Demystifying the Portfolio Management – Part 1/3: The Strategy's Side

In this first podcast of the series, Ricardo talks about strategic and portfolio management. He explains that if the manager does not know what is the strategy of the organization, it's a waste of time to create comparative to select projects. Ricardo makes an analogy between stones of different sizes and the choice of the sieve for selecting these stones, in other words, you must set the criteria based on the strategy to select projects that meet these criteria.

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Episode transcript

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Hello everybody welcome to the five minutes PM podcast today. Yeah. I'd like to discuss this and this mystified Portfolio Management you decided to record pre podcasts to cover this subject. Why I decided to do that because the first one I will take care of the strategic side of the portfolio management. And the second Podcast I will discuss the criteria, how to prepare, how to set up great criteria, and in the term Podcast that we'll be discussing how to apply in the company, their projects in this scenario, and that way.

So how do you make the right decision in why you decided to start with the strategic side? Let me explain to you a couple of weeks. I posted on my Twitter account. One sentence that I was thinking about portfolio management. If you don't have a strategy, you don't need portfolio management in a way I put this because the strategy is the key driver of all corporate decisions.

It's impossible to select them to see, Oh, this project is better than that project. How we can handle this comparison. If we do not have in the background or strategic thinking that direct and drives my decision. I like always to tell the Colt of Louis Carol, from Alison the Woodland, if you don't know where you are going and a new road will get you there. So this is very deep because a lot of people, the, we want to say, okay, it's easy.

Let's just compare a return on investment or the internal rate or something like that. The word and the strategy are not driven. Only by money. We have different things. We have different things. We need to understand that The, Strategy, we'll create the great criteria. And this criteria is we'll be applied to the set of projects to help you to decide you never, ever compare projects.

You decide criteria first, and then you apply it's. This is the best way. When you were negotiating about something, you do not. The goal sheet positions, unique interests are the roots of the getting to yes, from ilium early in all the collaborative negotiation techniques. So will you never say, Oh, look, project X is better or worse than project Y hi, this is pointless?

We need to understand which will be the criteria then. And I will apply the criteria is the PSAP of criteria. So in project X and product Y and based it on the results, I will tell both Kate using these criteria, I will decide to do that, that, so it's like, let me give you an engineering example. Imagine the CIF, you have a mountain of stones of different styles from Zamora soft sand, two big, big stones.

I not telling you that big stones are better than small stones. It depends. It depends on what it depends on the safe and deceives that you have. We'll be Side which kind of granularity te will pass through the C and which kind will not do pass in the if you go to the store, specialized shops, you will see different sizes of seeds in there. There's no good and worse and bad.

It does hands off your strategy, your strategy. Exactly, exactly. Decide how to build the best CJ to show up and to relate to, to your strategy. So this is very important in how do I do this on the practical side. Usually, I like very much the Palin scorecard. I think it's a great tool to translate your strategy into some actions in one of the key aspects of the BSC, you have the strategy map, where you be putting all your objectives.

And if you like you look in the internal process perspective, learning perspective, do you see that most of you are the initiatives that BSC call in sick s**t. He was in, we call projects there on the bottom, one of them, and what do I do? And a lot of people looked like a strange thing, but what I like to do, and to invite you to think about is that I take this objective in I priorities them.

I use techniques that I'll be talking about this in Portree like an elite go-a-year RQ process, or any of those for a process to compare in what I will be doing that will be deciding among seven, eight, five objectives. We care. The key objectives in this will help me to create one. Do you recall a strategic fit? So means the projects that will help strengthen and objective that this is strong, this will be great for me, will the projects that are in this criteria.

We want to, you have a large point scale in the point scale. So this is very important. And to covert this, I will discuss the utility theory and why it is like to discuss this. I will not cover this on this podcast, but the utility theory, the proposal by Jeremy Banton and Stuart Miele, and, and it's to have the greatest sex fashion to the greatest an about of people. For sure, if you do this, not everybody will be happy, but you believe that most people we'll be happy in most aspects.

And we are talking about the majority. I'm not, not discussing the human side of the utility theory. If you will, you want to do that. I invite you to go to amazon.com and by a course on at the Amazon, from Michael's Sandoz called justice, it's great, if you, one of the most valuable assets that you can buy with your money, it's a 12-hour course about just this. And in the second class, he talks about the military.

It's a very, very polemic, but, and I will not cover this, but what it's the reason behind you selecting and prioritizing does the strategic objectives. This will help me to avoid people saying that everything is critical in a strategic everything. If you go trying to do a selection of projects, everybody will tell that their projects are more important. When you do this, you will create a very good CIF, a very good filter for the really good projects.

And next week in the next Podcast out. Talk about the criteria for doing this. See you next week with another five minutes, be on podcasts.

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