Portfolio Power

Cameron McGaughy is the Editor for ProjectManagement.com, and has worked for the site for nearly two decades.

  Governance   Portfolio Management  

In a recent study of 130 Fortune 1000 companies, the Kellogg School of Management found that 41 percent lacked a centrally overseen IT budget, 46 percent did not track projects centrally and 68 percent did not track project benefits.

Gasping?

Matt Light isn't. In fact, he wasn't so discouraged by the numbers. The research director for application development at Gartner shared these numbers at July's Project Portfolio Management conference, Gartner's three-day strategic summit for optimizing business, held in San Francisco.

"Perhaps I'm a little more encouraged by the study than discouraged. Some of those numbers are actually a little better than I expected," Light says. "Is there improvement still to do? Absolutely. When are we actually going to have project portfolio management banging on all cylinders? I don't see it happening in the next three to five years."

While there's a long way to go, Light says the outlook isn't all gloom and doom. He says he had a lingering impression that there was a period in the '90s when a lot of IT budgets swung out into the business units and were slow to return, although they have started to move back toward more central control.

"Portfolio management appears to be the catalyst for this market," says Ted Kempf, a principal analyst and program manager in Gartner Dataquest's IT …

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