Introduction | Project Portfolio Management Terminology 
Whole Portfolio Process Overview | Your Organizational Environment
The Ten Steps | PART 2

The Ten Steps

The major phases of the project portfolio management process can be broken down into ten logical "steps" ("phases" or "stages" depending on your preferred terminology). However, before these make sense, and before you start the planning and executing portions of the process, you must have a clear understanding of two fundamental areas:

1. You must grasp the nature and extent of the work that you want to manage as a portfolio. Once this is defined, you will have established the scope of your portfolio
2. You must reach agreement on the things that are important to your organization so that you have the context to make work prioritization and balancing decisions

Ten steps take all of this into account and they do not assume that you have any of the prerequisite information ahead of time. The following table, Figure 1, shows each of these steps, where the responsibility falls in the organization.

Figure 1: The complete Portfolio Management Process in Ten Steps

As you can see from the table, managing a business portfolio ultimately involves the whole organization if the true value of the portfolio management effort itself is to be realized in the form of valuable benefits. By the way, each of the steps listed in the table are consistent with the sequence recommended by the Project Management Institute's Standard for Portfolio Management.

You can see the relationship between the ten steps and the project portfolio life cycle in the following chart, Figure 2:

Figure 2: The Ten Steps in relation to the Portfolio Life Cycle

Coming next

In Part 2 we will examine the Project Portfolio Management Life Cycle and its ten steps.

Your Organizational Environment

PART 2

Home | Issacons | PM Glossary | Papers & Books | Max's Musings
Guest Articles | Contact Info | Search My Site | Site Map | Top of Page