Nightmare on Portfolio Street

Nightmare on Portfolio Street Tom L. Barnett, PMP June 14, 2010

Project Portfolio Management

You can see it in nearly every company in every country around the world: zombie-like portfolio managers stumbling through the grey and eerie conference rooms of Portfolio Street, dragging themselves—lifelessly--from one meeting to the next not realizing that they (and their project portfolios) are already dead. They mouth their predictable phrases and show the required charts, but people have long since stopped listening to them. They seem like a ghostly echo from a parallel world somehow singularly disconnected from the real matters at hand: Projects with no customers and portfolios with reluctant sponsors.

One simple pass through a given company’s strategic portfolio of projects can sometimes seem like legions of zombie’s marching through the city streets. The zombie’s are ambivalent--but they’re worrying everyone else in the town. Why do so many companies find themselves on an endless portfolio treadmill—the one to oblivion and obsolescence? It all started with a disconnect…

When Projects Don’t Synch With the Business
The disconnect is usually because of two reasons: IT’s unwillingness to understand the business, and the business’ inability to try to understand the fundamentals of IT.

IT is in a unique position.