Suited Up?

Suited Up? Paul Harder June 27, 2002

Project Portfolio Management

Ever since I started working in this section of gantthead, I've received many e-mails from people wanting to learn more about project portfolio management and how it can help their companies. I also get questions about portfolio project management. Every so often, I'll dip into the mail bag and answer these questions for you and everyone else.

This installment's letter deals with setting up a company's organizational structure to be better suited for project portfolio management. This company has many internal IT projects which are funded from corporate resources. The problems for project managers occur when all of the IT projects go through a quarterly review. At each review, every project gets re-evaluated on its individual merits. The consequence of this behavior is that managers never know what projects will be in place for longer than three months. This process also absorbs a great deal of time and energy to a project's existence instead of doing work.

The e-mail's author asked how he could approach his management to proceed with a portfolio approach to managing the company's IT projects.