Good governance is not maximum involvement. It is correctly timed involvement with clear authority.
A chief executive attends every portfolio steering meeting because the portfolio is strategically important. The intention is responsible leadership. The result can be the opposite.
Operational decisions wait for executive preference. Portfolio managers become coordinators rather than decision owners. Project teams learn to escalate instead of resolve. Line managers lobby directly for resources. Senior leaders spend time on matters that should have been delegated while the strategic decisions that genuinely require executive judgement receive less attention.
The problem is not that the chief executive is the wrong stakeholder. It is that the stakeholder may be intervening at the wrong point in the decision system.
The Strategic Context
Beringer, Jonas and Kock examined stakeholder behaviour across 197 project portfolios. Their study divided portfolio management into three recurring activity areas: portfolio structuring, resource management and portfolio steering.
Portfolio structuring concerns strategic planning, evaluation and selection. Resource management connects initial allocation with continuing reallocation. Portfolio steering covers ongoing coordination, monitoring, corrective action, cross-project synergy and the cancellation of obsolete work.
The study's central contribution is uncomfortable for organisations that equate engagement with commitment: the effect of stakeholder involvement was phase-specific, and role clarity changed the relationship between engagement and portfolio success. Senior-management involvement was not uniformly positive and, in established portfolio systems, greater senior-management engagement in operative steering was negatively associated with success. In low-role-clarity environments, line managers could use their resource position in ways that harmed portfolio outcomes. The researchers also found that portfolio managers' influence in steering was not automatically significant, which they linked to their comparatively weaker power base.
The lesson is not to reduce stakeholder engagement. It is to design it.
What Leaders Commonly Misread
The first misread is that important portfolios require senior leaders in every decision. Strategic importance does require executive accountability, but accountability and continuous intervention are different things.
The second is that stakeholder management means getting everyone involved. That may be appropriate for consultation. It is rarely appropriate for decision ownership.
The third is that a formal role description creates role clarity. Beringer and colleagues treated role clarity as both formal differentiation and actually practised behaviour. A responsibility matrix can look perfect while real decisions continue to follow hierarchy, personal influence or historical habit.
The fourth is that delegation weakens control. In mature systems, delegation can strengthen control because it preserves executive attention for the decisions only executives can make.
Reframing the Issue
Stakeholder engagement should be treated as a form of governance bandwidth.
Every intervention consumes attention, changes incentives and signals who really holds authority. The question is not simply whether a stakeholder should be involved. Leaders should ask four things:
- Which phase?
- Which decision?
- Which evidence?
- Which authority?
The same stakeholder can be essential in one phase and disruptive in another.
Related article: Portfolio Governance Is a Decision-Rights System
Strategic Structuring Needs Executive Judgement
Portfolio structuring is where senior leaders have the strongest legitimate role. This is where the organisation interprets strategy, tests major investments, defines strategic priorities and accepts trade-offs.
Executives should challenge whether proposed initiatives genuinely advance enterprise objectives, whether the portfolio is balanced against risk and capacity, and what will not be funded. They also need to protect the process from pet projects. Beringer and colleagues explicitly warn that senior leaders should prevent personal preferences from distorting portfolio structuring through objective criteria, transparency and defined processes.
This is a crucial distinction. Executive participation should raise the level of strategic judgement, not provide a privileged path for executive sponsorship.
Resource Management Needs Enterprise Rules
Resource management is where portfolio governance often becomes political because the conflict becomes tangible. Projects can all look strategically important until they compete for the same architect, test facility, operations window, capital tranche or leadership attention.
Line managers possess critical information about capability and operational constraints. They are therefore essential participants. But when role clarity is weak, they can also protect local objectives at the expense of portfolio value.
The solution is not to exclude line management. It is to make allocation logic explicit. Scarce-resource decisions should be governed through enterprise priorities, not through the bargaining power of the function that owns the people.
A useful test is simple: if two projects compete for the same scarce capability, can the organisation explain the allocation without referring to who argued hardest?
Portfolio Steering Needs Empowered Portfolio Leadership
As the portfolio moves from strategic structuring into ongoing steering, senior-management involvement should become more selective. The portfolio manager should have enough authority to coordinate, challenge, reallocate within delegated limits and escalate only when a decision crosses an agreed threshold.
If every steering issue returns to the executive team, the formal portfolio role is hollow.
Beringer and colleagues' finding that portfolio-manager engagement was not automatically associated with steering success is therefore strategically revealing. A role can exist on the organisation chart without having sufficient power to shape decisions.
Portfolio governance should distinguish between responsibility without authority and true decision ownership.
Related article: Your Portfolio Committee May Not Be Where Decisions Are Made
Decision Framework: The Phase-Right Engagement Matrix
For every major portfolio role, define engagement across four dimensions.
| Governance question | Portfolio structuring | Resource management | Portfolio steering |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary concern | Strategic direction | Enterprise allocation | Adaptation and control |
| Executive role | Decide priorities and constraints | Resolve major enterprise trade-offs | Intervene by exception |
| Line-management role | Provide capability context | Make capacity visible and execute allocation | Manage operational impacts |
| Portfolio-manager role | Integrate evidence and options | Coordinate cross-project allocation | Own routine steering within mandate |
| Project-manager role | Supply credible project evidence | Clarify demand and consequences | Report, forecast and execute decisions |
This is not a universal organisation chart. It is a decision-design prompt. The exact allocation should reflect organisational scale, complexity and maturity.
Then apply five tests.
Role test: Is it clear what this stakeholder owns rather than merely attends?
Boundary test: What decisions are they explicitly not expected to make?
Escalation test: Which thresholds move a decision to the next level?
Evidence test: What information must be available before the stakeholder intervenes?
Behaviour test: Does actual practice match the formal role?
From Strategy to Execution
Immediate action is to review the last three significant portfolio decisions and map who actually shaped them. Compare this with the documented governance model. The gaps reveal the real decision system.
Medium-term capability building means clarifying decision rights by phase, strengthening the authority of portfolio leadership and creating allocation rules that reduce local bargaining. Training should include not just responsibilities but escalation behaviour: when to intervene, when to delegate and when to remain informed without taking control.
Long-term strategic positioning requires leadership discipline. Senior leaders need enough confidence in the governance system to let it operate. That means building capable portfolio managers, reliable information and clear exception thresholds so that executive involvement becomes more valuable because it is more selective.
Signals to Monitor
Watch for meetings where senior leaders routinely reverse decisions that were supposedly delegated. That is a sign that formal and actual authority have separated.
Other warning signals include recurring resource deals made outside portfolio governance, project managers escalating directly to executives, portfolio managers who can report but cannot act, senior managers spending increasing time on project-level detail, and line functions protecting capacity for local work despite enterprise reprioritisation.
A mature signal is different: stakeholders can explain where their authority begins and ends, and the organisation can make routine portfolio adjustments without requiring heroic escalation.
References
- Beringer, C., Jonas, D. & Kock, A. 2013, 'Behavior of internal stakeholders in project portfolio management and its impact on success', International Journal of Project Management, vol. 31, no. 6, pp. 830–846.
Questions for the Leadership Team
- Which portfolio decisions genuinely require executive judgement, and which still reach executives because delegation is weak?
- Where do line-management incentives conflict with enterprise resource allocation?
- Does the portfolio manager have authority proportionate to the accountability attached to the role?
- Which stakeholders are highly engaged but unclear about their decision boundaries?
- When did we last identify a “pet project” surviving because of sponsorship rather than evidence?
- Do our governance meetings distinguish consultation, recommendation, decision and escalation?
Closing Perspective
Portfolio governance fails both when the wrong people are absent and when the right people dominate the wrong decisions. Leadership maturity is visible in the ability to intervene selectively: executives set direction and resolve enterprise trade-offs, portfolio leaders steer within mandate, line managers make capability real, and project leaders provide credible execution evidence. More involvement is not automatically better. Better-timed authority is.
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