What is the Role of a Portfolio Manager?

A portfolio management approach needs to organize a framework in order to find the proper subset of projects that reflects better decisions when evaluating risks, resource allocation, costs, and quality. This framework also is required to integrate competitive advantage and operational effectiveness in a balanced decision maker structure. The Portfolio Manager guarantees the right flow of this process.

First of all, the Portfolio Manager needs to motivate the Project Managers - PMs. The controls and monitoring of each program or project are related with the feedback of PMs and their status reports, normally weekly. In a PMO – Project Management Office structure where meetings are often clouded or in virtual environment (Lotus Live, Live Meeting, Net Meeting, conference call, and others), the communication of the chairman and PMs is an important point to obtain success in report the issues and propose solutions and decisions. So, high level of communication and empathy of the Portfolio Manager is the second great skill required for them.

What about culture and values? That’s a good question. Portfolio Manager sometime works with people from different parts of the world. Understand how to talk with them and how to have patience about their different perspectives makes the difference when manage PMs in today’s globalized world. Thing about wake up at 6:00AM to have a meeting with PMO team in India, can you do that? If yes, it is a good start.


Thinking about the strategic direction of the organization, the Portfolio Manager is responsible to certify that silos of interests and individual finance concerns don’t damage the competitive position of the company as a whole. It is very common that projects create a compromised group of individuals focused on success of their projects. The management and solution for conflict of interest between PMs and functional managers are another great task for Portfolio Manager. They need to acquire focus on the strategy of the firm as an entire group of people looking for success in a collaborative environment.

iDEA Project Evaluation

Project evaluation problem for organizations is a decision-making effort. Members of the Project Management Office - PMO deal with the follow question "which is more important to assign priority to project, program or portfolio?. Firms are required to taking in consideration financial, operation and resource availability indicators.

Metrics or feedbacks from project managers are not a guarantee of success. New techniques and approach like data envelopment analysis (DEA) and balanced scorecard (BSC) are trying to help managers to solve the questions "what kind of projects or/and portfolio needs to be freeze, hold or kill?" or "which project is under the efficiency frontier and which project is required to acquire better performance with inputs supplied?

The use of methodology based on use of portfolio management and BSC metric determination to set restrictions, inputs, and outputs on DEA models can develop a model that treats data of inputs and outputs in accordance with scorecards definition.

First, the aggregation of projects and their inputs and outputs is required. Second, evaluate the scores and relative efficiency. This framework may find proper subset of projects that reflects better decisions when evaluating risks, resource allocation, costs, and quality.

A case study with semiconductor projects evaluated nineteen projects using DEA-VRS input oriented model. The scorecards for projects points at delivery precision, design revisions, cycle time, development cost were used as outputs. Unplanned feature and schedule conformance were the inputs. The results of the integrated model showed twelve, from nineteen, efficient projects.

DEA innovate in terms of project efficiency evaluation. An important point is that the approach doesn't focus on the application subject's areas but in indicators of performance for every project configured in a DEA model as Decision Maker Unit.