Future focused: Transforming portfolios with data-driven insights – The Portfolio Management Interest Group Conference

As the lead of the APM’s Portfolio Management Interest Group, and someone who was heavily involved in the SIG that pre-dated it, I’m thoroughly looking forward to what will be my 6th Conference through all the years. It always strikes me how much has changed in the world of portfolio management, while the principles of what we do and how we do it have never been more important. Portfolio Management has been fundamentally transformed by the programme revolution, the agile revolution and now the data/AI revolution. How we do what we do looks very different from how it looked in 2013, but the principles of good practice remain the same. We still need to ensure we’re helping our organisation commission the right change for its strategy, risk, and funding context and ensure that change is being delivered in the right way.

This guiding principle has shaped the design of this year's conference, being held on the 15th of May at the Holiday Inn, Bloomsbury in London. The conference will feature a mix of principled good practice and next-gen ways of working.

Providing us with the principles that underpin our profession are two giants of the Portfolio Management and PMO World: Steve Jenner and Dr. Robert Joslin. Steve needs no introduction; in drafting Management of Portfolio, he has done more than anyone to define what good practice looks like to the Portfolio Professional. Steve will be joining us to give us a sneak peek at his new Portfolio methodology, ‘Managing Portfolios,’ and share his experience from a lifetime of thinking about and delivering complex portfolio transformation.

Dr. Robert Joslin, CEO of AIPMO, has a long history of defining what good looks like in the world of transformational change, particularly around large-scale PMO. Few come larger than the PMO he built to oversee one of the biggest Mega-Projects in the world. Robert will be sharing how he went about this and some of the tricks and new approaches to large-scale change assurance over a ‘mega’ scale.

Strong principles are critical, but there’s no avoiding that how we deliver Portfolio Management is changing at a faster rate than ever. Few people are better to talk about that change than Steve McLaren, Chief Operating Officer of the National Robotarium. Steve will be sharing some of the exciting data-driven capabilities he uses to track the wide portfolio of projects and programmes that sit under him. From a practitioner perspective, we will be joined by Andrew Cleary from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who will share how he’s ‘using information to get things done’ in this critical national organisation.

We’ll also be joined by Nicky Walsh and Dave Gunning from NFU Mutual. Nicky and Dave have been firm supporters of the Portfolio Management interest group for many years and members of our Portfolio Director’s Dinner community. They’ll be joining us to talk through the great discussions that have been held at those events and particularly the thought-leadership that was generated.

Of course, we’ll have our breakout sessions covering everything from using PowerBI to present portfolio data to how to deliver change at the portfolio level.

The more things change, the more the fundamentals stay the same. Come join us and hear from some of the top thinkers in the field how it’ll affect you.