Toward a New Understanding of Portfolio Governance Senior Management Competence

Project portfolio governance is central to strategy implementation. However, there is little in-depth appreciation of the competences needed by senior managers working on portfolio governance boards. We apply an interpretive research approach known as “phenomenography” to address this issue. Current rationalistic approaches to the study of competence limit themselves to describing competence as two separate components: the personal attributes the worker possesses and an external list of work attributes. Phenomenography overcomes this limitation by suggesting that it is the meaning that work takes on for people as they experience it that constitutes competence, rather than a set of attributes. Hence, to understand competences, we need to understand how senior managers conceive of their work. Our findings revealed that senior managers hold four different conceptions of this work, each with multiple attributes. These conceptions exist along a hierarchy of increasing complexity, richness, and inclusiveness. We used these findings to build a guiding framework that could be used for the assessment and development of senior managers’ competences on portfolio governance boards. We also argue that our practical and pragmatic insights can inform practice for strategic decision-makers more broadly, beyond the specific context of these senior managers.