First, it's important to stress that there is no universal 'best' model. The right choice depends on your organisational structure, decision-making culture, business complexity, product maturity, governance needs, and strategic goals. Many organisations begin with one model before evolving towards another as their portfolio, operating structure, and strategic maturity grow. Just as importantly, the right choice depends on your organisation’s appetite for change. Some operating models are easier to adopt because they align with existing leadership structures and governance patterns, while others require more fundamental change to funding, accountability, and ways of working. So the best starting point is not always the same as the ideal long-term destination.
Let's take a look at the broad choices:
Centralised
In a centralised model, portfolio decisions are coordinated through a central function, such as an enterprise PMO, transformation office, or strategy team. You get consistent governance, prioritisation, and reporting across the organisation, which makes it well-suited to businesses with large transformation portfolios or complex regulatory requirements.
The trade-off: decision-making can slow down if governance becomes overly rigid.
Decentralised
A decentralised model gives individual business units, departments, or product areas greater autonomy to manage their own portfolios. With this comes faster decision-making, with those decisions being made closer to customers and delivery teams.
The trade-off: without strong strategic alignment, organisations can struggle with duplicated investment, competing priorities, and inconsistent governance.
Top-down
Here, strategic priorities, funding decisions, and investment direction are largely determined by executive leadership. This creates strong alignment with corporate strategy and provides clear accountability for investment decisions. For many enterprises, it is the most common and lowest-risk starting point for SPM because it builds on existing governance approaches. It is particularly effective for large-scale transformation programmes.
The trade-off: you need to make sure delivery teams retain enough flexibility to respond to changing customer and market needs.
Product-led
With a product-led approach, you organise investment around long-lived products or value streams rather than temporary projects. Funding, planning, and prioritisation are aligned with the teams that deliver customer value. It supports continuous delivery and rapid adaptation, so it's effective for digitally mature organisations with product operating models.
The trade-off: it requires significant organisational change, including new funding models, governance approaches, and ways of working. While it can be a powerful model, few organisations are ready to adopt it immediately without first building the right maturity and operating foundations.
Hybrid
Many organisations adopt a hybrid approach, combining elements of several operating models. Executive leadership may set strategic direction and investment priorities, while business units or product teams retain responsibility for day-to-day delivery decisions. This allows organisations to balance strategic control with local autonomy.
For many mature organisations, hybrid becomes the destination because it is effectively a “cut-and-paste” model: you can combine the elements that work best for different parts of the business. The real question is not which single model to choose, but which elements should be centralised, which should be pushed to teams, and what level of governance creates a healthy equilibrium
The trade-off: Hybrid models require maturity. They work best in organisations that are open to trial and error and willing to refine their governance as they learn. Without clear guardrails, organisations risk creating unnecessary complexity or duplicating decision-making across different teams.
