What is Needed for Successful Project Portfolio Management?
The obvious question to ask at this point would be: "What kind of capabilities should an organization have in order to implement a successful portfolio management program?" As demonstrated in previous sections, running proper portfolio management processes implies having in place well-developed and centralized project management capabilities, especially project scoping and estimating.
Scoping and estimating play an especially important role during the business case, project charter and project plan phases. This is when an organization's executives have to assess the economic feasibility and resource requirements of the proposed projects in order to come up with the prioritized project list (see Figure 6). Also, there must be a desire to develop a structured approach to project selection going all the way to the upper echelons of the organization. Since the most senior people in the company should handle the selection processes, implementation of portfolio management must be accompanied by their explicit approval and participation.
Figure 6: PPM check points in the project's life span
Finally, depending on how far along a company is along the project management path, new roles may need to be created to support these processes. These may include, project and program managers, portfolio director, PMO roles, etc.
|
What Happens Without Project Portfolio Management?
