Question

Choose a company (one where you work or have worked for) and consider key stakeholders that the company has. Focus on 2 stakeholder groups: portfolio sponsors and portfolio governance. What role do they have as stakeholders? What are their interests in the company? What are their expectations?


Answer 1

A stakeholder can affect or be affected by the organisations actions objectives or policies. Stakeholders can be creditors,directors,employers, government and its agencies,owners,suppliers,unions and community from which the business draws its resources.

So coming to the two groups mentioned here as portfolio sponsors and portfolio governance, portfolio sponsors are in general an executive in the organisation with an authority to assign resources and enforce decisions regarding the projects. As a stakeholder of the company these portfolio sponsors have an overall accountability of that project. They are primarily concerned with ensuring that the project delivers the agreed upon business benefits and acts as the representative of the organisation. They are interested in achieving the organisation goal which will benefit them as a stakeholder. The project sponsors as stakeholders expect a timely completion of the projects in a transparent way as delay may incur losses.

Portfolio governance is a factor in the success of portfolios and strategic initiative. With the dynamic organisational environment, with portfolio constantly changing implementing a framework of effective portfolio governance can be challenging. It is a subset of the activities of corporate governance and is mainly concerned of areas related to project portfolio. Portfolio governance identifies threats and challenges of the organisation, assess change, impacts and dependencies, achieves performance targets and selects schedules and prioritises activities. An effective portfolio governance results in accountability for everyone involved,transparency on what the scope is,protection of concerned parties against disputes.