1.5. THE PPM PLAYERS AND ROADMAP

Now, you may be saying to yourself, "Yeah, I can see how PPM would work, but I can't get the whole company to agree to use it." Well, that's why we wrote this book—to help you build your story about why PPM works and, in particular, how it has worked in our organizations. We can say, without qualification, that PPM can work at an organizational, business unit, or enterprise level. Ideally, we know it works best if it can be implemented enterprise-wide, but we have not seen this happen very often in real life.

In fact, this brings up a topic we will cover more in Chapters 8 and 9—there is, and is not, just one portfolio. "What?!" You heard right. From the perspective of the enterprise, all projects are in the one enterprise portfolio. However, each business unit and organization has a piece of that portfolio that they manage using the PPM process, and each of those pieces is a portfolio as well (the business unit and/or organizational portfolio). Most companies do not attempt to run all their projects at the enterprise level; that would be crazy. It turns out that PPM is actually a set of tiered portfolios (as opposed to what some might say are really "teared" portfolios, given the work involved). What determines the movement of projects from one portfolio to another is thresholds (see Figure 1.2).

Foundational Principle

There is and is not just one portfolio. It's a tiered thing.

The critical factor to understand here is that you don't need to ...

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