"Organizational portfolio" or "projects portfolio" is a collection of projects or programs and all the additional activities existing within an organization, brought together to ensure an effective management of all the activities within the organization fully coordinated with its strategy.
The main goals of portfolio management are to provide a broad overview of organizational activities focusing on the strategic goals and to support decision making based on all the projects within the organization.
Meticulous management of each of the "portfolio components" is crucial, but it does not necessarily ensure the realization of all of the organizational goals. This requires integrative management of the projects making up the projects portfolio, which relates to the mutual impact of the projects, resource constraints and priorities.
Organizational project management and portfolio management are closely connected. A project constantly receives strategic information from the portfolio it represents, and provides the portfolio with "on-site information".
The Project Manager measures the planned vs. actual in relation to budget and content scheduling, and reports to the Portfolio Manager. By contrast, the Portfolio Manager prioritizes and connects among the projects. The flow of information in both directions leads to the process, in which project management and portfolio management are bonded in order to make sure that the right resources are allocated to the right project, or, to put it simply, that the organization invests most of its efforts into the right place.
Portfolio management represents a continuous business process, which is focused on two major phases: portfolio planning and monitoring and control over its progress. The process is cyclically recurrent, in compliance with the organizational policy.
During the project planning phase, the projects that will lead to revenue maximization or will best serve the organization's strategy are selected. The availability of information relevant to the strategy the portfolio is supposed to support, is checked, and the measurement method, by which the projects related to the portfolio will be measured, is also defined. This is supposed to create uniformity in project management processes and their measurements, enabling the organization to benchmark its future projects objectively.
After the portfolio has been established and endorsed by the senior management, it has to be monitored and controlled. At this phase one has to make sure that the portfolio is functioning according to the pre-defined organizational processes. For example, the portfolio can be checked for the availability of the projects, in which the net present value (NPV) is higher than a specific value, or the return on investment (ROI) is not lower than the minimal value defined. Moreover, control processes check the progress of all the projects according to plan, for example: schedule compliance, resource overload, etc.
In order to make control procedures simple and effective, a portfolio manager has to have an easy access to the updated project overview, which can be obtained from a uniform and integrated system.
This system is supposed to contain general information on the projects within the portfolio and to enable one to perform analysis on the organizational level, and not only the standalone project level.
Such a system can allow for performing "What if" analysis for assessing different alternatives and providing an information basis for the best business decisions within the organization.
Microsoft has developed the EPM (Enterprise Project Management) application aimed at supporting organizational portfolio management. Based on MS Project, EPM presents an overall solution to portfolio management based on an organization-wide resource pool and on a broad overview of all the projects.
PME TEFEN has developed the "PME- Portfolio Dashboard" - a tool based on EPM solutions, which enables any organization to manage its portfolio in an effective way aimed at reaching the organizational strategy goals.
The "PME- Portfolio Dashboard" provides a summary of all the project data in addition to the one existing in EPM. This is intended for supporting the most senior managers of the organization in decision making processes by providing the mean figures of all the projects performance. The possibility of obtaining "on-line" updates enables the management to respond rapidly to the cases, in which the organizational efforts are not directed to the "right" projects.
In a single view, the tool centralizes all the principal measurements of the portfolio after the mean figures of the projects managed by the system have been derived. This is how the tool assists project progress monitoring and resource overload management, including scheduling, costs and risks.
If a problem with one of the metrics surfaces, the manager can do "Drill down" for projects negatively affecting this metric and single out the task causing the problem.
This is, basically, how the organization's management can obtain the most current data relevant to locating a problem at any given time and make the best decision, which will constitute a dynamic response to the changing needs of the organization and the market.
Organizational portfolio management is essentially an integral part of organizational management. The right project management serves as a basis for portfolio management. While until recently PMI has focused on standalone project management, this leading body of project management is currently addressing the broader issue of portfolio management.
PME TEFEN specializes in customizing and implementing project management methodologies and tools and will assist your organization in achieving higher performance levels and executing the right portfolio management processes that will effectively bring the strategy of your organization towards its full realization.
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