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PPM 101: Defining Projects
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.
Organizations may use dozens of documents and templates in the portfolio management process, but the ones that define the nature of their projects are perhaps the most important. There are three common documents that are essential to this effort.
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.
When an organization introduces portfolio management processes, it also introduces common templates and reference documents. The processes are the steps everyone follows to achieve a common end. The templates represent the visible output from these processes.
There are two aspects of portfolio management. The first is the business planning process that takes place on a yearly basis to outline the work and the budget for the coming year. The second is the ongoing execution of the work in the portfolio.
Organizations create and use dozens of templates in the portfolio management process, but the most important ones are probably the documents that define the nature of the projects in their portfolios. Here are three common documents that are key to this effort.
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