Project Portfolio Management: A View From The Management Trenches

Why We Created the Enterprise Portfolio Management Council

From the earliest days of the Enterprise Portfolio Management Council (EPMC), our goal was to provide pragmatic responses to the pervasive question in our profession: "If project portfolio management is so self-evident, why is there such limited traction; and, more importantly, what do you do about it?" We wanted to ensure that our perspective would have universal appeal. Our approaches to exploring the old issue of balancing growth with change in the face of limited resources should be read not only by portfolio, program, or project managers, but also by CEOs, CFOs, and other C-Level executives who care about this issue and about the real people and real dollars involved in their business' success.

In March, 2005, long before we had the idea for a book, a small group of likeminded project/portfolio practitioners met in San Francisco to form what has become the EPMC. Our belief was that there was a major disconnect between those who were making decisions on which projects to fund and those who were tasked with executing those projects.

We envisioned an organization that was free from consultants and vendors, where non-competing practitioners could share ideas, intellectual capital, software information, processes, problems, challenges, solutions, and future plans. It was from this vision that the EPMC was formed. As the founders of the EPMC, we suspected that there was an opportunity to accelerate the development, sophistication, ...