This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Every organisation that struggles to finish projects is running more of them than it has people for, and every single one was approved by someone reasonable.

That is the portfolio problem. It is not a delivery problem, and hiring a better project manager does not fix it.

Where the portfolio breaks

Initiatives get approved one at a time, each on its own merits, and nobody ever looks at the total. The business case is written to get funding rather than to describe a decision, so it is optimistic in exactly the places that matter. Priorities exist but they are not ordered, which means everything is priority one and the sequencing gets decided by whoever asks most persistently. Risks are logged in a register that is opened at the start of a programme and again during the post-mortem. And a project finishes successfully while nobody can say what changed in the business as a result.

How the course is built

Forty lessons in five parts. Single-project delivery first, because a portfolio is made of these and you cannot govern what you cannot run. Ten lessons on PMBOK 7: the business case and charter, stakeholder analysis, scope and boundaries, work breakdown, the network diagram and Gantt, the three stages of a budget, the matrix environment where nobody reports to you, control and reporting, and a proper closure.

Then where a portfolio comes from at all. Strategic planning, the baseline assessment with stakeholder analysis and gap analysis, the two-day strategy session run properly, and turning the output into a plan with owners and resources. This is the section that determines which initiatives should have existed in the first place.

Cadence, alignment and risk

Then agile delivery, and specifically backlog prioritisation, which is where portfolio decisions actually get made week to week. Kanban, sprint planning, story points, MVP scoping, launch cadence and the meetings that keep it running.

Then OKR as the alignment layer across programmes: the cycle, goal format, synchronisation between teams, running and closing a quarter, tooling, and the links to review and pay so that outcomes reach the people who delivered them. Cases from Google, Intel, Preply and iDeals.

And finally risk, which gets ten lessons because portfolios fail there. ISO 31000, the risk heat map and hierarchy, escalation, the 4I model, the cognitive biases inside your own estimates, top-management risk with its warning signs, the three lines of defence, and a decision-making checklist.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. The OKR section includes the Preply and iDeals rollouts, and both of them took two cycles before they worked.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

Where to start

List every initiative currently running in your organisation, with the name of the person accountable for each one. If the list is longer than you expected or some names repeat too often, you have found the reason nothing finishes. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.