Portfolio Management on Trayix

Sustainability belongs in the portfolio

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Not long ago, sustainability lived in a separate report written by a separate team. That’s changing. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and sustainability criteria are now built into portfolio decisions, especially in Europe and in infrastructure, where a project’s footprint and its community effects can decide whether it gets approved at all.

If your organization is in the United States, you might be tempted to treat this as someone else’s concern. We’d think twice. Many U.S. companies have European operations, customers, or suppliers, and those relationships bring the expectations with them. Even without that, the questions are good ones to ask of any investment.

Portfolio prioritization that executives trust

Wed, 06 Dec 2017 09:00:00 +0000

Every organization has a prioritized project list. Whether anyone trusts it is another matter. In many companies, the list reflects whoever argued last or loudest, “priority one” covers half the portfolio, and nobody has checked whether there are enough people to do the work. Executives stop believing the ranking, and they’re right to.

Why prioritization fails

Three patterns appear again and again. The loudest voice wins, so the ranking follows seniority and persistence instead of value. Everything is priority one, which means nothing is. And there’s no capacity view, so the list asks the same people to work on eight things at once. The result is that everything moves slowly and nothing finishes.

Fund teams, not projects

Wed, 13 Sep 2017 09:00:00 +0000

The usual way to fund software is to approve a project, assemble a team, build the thing, and disband the team. Then, a few months later, the business asks for changes, and a new project starts with a new team that has to learn everything again. Some organizations are trying a different model: fund a persistent team around a product or value stream, and let the work change while the team stays.

From status reports to strategy: the new PMO

Wed, 19 Oct 2016 09:00:00 +0000

Ask an executive what the project management office (PMO) delivers, and you’ll often hear “a weekly status report.” Ask what they wish it delivered, and the answer changes: which investments matter most, whether we have the people to do them, and whether any of it is paying off. More and more, we hear PMOs being asked to answer those questions. A report that lists what happened last week doesn’t.

What changes

A traditional PMO tracks projects one at a time. A strategic PMO looks across all of them. That shift sounds small, but it changes almost everything the office does.