Portfolio of Initiatives: Is it an important tool in performance management?
In today’s business environment, strategic initiatives are becoming more and more complex. However, there are few organizations that have tools implemented to routinely monitor the initiatives’ performance.
What is the portfolio of initiatives? Briefly, it is a collection of projects the organization is implementing in order to fill an existing performance gap and achieve the desired state. The important part is to develop this tool based on the Balanced Scorecard of the organization. Thus, for each objective, initiatives have to be identified, to support their achievement.
Initiatives management is not an easy step in the performance improvement process. It implies a proper tracking of the initiatives taken, which is usually a challenge for most organizations. Initiating projects may turn out to be easier than managing them afterwards, when the issues of time, money and talent available interfere in the process. If we add resources problems and poor project monitoring to other problems, then the future of the initiative is not hard to guess.
