Benefits of a Robust Program Structure

When we think about planning and investment decision making, we often think about projects and the associated programs into which they are rolled up.  There are several potential drivers behind the definition of programs such as technical discipline, asset class, expenditure classification and funding source.
In the pursuit of robust technical decision-making capabilities, organisations must keep in mind that the asset management systems used to deliver services are complex and there is often also a need to make investment trade off decisions between different asset groups. To enable quantification of cross asset group investment decisions, there is a need to have common decision-making criteria.

This article describes five core requirements that together enable progression from siloed planning practices into a whole of organisation planning framework.  The method described within seeks to build on existing technical discipline based processes, such that an organisation can leverage existing practices to develop integrated whole-of-portfolio decision making. When implemented, the combination of these five requirements enables optimisation of quantified portfolio-wide investment decisions.