On Prof Pieter Steyn’s July Paper on
“The Need for a Chief Portfolio Officer
(CPO) in Organizations”

14 July 2010

Dear David,

Professor Pieter Steyn's featured paper (with the above title) in the July issue of PMWT is an important contribution to our PM literature on several counts.

Congratulations to you for promulgating such an excellent set of forward looking ideas. I hope you continue to attract and publish papers of this high quality in the future. Perhaps you could encourage authors to submit papers to you that they have presented at PMI and other congresses around the world so that your subscribers won't have to spend travel time and money plus registration and hotel costs to keep up with the best ideas that are emerging in our field.

I encourage all PMWT subscribers to read this paper carefully, if they have not already done so. Steyn's arguments are very persuasive to me. Among many statements and concepts that I am tempted to quote, here are a few of the most important, in my view:

• Parkington deplores the fact that strategy literature concentrates on theories about how best to formulate and plan strategy, while at the same time underestimating the difficulty of developing and implementing strategy at the corporate, business and operational levels. He contends that organizational transformation and change can best be achieved through programme management structures and paradigms."

• Steyn proposes four project portfolios within a "Balanced Scorecard Programme Management Learning Organization": 1) Strategic Transformation, 2) Virtual Network of Partners, 3) Continuous Improvement, and 4) Capital Expenditure (see his Figure 1.)

Professor Steyn quite rightly points out that the concepts of "programme (or program) management" have evolved significantly in recent years. He quotes the 2009 Gartner Research findings that PMI's 2008 "Standard for Program Management" "demonstrates little understanding that the two disciplines of programme management and project management, although related, are distinctly different. Programmes are mistakenly seen by the collection of authors of the PMI document as 'simply overly large projects.' ... Unfortunately, the vast majority of existing publications on the subject of portfolio- and programme management suffer from similar deficiencies."

Steyn also describes his and others' efforts to "comprehensively address these deficiencies and put modern thinking, including the emergent role of the Chief Portfolio Officer, into perspective."

Russell D. Archibald M
PMI Fellow
San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, russell_archibald@yahoo.com

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