First real-time view of a 60-programme portfolio

The problem

Nobody could say with confidence what was happening across the commercial division's 60 programmes spanning five lines of business. There was no central tracking or tooling, risks surfaced late, and prioritisation ran on whoever shouted loudest. The mandate arrived in Q4: have a portfolio function operational by 1 January.

Who it was for

The Chief Commercial Officer and divisional leadership, who needed a trustworthy picture of the portfolio, and the programme leads across five lines of business who had to feed it without drowning in status admin.

My role

I built the division's first portfolio tracking function from scratch. No prior tooling, no template, no team. None of the 20+ people whose work fed the system reported to me, so every part of it had to be adopted rather than mandated.

Process

1. Wrote a white paper in a week rather than accepting the 1 January big-bang brief at face value, proposing a phased rollout leadership could hold me to.
2. Launched wave one with the 10-15 core strategic programmes, then scaled to all 60 by the end of March.
3. Published the first portfolio overview on 14 January and held a biweekly cadence from then on.
4. Pre-populated every return from existing operating plans so team leads validated data instead of filling in blank forms.
5. Evaluated Asana, Monday.com and Smartsheet, then ruled them out. Procurement would take six months. Built on the Excel, Jira and Confluence stack teams already used.
6. Standardised the language. One RAG standard brokered across commercial and product, plus an acronym dictionary for the function.
7. Started building an AI agent to shift reporting from biweekly push to self-service pull, so anyone can ask for the latest status of a programme on demand.

Key decisions

• Push back on the 1 January big-bang with a phased white paper.An impossible deadline met badly destroys a new function's credibility. A phased plan delivered on time builds it.
• Build on tools teams already had instead of waiting for procurement.Six months for the perfect tool was six more months of no visibility. Excel and Jira on day one beat Smartsheet in Q3.
• Pre-populate, never blank forms.With no authority over the 20+ contributors, the system had to be easier than the status quo or it would die quietly. Validating is easier than authoring.
• Replace loudest-voice prioritisation with a metric-driven approach.A tracker shows what is happening; prioritisation decides what should. Wiring intake into the annual operating plan made the system the place where the portfolio takes shape.

The result

The division got its first real-time portfolio view two weeks into January, with all 60 programmes onboarded by the end of March. Risks now surface while there is still time to act, the intake process feeds the annual operating plan, and programmes are prioritised on data rather than volume.

What I learned

Governance earns its keep by speeding a company up. The moment it becomes admin, people route around it, so the system has to be lighter than the chaos it replaces.