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Investment Management

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Projects should visibly enable, support and deliver the strategy - TOP™ enables you to track, evaluate and measure this; and increase the returns over time. This can dramatically increase the returns generated by your project portfolio.

Which projects should get up and why? How do you cull early poor projects or ones you cannot do? How do you maximize the returns on your investments? When does the investment management process start and finish?

Investment management is an area that most organizations themselves rate that they do inadequately.

Investment management should start when the idea is formed in the corporate planning process and track its strategic and business contribution through to post-project delivery. But most investment management processes fail on these and other criteria. This leads to funds and resources being wasted on the wrong projects.


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The effectiveness of your Project Investment Management processes determine your cumulative results over time. They should increase the returns on individual projects and the portfolio, while eliminating or stopping (at any stage) projects that are not worthwhile At the basic level investment management involves answering just three questions

  1. Why – Do we want to do this project?
  2. How – Can we be sure we can deliver it (and its value) successfully?
  3. When – Do we want to do it now?

These three questions are cumulative – failure at any one should cull the project. To answer these three questions requires

  • a clear value proposition/business case appropriate to the stage of the project/proposal
  • comparable information based on agreed standards and validated as correct
  • and a planned and existing portfolio context.

Most project investment management programs fail to provide adequate information in each of these areas. This is where Value Delivery Management fills the ‘holes’ that business value currently falls through. Our investment management approach

  • refocuses the primary investment perspective onto value from cost
  • evaluates projects from the corporate planning stage onwards
  • determines which projects get into the forward portfolio plan so that time is not wasted on irrelevant projects
  • prioritizes and approves (or culls) proposed projects on transparent grounds as they progress
  • resources (funds, skills, et al) prioritized and approved projects to ensure their success.

But our investment management process also

  • measures and tracks the portfolio’s strategic and value contribution - how and where are you advancing and contributing to your organization’s strategy?
  • tracks and measures your organization’s capability to deliver projects - what types of projects can you successfully deliver and how can you improve this?
  • tracks and measures your organization’s progressive improvement of its delivered project results.

The TOP™ Investment Management TOPology is focused on increasing the returns from investments — not just approving or not approving projects.