How to Do More with Less: Let Project Portfolio Management Be the Success Factor in Managing Projects in a Challenging Economy

By Whitney Sommers
Associate Editor

October 23, 2009

The age-old mantra,”do more with less” is reverberating throughout just about every corner of business today. It’s especially rampant in the IT domain where CIOs and IT managers are challenged by their CEOs and corporate boards to maintain – or even expand – competitive advantages and organizational efficiencies in an atmosphere where budgets have either been cut or in the best case, have stayed flat.

Many senior IT leaders – in both the public and private sectors – are looking more and more toward creative utilization of Project Portfolio Management (PPM) or Project Management (PM) to meet the efficiency challenges as well as to inspire their teams to achieve higher performance results by embracing a culture of excellence.

The evolution of IT project management began in the 1980’s but it’s taken about a decade to reach the mainstream. Early adopters were generally enterprise organizations that had the budgets and high-level corporate buy-in to invest in new management ideas and costly enterprise software. As IT management has gained credibility as a critical partner in achieving business goals and moved into the C-suite – enter the CIO - more and more organizations are looking at PPM and PM as a viable path to support increased sales, higher levels of customer services and competitive advantage. And, with this awareness of PPM as a key business tool, software developers and PPM outsourcing companies have created solutions that are affordable for businesses of all sizes.

What’s Project Portfolio Management vs Project Management
Project Portfolio Management is a way to group projects into a portfolio so that they are highly visible to leadership teams. In this way, PPM provides a way to better identify redundancies, spot areas that have been around forever, but may have lost their usefulness to the corporate vision, better allocate resources, and have easy visibility into individual project successes. The IT portfolio approach offers a clear view of what’s going on and drives the conversation past just what a project will cost but how it will impact – in terms of risk and return – overall business initiatives. PPM brings together all the disparate projects and provides a kind of overall dashboard that a company can view to keep focused on projects in real time to determine their ability to work together to achieve corporate goals. By maintaining a balanced portfolio, a company can reduce the risks and returns of individual projects and produce a higher overall rate of return.

The Project Management Institute (PMI) cites that organizational maturity occurs when companies are best able to manage their individual projects and portfolios in alignment with strategic goals. Another definition cites that Project Management is the process by which projects are defined, planned, monitored, controlled and delivered so that the agreed benefits are realized. Projects are unique, transient endeavors undertaken to achieve a desired outcome.

The Project Portfolio Management approach organizes a myriad of details and projects into a definable, clear and visible program to support strategic business goals. Project Management organizes individual projects into definable, clear and visible programs to support corporate goals.

In a nutshell, PPM is strategic. Project Management is tactical.

How Do You Know When and How to Begin
If an organization has more than one IT project that is intended to be a significant ‘change agent’, it’s time to think about PPM or a tighter Project Management approach. Other factors or

You do not have flash or javascript support.

Average (1 vote)

Reply