Book Reviews

For corporate executives who are asking questions about how their strategic objectives are being delivered or concerned with controlling discretionary spend (aka project investment budgets), the book provides a guide on how you might tackle these questions.  For CIOs sponsoring or considering Project Portfolio Management initiatives, the book provides a business perspective that will help you with them, and may provide the impetus to move beyond the IT organisation.  For those from the project/programme management community, the book provides a good business perspective on portfolio management that is generally lacking in books about “Project Portfolio Management.” 

Optimizing Corporate Portfolio Management is really an introduction and guide to the implementation of portfolio management and not the hardcore guide to optimizing the corporate investment portfolio that the title suggests.  In particular, Sanwal focuses on the organisational behaviours and process/disciplines aspects of portfolio management.  He starts by constructing a maturity model or framework based on these two dimensions and proceeds to a four step process to guide the implementation.   Later sections discuss the application of portfolio management within different functional areas of the business, and present a series of case studies from companies that have implemented corporate portfolio management.
Notable aspects of the book include:  an insightful discussion about the stakeholders around portfolio management, their possible behaviours and ways of addressing these; a list of 7½ deadly sins commonly made in the implementation of a portfolio management approach which is spot on; and an extensive questionnaire that helps place an organisation within the maturity model and helps guide any subsequent implementation.

The book is fairly high level and does not get into the gritty details that need to be addressed to embed the business change required to enable on-going management of the corporate portfolio.  Nonetheless, it is a must read for anyone concerned with ensuring that corporate strategy is delivered by making the right investments.

The book has an accompanying website www.wiley.com/go/sanwal which contains resources to go with sections of the book.