Rate how your organisation actually decides what to invest in, in which order, and when to stop. You get your maturity level, your profile on the six categories of the Portfolio Excellence Framework, your position against other companies and industries, and the good practices that would move you forward.
How organisations in automotive, banking, software, security, industrial technology and healthcare decide, fund and steer what they build next – measured with one framework on one scale. Your assessment is compared against this field.
These are the symptoms we hear in almost every organisation we work with – and the 2026 benchmark found them across industries. Each of them has a root cause the assessment makes visible.
With no shared criteria and no explicit decision rights, the loudest voice or the biggest business unit wins – and the teams juggle ten top priorities at once.
From the benchmark: “Board and CTO topics go through quickly – side channels to the developers do the rest.”
Strategy stays a slide: no allocation targets, no boundaries, no link between the strategic plays and the initiatives that actually get funded. Every request is equally “strategic”, and the portfolio drifts away from the intent it was meant to serve.
From the benchmark: “Strategy is aligned, but never translated into budgets.”
Requesters submit and wait for months without a yes, a no or a when. The rational reaction: side channels, escalations and shadow backlogs.
From the benchmark: “I’m basically paying for you, and I don’t know when I’ll get what.”
Without work-in-progress limits, capacity checks and the courage to stop, initiatives linger for years and development teams turn into maintenance teams.
From the benchmark: not one interviewee could name a project that was deliberately stopped.
Portfolio management is how an organisation decides which products, services, platforms and projects to invest in, how much, in which order – and when to stop. It sits between strategy and execution: strategy says where to play, delivery says how to build. Portfolio management turns limited capacity into the set of bets that creates the most value.
Done well, it is the difference between a busy organisation and a valuable one. Done badly, it is invisible – until the symptoms above appear.
↻ … which feeds the next strategy cycle
Every dimension, category and organisation is scored on the same four levels. The levels describe how an approach is lived, not how elaborate it is – a simple rule that everybody follows scores higher than a sophisticated process that is bypassed. In the 2026 benchmark the whole field sits inside ML-2 and the lower half of ML-3. Click a step to see what each level looks like.
What it looks like:
To reach Emerging: definition – a named approach, one intake, one review cadence, written down and known.
What it looks like:
To reach Established: adoption – rules that bind the people who set them, hand-overs with owners, every requester gets an answer. Not more process: the existing one has to be lived.
What it looks like:
To reach Leading: measurement and learning – realised value against the business case, process KPIs that steer, evaluation calibrated with evidence, the framework reviewed on a cadence.
What it looks like:
To stay there: keep measuring the process, benchmark against the best, and teach the discipline to the rest of the organisation.
The four levels follow the maturity logic of P3M3 and CMMI – from an initial, repeatable and defined approach to one that is measured and continually improved – applied to the portfolio-management process of ISO 21504 and cross-walked to the ITIL 4 capability levels.
The framework describes what excellent portfolio management looks like in practice: leadership as the roof, strategic inputs feeding the portfolio core that drives execution, and governance and culture as the foundation. Click a part of the house to see what it covers.
The framework builds on ISO 21504, P3M3 and Lean Portfolio Management, and on years of portfolio work in large R&D and service organisations.
Portfolio management stands or falls with the people at the top: whether they understand the different forms of innovation, decide on evidence, stick to the process they set up, place portfolio management with real authority – and reward the behaviour they ask for.
What excellent looks like: leadership stops immature opportunities on evidence, role-models the process instead of bypassing it, and targets and incentives point in the same direction as the portfolio goals.
What flows into portfolio decisions: scenarios and outlook, market sizing, competitive, regulatory and technology intelligence, local market knowledge – and a strategy that is translated into priorities, boundaries and an investment logic across horizons.
What excellent looks like: decisions rest on validated external data and explicit strategic plays, not on the loudest internal voice; every initiative can be traced to a strategic boundary and an investment horizon.
The decision process itself: how the portfolio is structured, how customer value is defined, how opportunities enter, are evaluated, prioritised and committed in stages, how capacity and work in progress are managed – and how the portfolio as a whole is assessed, rebalanced and pruned.
What excellent looks like: one defined intake, transparent and enforced prioritisation with cost of delay, a capacity reality check before commitment, and regular phase-out decisions that free capacity for the next round.
Where decisions become results: translating portfolio decisions into execution plans and delivering them predictably, rolling out to markets and regions with the right communication – and closing the loop by measuring realised value against the business case.
What excellent looks like: real-time execution transparency, right-first-time delivery, active regional ownership of roll-outs, and every business case followed up with actuals.
The mechanics that make the process repeatable: documented and understood process design, defined roles and decision rights, a meeting cadence that works, effective escalation and communication, tools and data people trust, a funding model with discipline – and financial transparency down to team level.
What excellent looks like: decision rights are clear and enforced, governance bodies are empowered, escalations are resolved by rules rather than by rank, and one integrated data source shows the whole pipeline and the money behind it.
Whether the organisation can carry the process: a shared understanding of process, roles and risk, the ability to adapt and learn from outside, openness to buy, partner and ecosystem options, the courage to stop, professional portfolio skills – and the weight of a hardware-centric heritage in a software world.
What excellent looks like: people understand what is expected of them, stopping is accepted rather than punished, learning loops are structured, and portfolio management is a recognised, professionalised discipline.
The goal of the assessment is a fact base: how your organisation lives the six categories of the framework today, from the perspective of the people in it.
The short version, for anyone involved in the portfolio management process.
Quick assessment
The complete framework, for portfolio managers and process owners.
Deep-dive assessment
The assessment asks for your role, so results can be compared across roles. That is where the interesting conversations start: the same process, rated very differently by the people who fund it, run it, feed it and deliver it.
See where the organisation really stands before the next budget round, defend investment decisions with evidence instead of volume, and get a neutral outside view of a process you are accountable for.
“Are we investing in the right things – and would our people say so?”
A maturity profile by role and dimension, a benchmark against other companies, and good practices that address causes rather than symptoms – proof for the changes you have been arguing for.
“Which of the twenty things I could fix would actually make a difference?”
Understand why opportunities get stuck, what a mature intake, evaluation and prioritisation looks like – and how to make a business case count without inflating it.
“Where is my request, and why did it lose against theirs?”
Portfolio management is not only for hardware and software. See how service and digital offerings are evaluated, funded, rolled out and phased out alongside products – and where they fall through the cracks.
“How do services get a fair seat at the portfolio table?”
Fewer parallel initiatives, decisions that reach the teams, ready work before it starts: the assessment shows which practices reduce overload and context switching.
“Why do we have 70 things in progress and nothing done?”
Investment transparency per portfolio type, business-case rigour, funding discipline and value realisation are measured explicitly – the numbers side of the portfolio, rated by the people who produce them.
“Which promised value ever showed up in the P&L?”
For individuals and teams who want a first, neutral picture of their portfolio management.
For sponsors, portfolio managers and PMOs who want the whole organisation in one picture – and measurable change, not a report.
Corporate InnovatorsFramework and diagnostic, study design, assessments, analysis and synthesis – and the consulting behind the Enterprise package.
EBS Business SchoolExternal benchmark interviews, Design Science Research method and the target picture of portfolio-management excellence.
Co-initiated the benchmark and took part under the same case logic as every other participant.
Yes. The Basic package – assessment, maturity profile, benchmark position, good practices and the annual report – is free for as many people as you like. We ask for a role, an industry and a company size so the benchmark stays meaningful; a name and an e-mail address are optional.
Your individual results are shown to you. In the benchmark, answers are aggregated and anonymised; no company or person is identifiable. Only with an Enterprise package does your organisation get a dashboard of its own participants – and only for participants who used the organisation's link.
Please do – that is where the assessment becomes most useful. Send them this page. With the Enterprise package you get a dedicated link so all responses land in your company dashboard.
Yes. Your progress is saved in your browser; open the same link on the same device and continue where you left off.
The statements come with four maturity levels each, side by side. That layout needs a wide screen to stay readable, so the assessment opens on laptops and desktops. This page works on any device – save it and start when you are at your desk.
Take the quick assessment first. If you own or run the portfolio process, take the deep-dive afterwards – the additional practices it covers are where the detailed levers are.
Questions first? Write to info@corporate-innovators.com.