Portfolio Governance Assessment
The governance your PPM system actually runs on.
The questions that follow (including some questions that are straightforward, some that are complicated, some that are mundane and some that you may not have considered before) amount to a self-assessment of your portfolio's agility and resilience. This self-assessment is primarily for PMO Directors. The assessment is self-contained: no prior reading required.
Right now, somewhere in your portfolio, a decision needed to prevent a catastrophic risk is not reaching a decision-maker. How long that failure persists is not an accident. It is governed, well or badly, by rules your organization authored itself: who decides, on what signal, and by when the answer must move. This assessment shows you yours: the rules as they actually run, the rules that exist only on paper, and the rules that exist nowhere. Its object is a single artifact: the completed dyad matrix of the nine practices that constitute a PPM system.
How to answer (read once before you start)
Answer as completely as you can: only complete answers score. Every question accepts a question mark for unknown. Unknown earns no points, but it is tallied separately from No, because not knowing whether a rule fires is a different finding from knowing it does not, and a guessed answer is worse than either. Decision questions are asked twice on purpose: the expert phrasing first, then a plainer twin of the same question. The twin never adds or changes a condition; the two are one question, answered once. Every question carries a unique identifier, like SH-04 or B3-02; use these to cite, cross-reference, and look back. In Part A's decision tables, the three answer columns are cited as a (ritual), b (output), and c (where captured), so A3-07c means the capture location of that decision. Wherever you record a time value, include units (days, weeks, reporting periods); wherever you record a size, say what it is a size of.
Three instructions. First, answer for what actually happens, not for what the process manual says; the gap between the two is one of the most valuable things this assessment measures. Second, write "none" wherever nothing exists. A none is a finding, not a failure of the form; the blanks you cannot fill are the map of where your system runs on unwritten rules. Third, the small tags in parentheses, like (THR-16), point to the matching rule in the PMO Rule Catalog for anyone who wants the full treatment later. You can ignore them completely and lose nothing here.
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Terms used in this assessment (15 terms)
| Cadence rule | A rule about when a governance meeting or cycle runs: how often it happens, and what its timing is anchored to. |
| Threshold rule | A rule about what condition activates a decision: what signal, at what value, forces which forum to act, and by when. |
| Synchronization rule | A rule about handoffs between levels: by when one meeting's outputs must reach the next meeting that needs them. |
| Timing rules | The three families above: cadence, threshold, and synchronization. Together they govern when a PPM system decides, escalates, and re-synchronizes. |
| Temporal governance | Your organization's standing system of timing rules: who decides when, on what signal, with what deadline. |
| Authority over timing rules | A named forum that can change the clocks, thresholds, and deadlines on the record, rather than each level changing them locally and informally. |
| Quasi-governance | Rules that exist on paper but are silently overridden in practice. The most dangerous state, because it looks like governance. |
| Rank list | The dated, versioned priority order of the portfolio. If it is undated, nobody can tell whether it has gone stale, and any rule that depends on its age cannot fire. |
| Decision log | The record of decisions taken: what, when, by which forum, under which rule, and with what consequence. |
| RAID log | The log of risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies. Properly kept, it is the ledger of disturbance episodes: events that could knock the system off its rhythm. |
| Absorption | The disruption (delays, changes, extra work) a team may soak up on its own before it must escalate. A bounded amount is healthy; unbounded absorption is how problems disappear. |
| Escalation aging | How long an escalation may sit unanswered before it automatically climbs one level. |
| Repair forum | The standing body authorized to change the timing rules themselves: cadences, thresholds, windows. If no such body exists, nobody owns the clocks. |
| Baseline | The approved reference values for cost, schedule, and scope against which actuals are compared. |
| Type scale (1 to 4) | How real a rule is in practice: 1, habit only; 2, written but overridden; 3, standing but not yet tested by events; 4, fires and is enforced. You never assign these yourself; Part B derives them from one tick per rule. |