Roles and Responsibilities of the PSO in Portfolio Management

The Project Support Office (PSO) is an essential ingredient in any portfolio management process. Their role is supportive to two audiences: the project sponsor and the portfolio manager.

Project Sponsor

The PSO is safe harbor for the project sponsor in that it helps the project sponsor and project manager prepare the project proposal for submission to the portfolio process and then helps shepherd the proposal through the process. There will likely be several cycles of revision and review before the portfolio manager can make a good business decision with respect to the business value of the proposed project. The PSO is in the unique position of being helpful to that process more than any other.

Portfolio Manager

The PSO provides the administrative support function for the portfolio manager. In that capacity, the PSO is generally charged with the responsibilities described in the following subsections.

Proposal Intake and Evaluation

One-stop shopping for project proposal submission and evaluation with respect to alignment to the portfolio strategy is a must. This brings consistency to the process. As part of the intake process, the project sponsor should make his or her assessment of that alignment. This often takes the form of citing which strategic objectives the proposed project addresses and how they are addressed. It is, however, the final responsibility of the PSO to make that formal determination.

Project Prioritization

Having done the intake evaluation as stated previously, the PSO is now in the best position to choose the ranking process that is appropriate and to execute that process. Any one of the ranking models discussed earlier in this chapter can be used, but the PSO must convey to the project sponsor which model they are going to use for this purpose.

Selection Support to the Portfolio Manager

The portfolio manager makes the final decisions as to which projects are placed in the portfolio. The PSO supports the portfolio manager with any further data or analyses that might be required.

Monitoring and Reporting to the Portfolio Manager

Monitoring and reporting project performance to the portfolio manager is an administrative function provided by the PSO. The PSO is responsible for gathering and validating project performance reports and consolidating them to the portfolio level. Dashboard-type reports are commonly used here. This type of report gives the portfolio manager the capacity to drill down into specific projects and discover reasons for anomalies or use other cross-project performance metrics of interest to the portfolio manager. There are several commercial software applications on the market to support these activities.

Facilitate Project Review Sessions

Formal project review sessions are major Stage Gates in the life cycle of every project in the portfolio. These may be quarterly, or they may occur more often for short-duration projects. The project review is conducted to assess project status against the project plan. Various project-specific metrics are used to assist in that analysis. Risk, issues, and problems are discussed with various mitigation strategies suggested or reviewed from previous project reviews. While these project reviews provide excellent data into the portfolio process, they are also designed to help the project manager. The project review board should be chaired by a PSO member and include two or three senior project managers and perhaps a client manager. In the interest of fairness and impartiality, the senior project managers on the project review board should not be managing projects from the same portfolio.