Project Portfolio Management: A View From The Management Trenches

10.11. CHAPTER SUMMARY

10.11.1. Foundational Principles

• PPM is a two-fold undertaking (1) action and (2) creating.

• PPM is first about people.

• Politics is really about influence, negotiation, power, and autonomy.

• Passion holds PPM together.

• PPM done right uses and follows a process.

• Potential is forward-looking.

• Payback is the real bottom line of PPM.

• The business case is more than just financial analysis.

10.11.2. Lessons Learned

• PPM is doing the right work. Project management is doing the work right.

• Beware of the tendency to evaluate one project at a time as it goes through the various decision points.

• Criteria are essential for qualification of project proposals and prioritization of projects in a portfolio.

• Clearly define each criterion, its measures, ranges, and score given for satisfying each range. It works best to do this before activating the PPM process.

• Link the decision criteria to business case requirements via documentation templates or specific data view completions in computing systems.

• Start with a simple scoring mechanism. Add more complexity to the scoring after PPM has been in place for a time.

• The mechanical scoring of projects in the portfolio is only the starting point. Numbers are just indications of what the priority of the projects could be. The final decision on prioritization of the projects is up to the business leaders.

• PPM enables effective resource and capacity management.

• The sum of the performance of the projects tells us how the portfolio is doing.

• Good PPM ...