3.2.4: Organizational Assets and Tailoring

Organizational Assets and Tailoring 

A portfolio manager should never start completely from scratch. Most organizations already have a body of past experience sitting somewhere, whether in old templates, historical estimates, or documented lessons learned. The challenge isn't a lack of material. It's knowing where to look, what kind of asset actually applies to the problem at hand, and how much of an existing process to keep versus reshape for the situation in front of you.

Two Categories of Organizational Assets

Two categories of assets matter here, and it's easy to confuse them. Organizational Process Assets, or OPAs, sit at the enterprise level. They include things like the company's funding models, its general budgeting process, and its compliance or regulatory procedures. These exist independently of any single portfolio and apply broadly across the whole organization. Portfolio Process Assets, or PPAs, are more specific. They're tied to portfolio execution directly, things like past estimating models, reusable templates, and lessons learned from earlier portfolio cycles.

Myth

A persistent myth is that every new portfolio has to invent its own governance procedures from the ground up. This wastes enormous time and ignores real institutional knowledge that already exists somewhere in the organization. The PMO plays an important role in surfacing these assets, helping new portfolio managers find and reuse what has already been built rather than reinventing it from a blank page.

The distinction matters in practice. When a new portfolio manager is trying to figure out how projects typically get funded across the company, they're looking for an OPA. When they're trying to figure out how a similar past portfolio structured its scoring criteria or handled a specific kind of risk, they're looking for a PPA. Confusing the two can send someone looking in the wrong place entirely, wasting time chasing a company-wide policy document when what they actually need is a specific template from a portfolio that ran two years ago. Table \(\PageIndex{1}\): OPAs Compared to PPAs lays out how the two asset types differ in scope and typical use.

Table \(\PageIndex{1}\): OPAs Compared to PPAs  

Aspect	Organizational Process Assets (OPAs)	Portfolio Process Assets (PPAs)
Scope	Enterprise-wide	Specific to portfolio execution
Examples	Funding models, compliance procedures, general budgeting rules	Past estimating models, scoring templates, lessons learned
Who typically owns it	Finance, legal, or enterprise PMO	Prior or existing portfolio teams
When you'd look for it	Understanding how the company funds work in general	Reusing a proven approach from a similar past portfolio

Reusing and continuously improving these assets does two things at once. It speeds up how quickly a new portfolio can get organized and start delivering, and it keeps reporting and governance practices consistent across the whole enterprise, so an executive reviewing multiple portfolios sees familiar, comparable formats rather than a different structure every time.

Why Tailoring Matters Just as Much as Reuse

Reusing existing assets doesn't mean copying them exactly. A scoring template built for a hardware portfolio won't translate cleanly to a portfolio built around public health initiatives. A risk framework tuned for a stable, mature company can crush a fast-moving startup team under process it doesn't need yet. Tailoring is the discipline of taking an existing asset and adjusting it to fit the actual portfolio in front of you, rather than either forcing an ill-fitting template onto new work or discarding useful institutional knowledge out of impatience.

The Same Template, Two Very Different Fits

Picture a company that built a rigorous, multi-stage approval process for a portfolio of new pharmaceutical products, where every decision carries regulatory weight and a mistake can cost lives. That same company later launches a small internal portfolio to modernize its employee intranet. Applying the pharmaceutical approval process wholesale to the intranet project would be absurd. Months would pass before anyone could change a font. The right move is tailoring: keep the spirit of structured sign-off, but strip out the layers of regulatory review that simply don't apply to a low-risk internal tool.

Getting tailoring right requires judgment, not a formula. A portfolio manager has to ask what parts of an existing asset genuinely apply here, what parts need to be loosened because this portfolio moves faster or carries less risk, and what parts need to be tightened because this portfolio touches something more sensitive, more regulated, or more public-facing than the one the template originally came from.

Maturity Models as a Tailoring Guide

Tailoring isn't something a portfolio manager has to figure out purely by instinct every time. Maturity models like P3M3 give organizations a structured way to assess how formal their current portfolio practices are, and a realistic path toward more structure if that's genuinely needed. Rather than jumping straight to the most rigorous governance model available, a maturity model helps match the level of process to where the organization actually stands today.

An organization early in its maturity journey might rely heavily on informal conversations between line managers to get decisions made. That's not automatically wrong. It becomes a problem only when the organization has outgrown that informality without anyone noticing, and decisions that used to be simple start slipping through the cracks. A maturity model gives a portfolio manager language and a framework for having that conversation with leadership, rather than simply declaring that more process is needed and hoping people agree.

Myth

A common assumption is that tailoring is really just an excuse to skip rigor when it's inconvenient. Sometimes that's exactly what it becomes in practice, which is a fair concern. But genuine tailoring isn't about cutting corners. It's about matching the weight of the process to the weight of the risk. A portfolio manager who strips out a needed compliance check because a template felt heavy isn't tailoring. They're quietly creating exposure the organization hasn't agreed to accept. Real tailoring is a deliberate, documented decision, not a shortcut taken under time pressure.

That distinction, between deliberate tailoring and quiet corner-cutting, is what separates a portfolio manager using organizational assets well from one who's simply avoiding the work of adapting them properly. The first path builds trust with governance over time. The second erodes it the first time something slips through that a proper process would have caught.

Used well, organizational and portfolio process assets give a portfolio manager a running head start rather than a blank page, and tailoring is what keeps that head start from becoming a poor fit. Together, they let a new portfolio move faster without inheriting either unnecessary bureaucracy or unearned informality.