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What the Heck is Portfolio Management, Anyway?
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
The first time that someone asked me how they could successfully manage their project portfolio I was tempted to laugh. The organization was struggling to manage a single project successfully, and now they thought that they could manage their entire portfolio. Then I thought about it some more and asked myself a larger question--it is even possible to manage a project portfolio?
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating portfolio anarchy as a viable option, but I do think that in the vast majority of organizations that portfolio management needs to resemble macro-level company management rather than project management. In this article I’ll try and explain my logic and offer some thoughts on how portfolio management can be successful.
The nature of portfolio management
The cornerstone of this article is that the project portfolio cannot be treated in the same way as an individual project, or even a program--it is a fundamentally different creature. The portfolio view of the world, by definition, is a top level view--it is every project that a company is engaged in, covering multiple timeframes, varied departments, priorities and drivers and at many different stages of completion. The portfolio view is also extremely removed from the day to day decisions that impact the various portfolio constituents.
The cornerstone of this article is that the project portfolio cannot be treated in the same way as an individual project, or even a program--it is a fundamentally different creature. The portfolio view of the world, by definition, is a top level view--it is every project that a company is engaged in, covering multiple timeframes, varied departments, priorities and drivers and at many different stages of completion. The portfolio view is also extremely removed from the day to day decisions that impact the various portfolio constituents.
In order to be successful I believe that portfolio …
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