Programme Assurance

Providing Evidence to Manage Portfolios

Managing a large programme portfolio inevitably involves balancing the demands of diverse programme objectives against constraints imposed by resources, time and risk. In the real world, this is often made more difficult because:

• critical portfolio management decisions often have to be made with inadequate information
• the relationships between outcomes and benefits are usually complex

Polaris has developed tools and techniques which have been used for over 20 Value for Money assessments of research programmes for the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) of values up to £300M per annum.

These assessments have allowed decision makers at them MOD Equipment Capability Customer (ECC) to make the most of the information they can get hold of. They provides evidence to:

• direct resources towards the highest priority needs
• ensure that the portfolio remains cost-effective
• support or review a programme’s business case 

In one instance, a one page summary report was enough to reverse a 5% cut in a portfolio budget worth approximately £35 million.

How We Do It More information on our methodology can be found in the Perform™ pages of this website. Perform™ allows assessments to be conducted: quickly on the basis of available data by providing relevant answers to relevant questions by assessing the performance of the portfolio as a whole and of individual projects by working with the people involved in the programme with traceability from data to conclusions (i.e. no black boxes, no magic formulas) It draws on Polaris’ experience in facilitation, information gathering and problem structuring to deliver meaningful results quickly and effectively. If hard data isn’t already available through a MIS, then it has to be captured from the people who know. Much of this is bound to be judgmental but we can apply a range of techniques to extract supportable evidence from opinions and subjective assessments.