The Portfolio Support Office is responsible for supporting the Portfolio Leadership Team. This includes facilitating effective portfolio management, collecting and maintaining metrics and data on portfolio performance, and tracking and driving continuous improvement to the portfolio management ways of working. This team may also facilitate the governance and coordination of delivery work done by Delivery Teams that work directly to the portfolio, and the continuous improvement of the performance of both internal teams and suppliers.
They should also be responsible for enabling and supporting standards and good practices across any sub-portfolios. These can be defined at the top and flowed down, but with space for the Portfolio Support Offices in the sub-portfolios to innovate and experiment and to fit these to their local context, with emergent good practices flowing across portfolios (for example via communities of practice) and fed back up to influence global standards and practices.
For clarity, the Portfolio Support Office is not a decision-making or management team – its role is to enable effective and timely decision making by the Portfolio Leadership Team.
The name of this team is likely to be contentious. It is not a management team and therefore should not be called a Portfolio Management Office, a distinction that’s also important given its supporting Lean Portfolio Management rather than traditional Portfolio Management. And the acronym of PSO is likely to create confusion with a Programme or Project Support Office.