Mike Cooper PMPPrincipal Project Manager (retired, sort of)| New England Project ServicesWestford, Ma, United States
I've been helping a (fairly small) organization develop an understanding of the IT projects, which we have called their portfolio of projects. When I talk to students in a IT project management training class about portfolio management I also tend to use this as the definition of the scope of the portfolio - the list of the projects that the IT organization is doing.
However, I have heard a speaker talk about the portfolio of projects as including ALL the projects in an organization. From, say the CFO's perspective, they are interested in performance of work throughout the organization, not just in IT. Even with IT projects, the IT project itself can be just one part of a larger project or program across one or more business units.
So I'm interested in hearing from those of you who are actively developing / maintaining a portfolio of projects - how broad is the definition of the portfolio? There can be different answers, I'd like to hear some of yours, with the reasoning.
All the best, Mike Saving Changes...
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Karl BurrowBusiness Consulting Services| AnalyticaTokyo, Japan
I am currently developing a portfolio of project accoss the organization that all have an IT related project as a component. I have noticed that this require improvement and understanding of IT governance and alignment of IT and Business department respectively Saving Changes...
No IT project is purely IT. It's being done for a business purpose. While local IT sub-portfolios might be useful for managing the function, an organization sub-optimizes the use of its PM capabilities if it doesn't use the skill across the board. Saving Changes...
I have had the opportunity to assist several companies develop a portfolio and the practice behind it. Uniformily each company has limited the portfolio to projects with a major IT component, but the companies have differed on the topic of including non-IT (business-related) expenses in the financial calculations.
Although they evaluate the risk of each project from an enterprise perspective (ie. they consider the non-IT areas during the risk assessment) they collectively have decided not to include the cost of internal labor from their own business unit as part of the cost estimate unless something major, such as a new facility or additional headcount is required.
I believe, over time, as each company matures in their ability to effectively practice portfolio management and their respective CEO and CFO grow more dependent on it - they will adopt the practice at the enterprise level and the CFO (not the CIO) will facilitate the practice. Saving Changes...
Mark Price PerryBusiness Driven PMO Evangelist| BOT InternationalOrlando, Fl, United States
Hi Mike, great post and great replies. In reponse to your question regarding how broad is the portfolio - IT or the whole organization; we typically see the following three approaches. 1) the IT portfolio is solely IT projects. We see this about 75% of the time. No doubt, the IT projects support the busines unit. But a busines unit project like a marketing research project would not be in this portfolio. 2) the IT portfolio encompasses all formal projects of the company. We see this sometimes, but not often, perhaps 10% of the time. And 3) the project office makes the PM process available for anyone in the organization to use, as a best practice, but the line of business projects not-related to the IT PMO, are managed by a line of business "casual" project manager and are typically not in the IT PMO portfolio. We see trend this increasing quite a bit. I too would be interested in further feedback from others..! Cheers. -- Mark Perry, VP of Customer Care, BOT International Saving Changes...
Good post Mike - wish more people had responded I'm actually curious about the answers myself.
I've been creating & implementing PMO's so most of the "porfolio's" I've seen have been just starting to take shape. But in one large and established organization I did find the following which I thought was very interesting.
They had a seperate PMO for every business unit. The Director of PMO for that business unit would manage the portfolio of projects as they related to that business unit. He/she would in turn report up to a Portofolio Manager who was part of a Portfolio Management unit. The Porfolio Management Unit would in turn facilate and manage all the (sub)portfolios as a whole.
Bringing this back your question, IT was managed not only as seperate porfolio with it's own PMO for IT specific projects. But since many projects involve IT at some level the various portofolio managers would feedback to the portfolio manager of the IT busines unit on upcomming projects. This enables the group to be aware of any potential problems (ie: resources, technology, etc) that are risks on many projects.
Most companies I've seen define a project portfolio as all the on-going projects (including IT specific projects) in an organization but usually only closely monitor what they term "major iniatives."
They generaly track IT sections of those major iniatives projects, but tend to forget about the IT part other than as it relates to those.
