Mr Portfolio’s “Handshake”

By Craig Kilford

The “Handshake” is a little nugget of Portfolio Gold that you wont find in any book, you can use it to help your portfolio work wonderfully with your key stakeholders. At some point in time your stakeholders will get confused about the services they should expect from you, and equally the information and services that you need from them.

To help clarify relationships and working practices between the porfolio and other teams I have found the concept of a “Handshake” to be extremely useful because it helps build strong connection, plus everyone likes doing a good deal. I’ve used this with teams in Finance, IT, HR and Product Development, I’ve also found it really useful for working with other Portfolio Offices and with 3rd party organisations that the Portfolio Office has to deal with.

Best wishes, @MrPortfolio

To ensure the Portfolio Office realises it’s vision we make sure that the way we work with other teams in [company name] are defined to ensure expectations are understood and met from both parties.

Due to the increasingly complex dependency work taking place within the [portfolio name] and the wider Corporate Dependency Team, this “Handshake” defines roles, responsibilities, who to contact, reporting timescales, response time promises and frequently asked questions.

This is a living document and should be updated as the relationships with other departments evolves.

Craig Kilford

@MrPortfoliowww.MrPortfolioManagement.com

Our Portfolio Office Vision

To provide top class, professional portfolio management services that are valued by by all of our Stakeholders.

We achieve this by:

• Checking and double checking that everything we do adds value and achieves quality standards that we can be proud of.

• Ensuring efficient portfolio delivery processes are used to drive Governance & success

• Sharing accurate and timely information

• Working collaboratively as one team

Introduction to the Handshake

[Company name] Portfolio Office Central Dependencies Team

Role• Provide a value add suite of portfolio management

services to the [company name] and all stakeholders

• Provide [company name] with timely and accurate dependency information with recommendations for next steps and key action.

Handshake Duties

• Embed internal mechanisms that enable effective management and reporting of portfolio dependencies at all levels

• Obtain dependency information from the Portfolio Office and represent the information accurately in the corporate dependency analysis

Provision of information

• Provide updated dependency information on projects as per the agreed Central Dependency Team dependency Calendar (see appendix *)

• Provide copies of the Corporate Dependancy Register and Executive Dependency Information to the Portfolio Office as pet the agreed calendar (see apendix **)

Reponses times

• Provision of extra-ordinary information within 12 working hours or less

• Provision of extra-ordinary information within 12 working hours or less

Rules of Engagement

• The Portfolio Office will work with [ team member name] relating to any central dependency information and will ensure the most up to date and agreed information is shared.

• The Portfolio Office will ensure Director of Change is aware of information sent to the Central Dependency Team

• [team member name] will review the Portfolio Office Register and engage with @MrPortfolio prior to engaging with project or programme managers within the Portfolio. This will prevent duplication and ensure one version of truth is reported upwards.

HandshakeThe Handshake detail

Who do you know that would find this useful?

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@MrPortfolio

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