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PPM101: Define Portfolio Scope
Tom Mochal, PgMP, PMP, TSPM is the president of TenStep, Inc., a methodology development, consulting and training company. Tom won the Distinguished Contribution Award from the Project Management Institute for his work spreading knowledge of project management around the world. He is a speaker, lecturer, instructor and consultant to companies and organizations around the world.
Understanding the organizational scope (boundaries) of your projects is a fundamental step before you can start looking at goals, strategy and objectives. Here are some examples of how organizations structure their work portfolios.
Done right, project portfolio management can do a lot of good for any organization. But it’s not easy, as many companies, large and small, have discovered. In PPM 101, an ongoing series by veteran project management consultant and author Tom Mochal, we focus on the fundamentals for organizations that are just getting started on the PPM path.
Portfolios are structures used to organize work. When you are ready to create a portfolio, one of the initial decisions you need to make is to define the organizational scope. Organizational scope refers to the boundaries or limits of the portfolio. In some cases, for example, the scope might be limited to one department, such as IT. In fact, this department is commonly included in the first portfolio of many organizations.) In other cases, the portfolio may be applied across the entire company.
Here are some examples of how an organization could structure its portfolios.
One Companywide Portfolio. The most efficient use of organizational resources comes from having as few portfolios as possible. It is possible that you could have one portfolio of work for your entire company. This would make sense if …
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