Portfolio Management Structures: System, Capability, and Mission Portfolios

Abstract

Since 2008, ongoing attempts by DoD to support decision-making across capability portfolio management have been unsuccessful. Proposed is a multidimensional portfolio structure schema, which utilizes ANSI Standard for Portfolio Management and is informed by ISO Standard for Building Information Modeling (BIM)s. The schema creates a non-hierarchical structure of three portfolio types across component PEOs representing product/platforms, component operational units representing capabilities, and combatant and supporting commander Operations Plans (OpsPlan) representing missions. The multidimensional nature of the structure allows for enhanced management insight and decision-making using structured performance management across the DoD Decision Support Systems (D2S2).. Observations and challenges discussed range from the misalignment of Joint Capability Assessment (JCA) with the field use of Universal Joint Task List (UJTL) to not capturing cost estimate’s quantitative risk data. The path forward outlines building a notional multidimensional programmatics model which demonstrates how key data can be aligned with Mission Engineering and Systems Engineering models, allowing for full utilization of evolving Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to enhance management insight and decision-making across the enterprise.