Food for thought: Portfolio management: planning the renewal of strategies, processes and skills-sets

Robert Fonteijn, leader of Elevation Learning's consulting practice, introduces portfolio management as a means of identifying new routes to business development.

The way most businesses respond to the varying demands of their customers is to put together portfolios. Externally, at the business unit level, these would consist of portfolios of products, markets and channels. Internally, at the operational unit level, you will have portfolios of processes, while on the individual level there will be portfolios of skills. These portfolios define who you are on each of these levels: as a customer-facing business, as an organisation, as a person.

The drive to change any of these portfolios can come from outside or inside: customers may ask for new products or services, or a consultant want to develop his or her skills.

There are three ways to change a portfolio:

• Start from scratch and design something new.
• Take an existing idea or service and redesign it to fit a new purpose.
• Take an existing idea and simply apply it to the new situation

From these simple building blocks the potential range of solutions is vast: three organisational levels (business unit, operational unit and individual), three different focus areas (products, processes and skills), and three different ways to change portfolios. Operating in only one of these contexts-skills training or process redesign, say-blocks out a much wider range of possibilities.

At Elevation Learning, when we look at portfolio management, we try to help clients choose the approach that is going to increase their performance most effectively in the short run and then help them get on with it.

In practice that may mean working with a management team to redefine mission, vision and business proposition, through redesigning a sales channel o or at the other extreme, simply recommending a course of training.

(If you want to discuss the concepts underlying this brief article in more detail, please contact robert.fonteijn@elevationlearning.co.uk )