7 Views of Project-Portfolio Variance
Knowing the current cost and estimated value of every initiative in your portfolio is nice, but when executives meet for a review, what they really want to know is: What’s changed since the last review, was it good or bad, and why?
The above is true whether a month, a quarter, or a year has passed since the last review; looking at what has changed is one of the fastest ways to communicate portfolio health and progress towards strategic goals. It also builds trust in the portfolio process: executives remember where you left off with them, and starting from that same point establishes a feeling of continuity and stability.
In this post I’ll share different methods for communicating variance. These methods have different use cases, but they all riff on the idea of variance. My examples will come from our cloud-based offering, the Enrich Analytics Platform, but you could build similar views by hand in Excel or other self-service BI tools.
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