Portfolio Analysis
How DELTA Helped a Public Sector Portfolio Team Uncover $20 Million Through Data Governance and Intelligent Insight
A large public sector client engaged DELTA Informed Decisions to improve its portfolio analysis and management system.
By addressing data fragmentation, unclear financial relationships, and limited visibility between projects and programmes, DELTA’s evidence-based approach uncovered $20 million in unallocated budget and strengthened the organisation’s financial governance, accountability, and strategic decision-making capability.
The Challenge: Limited Insight, Hidden Value
The organisation’s portfolio management process lacked integration and visibility, resulting in missed opportunities and financial inefficiencies.
Key challenges included:
- Difficulty understanding how each project and programme aligned to overall portfolio budgets.
- Fragmented systems showing either project-level or portfolio-level data — with no clear interrelationship between them.
- No unified reporting mechanism to identify trends, overruns, or surplus funds.
- Inconsistent data accuracy due to lack of profiling, cleansing, and governance controls.
Without a connected view, leaders couldn’t fully assess portfolio performance or make informed investment decisions.
Our Approach: Building Financial Intelligence Through Data Integration
DELTA established a Portfolio Assessment and Data Governance Framework aligned with organisational policies and financial management standards.
Our approach included:
- Data Profiling and Cleansing: Ensured accuracy and integrity of portfolio data before reporting.
- Data Modelling: Structured datasets to reflect the relationships between projects, programmes, and the overarching portfolio.
- Integrated Reporting Design: Developed intuitive, interactive reports to enable both top-down and bottom-up financial analysis.
- Governance Alignment: Created clear assessment criteria for portfolio oversight, ensuring consistency with internal financial and policy frameworks.
This approach combined analytics, governance, and Lean principles to give decision-makers clear visibility of financial health across the entire portfolio.
The Results: From Fragmented Data to Financial Clarity
- $20 Million in Unused Budget Identified: Exposed long-held inactive projects still registered in financial systems, mitigating risks of unintended charges.
- Improved Financial Governance: Enabled portfolio managers to understand cost distribution, surpluses, and overruns — and to address the underlying causes.
- Optimised Resource Allocation: Ensured project ownership and resource data were accurate and current.
- Strategic Reporting: Delivered interactive dashboards enabling leaders to analyse portfolio performance from both macro and micro perspectives.
- Accountability and Transparency: Empowered decision-makers with reliable, evidence-based data to justify financial adjustments and strategic investment decisions.
The Strategic Value
This engagement demonstrated that data governance is not just a compliance tool — it’s a strategic enabler for Intelligent Transformation.
By integrating portfolio-level analytics with leadership insight, DELTA helped the client achieve both financial transparency and measurable ROI, creating a blueprint for smarter, evidence-based governance across future programmes.