Project Portfolio Management: Real-World Observations

Gus Cicala is the President, CEO and founder of Project Assistants, Inc., a full-service project management consulting firm that provides consulting services, custom development, education and products that form the foundation of enterprise project management solutions. He is an expert in Project & Portfolio management with extensive executive leadership and consulting experience and has worked with a broad range of clients throughout the U.S. and Western Europe.

  Business Case   Portfolio Management   Strategy  

I'm often asked to share my observations on project portfolio management in the “real”world. In thinking on this topic, I've found that it is a particularly relevant issue to the current events of our world. The value of PPM and the priorities people place within it have seen drastic changes to go along with the dynamism of the world over the last five years.

Not too long ago, it was quite easy to achieve a positive return on investment on your projects. This made the budgetary process very easy for anyone merely looking for satisfactory results from their business cases. Though this was obviously a great thing for keeping businesses alive and healthy, it led to a business culture where project efficiency and success rates were so abysmal that it would have been malpractice in many other lines of business (if someone were equally careless in the banking or medical world, they would assuredly be spending a lot of time in court).

Since the global economic crisis of 2007, though, we've been living in the “new normal”. There is now a distinct economic intolerance for failure, whereas before there were do-over opportunities in the marketplace. Optimal realization of portfolio ROI is now a must just to simply stay alive, whereas before it was often just treated as a nice idea that a company could do to improve their business success.

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