from your project investments.
At Portfolio Philosophy we will only work with organisations we truly believe we can help.
We differentiate ourselves from our competition as much by what we do not do as much as what we do. We do not manage projects. We do not operate PMOs on behalf of organisations. We are not a training provider. And we do not implement PMO toolsets. If you need any of these services, we are happy to recommend some great people who you should talk to.
However, if you want an expert who can help your organisation build internal Project Portfolio Management capabilities or undertake specialised project investment governance functions, you should definitely talk to us.
We are based in Brisbane, Australia, but work wherever there is an interesting opportunity. Whether you are based down the road, interstate, across the Tasman or internationally, if you are looking to improve how you manage your project portfolio, we can help.
Our focus is on delivering maximum value to your organisation. This extends to keeping costs we have to pass on to our clients under control. For engagements requiring travel, you will be pleased to hear we fly economy class and won’t be staying at the Ritz.
Some things are more important than money. We live our values and will not undertake engagements for organisations promoting gambling, weapons manufacture, or exploitation of fossil fuels.
Conversely, we offer discounted rates and limited pro-bono consulting services to charitable organisations aligned with our core values. Please get in touch if you would like to discuss this further.
For everyone else, we just offer a great service at competitive consultancy rates.
