Portfolio of Work

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Portfolio of work

Many spinning plates is something I have often heard in the context of work (including mine) - I’ve used it! I find this is a poor analogy, and if indeed it is apt as an analogy, then there is an issue: fragility. I picture a brittle juggling act to keep all those plates spinning, rushing from one to the next, always under stress.

I rather think of managing a portfolio of work, where the return profile of that work varies, most usefully, along two key axes: timeline to impact and likelihood of impact. More clearly, I find the following framing a useful tool to reason about a variety work over time:

  • At any one time I expect to have multiple projects, and for each of these projects to be:

    • either short term, medium term, long term or very long term
    • have differing return timelines (impact accrued over what period of time)
    • have varying degrees of certainty about their impact

  • I like to make sure as an eng leader I have work within the context of my areas (my direct teams) and outside them (all of eng, or company wide)

  • I like to stay relatively close to fully utlilised - that is, I will have to actively decide what work to drop out of the portfolio if something new comes in, and in fact the concept of a portfolio is useful here too

So what is a project? For me, this is a wide conceptual container. It can include working on improving the health of a team, working on new onboarding for a disicipline, drafting, seeking concensus and implementing a strategy, having (and executing) specific growth plans for people, improving a specific hiring pipeline. Anything that requires >1 episode of time investment and that I expect to have specific impact qualifies as a project. Most of my business as usual (BAU) tasks should be bucketable into project form. Put differently, I should not have BAU for which I am investing time but don’t have specific impact expectations. With time this degreades and requires cleanup, like everything (entropy is mean like that).

Why is this useful? This just seems like a complicated way to look at work.

Thinking up-front about what is in my portfolio, what investment it requires and when, and roughly when I expect to see impact from that investment, helps me:

  1. optimise for impact across the portfolio, and importantly across a variety of timelines, greedy search isn’t always optimal

  2. to say no; and to make it clear when you need to drop something from your portfolio to add something new

  3. set expectations that make me (and others) comfortable with different investment and return profiles (“I expect this to pay over time”, “I expect to dedicate a couple of hours every two weeks to this”)

A portfolio of work should not feel fragile, like an accidental bag of things I’m looking after that I have collected over time and now drive stress, but rather a purposeful set of investments I expect to pay out over time.

When speaking to others, the most contentious part of this framing I’ve heard is that it can feel sanguine to treat your work with reports as projects with an expectation of impact. I disagree: I think that can be both done with empathy and kindness and can be immensely valuable for a report. Put differently, I am extra satisfied when I know my growth is someone’s project.