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.
In my last article I offered my belief that portfolio management was a very different discipline from project and program management. If that is the case, then by extension the process of integrating portfolio management with your existing project structure is not seamless, so how do you do it successfully? In this article I’ll try and offer some alternative approaches to supporting portfolio management without causing significant upheaval to the way that projects are currently managed.
I am going to focus on the reactive side of portfolio management from my previous article--that is the aspects of portfolio management that relate to projects already in progress, rather than future planned projects, because that is where the biggest impact is for existing project teams. I am also going to assume that an organization that is considering implementing portfolio management already has a PMO.
Defining the relationship
One of the biggest push backs I get from people who don’t think that a portfolio management function is going to help them is that they already have that capability in their existing PMO--adding portfolio management is just another level of bureaucracy. I can’t agree with that, because in my mind the two functions are facing in completely opposite directions.
The successful PMO is focused on what is necessary to deliver on