Upcoming Events

Portfolio Management Beyond Governance
How Executives Really Make Investment Decisions

Four projects go to a steering committee. Three of them make it to the table. The one with the weakest business case and the lowest score is the one that gets funded, and nothing in the governance model explains why.

Most of us run the same process. Idea, business case, scoring model, prioritization, committee. The framework is sound and worth defending. Without it you get pure politics with no accountability. It simply does not describe what actually decides. Governance supports decisions. It does not make them. It assumes rational, unified decision makers, and an executive room is neither: five or six people with different incentives and different things to lose. The scoring model captures ROI, strategic alignment, risk and complexity. The decision turns on trust, timing, momentum, sponsor influence, and how much change the organization can absorb, none of which appears anywhere in the model.

What the session covers

• The five lenses every executive applies to an investment decision. Two the scoring model attempts to capture, and three it never sees.
• Three portfolio outcomes and what decided each: the high ROI project that died for want of a sponsor, the weaker case funded in a week on narrative fit, and the strongest NPV in the portfolio deferred three cycles running on capacity.
• Three practices that move a PMO from process enforcer to strategic advisor: building the shadow case, reading the room before the room happens, and coaching sponsors on credibility rather than documentation.
• Why the framework is incomplete rather than wrong, and what it takes to build governance that accounts for the politics instead of trying to remove them. "The portfolio isn't selected inside the spreadsheet. It's selected inside the conversation around it."

More about the speaker

Marco Lo Visco, PfMP, PMP, has spent more than twenty years leading PMOs and enterprise portfolios across Brazil and Canada, in banking, healthcare, logistics, and manufacturing. He has served as an IT director in both countries, built PMOs from scratch, and run a portfolio of more than 300 million dollars. He currently leads portfolio governance for a Canadian healthcare organization, and holds an MBA and an MSc in Administration.