Project Portfolio Management: A View From The Management Trenches

Chapter 5. How Well Are We Executing?

The day after the dinner, Christine Jones (Chris to her friends) thought back to her start in PPM.

She remembered when she was the lead of Project Portfolio Management for the company, but at the time she did not even know she was the lead. She had been hired for a different role and was busy learning about the company. But part of her new job involved administration of the company's governance council that evaluated, approved, and monitored technology projects. It was a council made up of a combination of technology and business leaders, and it gathered once a month.

Chris was learning about the council, how it operated, and what it required to perform the role it filled at the company. But at the time Chris didn't know that what she was doing was actually "Project Portfolio Management" or that there was a field of study that went with it. She only knew that the project governance council was performing this role and that she was charged with assisting its activity.

That changed one winter morning when she attended a quarterly meeting of the executive planning committee made up of the most senior executives at the company including the CEO. Attending the meeting is a relative term in that she was far from the large U-shaped table the executives were sitting around. Chris's boss, the CIO, in her role as lead of the project governance council, was presenting the current status of the portfolio of projects to the executive planning committee. ...