Hi Ed, great question. I don't know of a definitive description of EPM and PPM categories and depending upon the context such as IT PMO or Corporate Strategy Group PMO, some differences in thinking and language tend to appear. The folks like Gartner and Forrester and the vendors too for that matter provide some very good reports and opinions on the subject of EPM and PPM and of course there is "The Standard for Portfolio Management" from PMI, but again a consenus on categories or portfolio types has not been offered. For example, in Appendix D, "Project Portfolio Management Tools and Techniques" of the PMI Global Standard, "The Standard for Portfolio Management", a number of examples are given where categories and criteria are listed as category 1, category 2, category 3, etc. and criteria 1, criteria 2, and criteria 3, etc, as opposed to showing example categories and criteria. Perhaps the fact that example categories and criteria are not shown serves as evidence that the folks involved on the work could not reach an agreement or consensus either..!
But getting back to your post and questions, many folks view Enterprise Project Management (EPM) as the all encompassing effort to manage, monitor, and assess the status of all projects throughout the enterprise through adherence to the EPM processes and usage of the EPM tools. And as part of the EPM processes, Project Portfolio Managment is performed by management and the leadership team as an approach to achieving the strategic goals of the business. The PMI standard offers processes for this of which Categorization is one of them and this leads to your question about what are the categories and what are the types of portfolios that organizations use to meet their needs?
Popular categorization approaches include such schemes as:
- Business Impact I
- Fundamentals
- Market Share
- Profit
- Customer Satisfaction
- Business Impact
II
- Strategy
- Transform the business
- Grow the business
- Support the business
- Business Impact III - CEO Obectives
- Objective 1
- Objective 2
- Objective 3
- etc.
- Risk Impact
- High Return - Low Risk: "Blockbuster"
- High Return - High Risk: "High-Wire Act"
- Low Return - Low Risk: "Cash Cow"
- Low Return - High Risk: "Dud" or "Questionable"
- Line of Business Impact
- Business Unit 1
- Business Unit 2
- Business Unit 3
- etc.
- Geographic Impact
- Theatre 1
- Theatre 2
- Theatre 3
- etc.
Some organizations may have or start with just a single categorization scheme; others use multiple categorization schemes and manage their project portfolio continually via ongoing evaluation, prioritization, balancing, and optimization with careful consideration of business objectives and economic and market trends. For example, if the economy is heading into a recession, the project portfolio might be optimized differently than if the economy is in high growth mode. So, it is not so much that different organizations use different types of porfolios, rather an organization performing PPM will use a number of different portfolio classification categories in order to perform the required what-if analyses to arrive at, and maintain, the best possible mix.
This is where a good PPM vendor demo can be worth a thousand words...! Great post, I hope the PPM vendor community responds en masse so we can learn more about popular approaches for EPM and PPM categories.
