Effective project portfolio management is key to the success of an organisation's enterprise project management and coordination. Countless tools, theories and approaches exist to assist with the development of an organisation's project portfolio management approach, all of which add value in the appropriate context. However, regardless, the basic practice remains the same.
The size of the organisation, nature of business, people involved in delivering the function and the tools used are secondary. What is primary to the project portfolio management function is an understanding of the fundamentals, as discussed here.
Project Portfolio Management and Project Selection
A Project Portfolio Manager's role begins at project inception. Decisions to proceed with projects, although constrained at times by organisational imperatives, should involve the Project Portfolio Manager. A basic project approach emphasises the need for the enterprise project office to provide decision-making information such as pipeline views, resource supply and demand statuses and comprehensive information about projects already underway. This information should be provisioned through the project office's portfolio management function.
Project Portfolio Prioritisation
Once a project has been approved to proceed, the Project Portfolio Manager must then play a crucial role in prioritising that project against all other in-flight and pipeline projects. This prioritisation process, fundamentally a scoring, weighting and ranking activity, looks at factors such as proposed investment, estimated return, risk, resource requirements and any other factors relevant to the organisation.
The qualitative and quantitative factors measured above, can then be used to derive a ranking for all projects in the project office portfolio, thus determining any single project's priority. Basic project prioritisation processes for a PPM model of operation are covered in further detail in a separate article.
Pipeline Management and the Project Portfolio Manager
It is not only in-flight and pending approval projects that should be visible to an enterprise project office. A project office should also have line of forward sight to possible projects and those that are yet to commence. The term for this is the pipeline. Pipeline management is generally another responsibility of the Project Portfolio Manager.
Some of the key pipeline management activities, to be undertaken by the Project Portfolio Manager are as follows:
- Liaison with all areas of the enterprise to remain informed of initiatives that they are proposing to progress in the coming one to three years.
- Ongoing liaison with areas of the enterprise to ensure previously flagged initiatives are still on track to progress.
- Maintenance of a pipeline view to ensure appropriate long term resource management activities are undertaken (e.g. Recruitment of appropriately skilled staff).
- Communicating the pipeline view to all relevant areas of the enterprise.
Project Portfolio Resource Coordination
Increasingly, project resource supply and demand management is the responsibility of the Project Portfolio Manager. The fundamental theory behind this is that as the manager has a clear pipeline view and the best understanding of project portfolio priorities then they are best placed to make decisions about the allocation of project resources.
Resource groups that the Project Portfolio Manager may be responsible for coordinating supply and demand for could include, but not be limited to, the following:
- Project Managers and other administrative project staff
- Software development resources
- Business Analysts
- Testing resources and environments
Organisation Risk Management via Project Portfolio Management
A key function of project portfolio management is the responsibility for identifying, reporting and mitigating as far as possible any risks that affect the project as a whole. Portfolio level risk reporting should form an integral part of the organisation's risk management practices. The risk register used for this purpose may be very similar in layout and function to that which would be used by an individual project as part of the project risk management framework.
Portfolio Dependency Management
Project portfolio management has an important role to play with respect to identifying and managing portfolio-level dependencies. Portfolio-level dependencies are those project dependencies related to the portfolio as a whole, which could potentially impact multiple in-flight projects across the enterprise portfolio.
For example, if three development projects all require the skills of a single team of programmers then completion of Project A and Project B might be dependent on the completion of work for Project C. With multiple projects linked by this dependency, the dependency itself should be identified, documented and managed at the portfolio level.
Provision of Management Information by Project Portfolio Managers
Provision of project-related reporting, on an aggregated basis, is traditionally the responsibility of an enterprise project office. Some of this reporting is the responsibility of the Project Portfolio Manager. Although the reporting provided through the process may vary as a function of organisation size, maturity, complexity and nature of business, there remain some general reporting areas that should be developed as part of this function. Some such areas are:
- Pipeline status (e.g. Number of pending projects, projects in-flight)
- Current work in progress broken down into areas such as resource requirements and capital spent against proposed project budget)
- Resource utilisation (i.e. supply and demand tables and charts)
- Project portfolio composition in terms of project types, enterprise strategy alignment and size of capital investment
What does Project Portfolio Management Deliver to the Organisation?
With the fundamentals of PPM established, the question remaining is, what does effective project portfolio management provide an organisation? Varying benefits are postulated by numerous theories and specific approaches to PPM, but the common benefits of a PPM approach to enterprise project management and coordination are, at minimum, the following:
- An optimised project portfolio which delivers projects aligned with organisation strategy
- Ability to more closely govern and guide projects across the enterprise
- Transparency and better management of organisational risk born of projects across the organisation
- Optimal resource utilisation and reduced resourcing costs on a per-unit-delivered basis
- Improved project risk management through the identification and management of portfolio-level risks
- Greater forward planning through pipeline view management
In summation, Project portfolio management is essentially a simple collection of fundamentals, aimed at improving the management and coordination of projects, project resources, organisation capital and risk. As with other enterprise project management approaches, there are a myriad of variations on the theme. Regardless, the basics of project portfolio management remain unchanged.
Ashley Wright - Ashley defines himself as a father, husband and writer, all roles that he cherishes. After spending a number of years in the workforce, in ...
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