Managing project portfolios to unlock trapped capital

Large infrastructure projects come with an array of challenges. Projects are getting more complex, remote building locations are more common, budgets are larger than ever, and schedules can extend for multiple years. The COVID-19 pandemic has also wreaked havoc on supply chains and increased the need to free up cash. Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that project owners often struggle to estimate costs.

About the authors

This article was a collaborative effort by Katy Bartlett, Steffen Fuchs , Mark Kuvshinikov , Peter Trueman , Simon Webb, and Dick Westney, representing views from McKinsey’s Operations Practice.

Due to market uncertainty and ongoing questions about the global economic outlook, many companies are freeing up cash by deferring capital expenditure. McKinsey’s data indicate capital expenditure was cut by 25 to 30 percent in 2020, with cuts of 60 to 80 percent in sectors such as transportation, pipelines, and oil and gas. Nevertheless, companies still have to manage their current projects, and future revenue generation will require continued and significant investment. What is needed is a shift in capital-outlay approach from “survival minimum” to “strategic optimum.”

A major driver of capital efficiency is the extent to which capital becomes “trapped” within project portfolios. Businesses have traditionally taken a bottom-up estimating approach to developing and setting the budget for investment projects. While project-level development and accountability are crucial, a lack of clear direction on risk analysis and budget development can lead to an inefficient use of capital. A portfolio-level perspective can help to optimize capital expenditure and ensure consistency at both the business-unit and individual project levels. This approach should involve a better understanding of risk management, alignment on acceptable levels of risk tolerance, and the elimination of systemic biases—in either direction—in the construction of initial cost estimates.

Implementing new processes for project approval and risk management requires a strong commitment from leadership and a sustained change-management effort. However, businesses that rethink the way they manage capital-investment risk will be well positioned to thrive in the next normal.

Why companies struggle with trapped capital

For many companies, there is limited integration and communication between leadership at the project and portfolio levels regarding risk management. In addition, the project funding process often does not require that risks and their potential impact be properly identified and understood.

We commonly see the onus for risk assessment and accountability falling on the project leaders and teams, with insufficient executive guidance to ensure a robust process or consistency between projects. Many decisions are therefore made, and many risks are managed, beyond the view of executives. This tendency means that most risks—including those that might be better managed at the portfolio level—become de facto project risks. This can lead to capital becoming trapped in two different ways.

  • Overcommitting capital can trap unnecessary capital in contingency funds. Projects in the typical capital-expenditure portfolio tend to be only partially correlated, and some project risks (such as foreign-exchange fluctuations) may be offsetting. This means that the appropriate level-of-risk coverage for these types of risk may be lower at the portfolio level than the sum of risk-funding requirements at the project level. Companies that account for these sorts of risks at the project level may therefore be holding a substantial amount of excess capital, which could be employed more profitably elsewhere.
  • Undercommitting capital can lead to cost overruns. Risk assessments that are overly optimistic, often driven by the intense competition for capital-expenditure funding, may underestimate the amount of money likely to be required during the development process. This can lead businesses to tie up more capital than intended in centralized funds for allocation to the many projects experiencing unforeseen cost overruns—including capital that they might have preferred to deploy elsewhere. In extreme cases, these understated risks may lead to the approval of projects that would not otherwise have been given the green light. Project leaders and teams also tend to systematically overlook some risk categories, including geopolitical and macroeconomic risks. For example, project teams may ignore the risk of tariffs stemming from regulatory changes, which can have a significant effect on the pricing of raw materials or vital equipment.

An approach to unlocking trapped capital

Our experience suggests trapped capital can be unlocked by ensuring that capital budgets are set consistently across the portfolio, all risks are recognized, adequate funding is secured, and outcomes are more predictable. This approach has four key principles:

  • resolving ambiguity in how risks are defined and managed
  • reducing financial risk by managing shared risks across the portfolio
  • replacing systemic bias with consistent cost estimates set at an appropriate confidence level
  • reinforcing the relationship between risk and resilience

1. Resolving ambiguity in how risks are defined and managed

A high level of ambiguity around risk can make it difficult to locate—and unlock—trapped capital. This lack of transparency can flow from a punitive culture around cost overruns, but it can also be the result of insufficient portfolio-level direction on how to define both the level of confidence in base estimates and the appropriate level of contingency funding.

In our experience, it is vital to define carefully which risks ought to be managed at the project level and which would be better managed at the portfolio level. We have seen examples of contingency duplication at project and portfolio levels due to this lack of clear definition and examples of contingency omission from risks not covered at either level. We recommend the following definitions, which should be applied consistently across the project portfolio (Exhibit 1).

  • Project-level risks: Risks that project managers have the expertise and authority to assess and control should be funded and managed at the project level. These include design changes, execution variations (such as weather delays or craft shortages), and estimation variations (such as higher craft per diems). These project-level risks should be funded by the contingency fund that is allocated to each project.
  • Portfolio-level risks: Risks that project managers and teams do not have the expertise or authority to assess and control should be funded and managed at the portfolio level. This type of risk is usually associated with the environment in which the project will be executed, including geopolitical risks (which may result in changes to regulations, unanticipated imposition of tariffs, or difficulties in obtaining government approvals); macroeconomic risks (including extraordinary changes in global supply, demand for key materials and services, or both); and the actions of nonfinancial stakeholders. These portfolio-level risks should be financed through a centralized management reserve, which is a preauthorized allocation that is held across the portfolio and that may be released to individual projects by the executive team.

2. Reducing financial risk by managing shared risks across the portfolio

We have already noted that the level of management reserve required at the portfolio level will be less than the sum of the reserves required for each project, but risk mitigation may also be more cost effective at the portfolio level. An oil and gas operator with multiple projects across regions, for example, reviewed material and equipment supply contracts, as well as exchange-rate risk across its portfolio, to understand the cumulative impact. Managing this risk centrally took advantage of natural hedging between regions and released management capital. Part of the savings came from capital that had been trapped at the project level, and part came from the assessment that the preexisting central reserve, which had previously been calculated using a less sophisticated approach, was unnecessarily large.

A detailed understanding of the portfolio, including project size, location, and the commodities involved, is required to ensure portfolio-level exposures are quantified and the appropriate level of reserve is identified. A megaproject, for example, can have a disproportionate impact on a portfolio of smaller projects. The size and visibility of the megaproject can generate market, political, and location risks that are very different from those in the remainder of the portfolio; these risks, if they eventuate, may not be offset by movements in other portfolio projects.

3. Replacing systemic bias with consistent cost estimates set at an appropriate confidence level

Cost estimates for both public and private projects are often—intentionally or otherwise—both overly optimistic and unreasonably precise. This systemic bias toward overconfidence is often due to rational economic behavior from the project sponsors, contractors, and other financial stakeholders, who expect to benefit if the project goes ahead. Executives often encourage this bias by rewarding those who both showcase attractive project economics and display a can-do attitude.

Cost estimates for both public and private projects are often—intentionally or otherwise—both overly optimistic and unreasonably precise.

An accurate most likely cost estimate can help to avoid trapping capital. An overly optimistic approach can have serious consequences; it can mean that companies fail to recognize the full scope of risks, which increases the likelihood that risk management will be ineffective and understates the required level of funding. In one recent case, for example, a company was looking to fast-track a project and therefore simply added a 10 percent contingency, even though the project scope remained largely undefined. The final cost was significantly over budget.

Leaders can take several mutually reinforcing steps to change these mindsets and behaviors and to avoid trapping capital. First, they can ensure project documentation is developed to the level of maturity required to support the desired accuracy of an estimate. Second, they can increase the use of independent estimate validation, which may be provided by internal assurance teams or external independent experts. Third, they can expand project-performance metrics to include internal- and external-cost benchmarks. These actions will improve the likelihood that the base estimate, excluding contingency, is a most likely cost.

A probabilistic cost-risk analysis can lead to more accurate funding at the start. The most likely cost provides the basis for probabilistic cost-risk analysis, which should take place within a culture of open, frank discussions of project risks. The resulting curve, which shows cost versus cumulative probability, enables decision makers to quantify the costs associated with higher levels of confidence that an overrun will not occur. This is often expressed as a P-value. A P30 estimate, for example, is the cost for which there is a 30 percent probability the final cost will be lower than or equal to the estimate and a 70 percent chance the final cost will be higher. A P50 estimate—for which there is a 50 percent probability that the final cost will be less than or equal to the estimate—may be the appropriate value to use in a multiproject portfolio.

An important benefit of probabilistic cost-risk analysis in the cash-constrained COVID-19 environment is that it enables decision makers to recognize the probable range of outcomes. For example, an informed decision-making process might use the P90 estimate (that is, a pessimistic cost assessment) to confirm economic viability under a worst-case scenario, the P50 estimate to set contingency, and the P30 estimate to set a target for outstanding cost performance. Regardless of approach, a detailed understanding of different cost scenarios—and their impact on the project—is critical when establishing the funding based on project risk.

This approach will also enable risk recognition and funding to be tied to accountability in a more consistent way. When projects are overfunded, teams may lack an incentive to keep costs down. On the other hand, a culture that punishes cost overruns, regardless of the cause, can delay conversations about possible overruns until it is too late to do anything about them. Up-front agreement on the possible range of outcomes enables a uniform understanding of management expectations and a performance-management system to match.

4. Reinforcing the relationship between risk and resilience

Large-scale investors can sometimes find themselves trapped in projects for which the economics are no longer attractive, that are too far progressed to change or cancel, or where there are no viable options to stop or exit.

This can be avoided using an enhanced understanding of risk to build resilience. Resilience in a capital investment requires a robust business case, commercial optionality, strategic off-ramps, and an agile execution plan (Exhibit 2).

To achieve capital resilience, the economics of each potential project should be rigorously stress tested. Executive and project teams need to be sure that the expected return justifies the inherent risks, with adjustments then made—or cancellations ordered—as necessary. Different project scenarios should be used in this pressure testing to understand the implications of project decisions, to inform the project scope and strategy, and to identify where strategic off-ramps are required. Without a scenario analysis, the executive and project teams risk pursuing project development with insufficient resilience, off-ramps, or commercial optionality to respond to challenges and avoid trapping capital.

Building this sort of economic resilience may require rethinking conventional project-approval processes, which discourage deviations from the original plan. The current approval process typically involves a rigid set of stages that are separated by decision gates, which means that changes become more expensive and less desirable as the project progresses. This reluctance to respond to changes in the business case can be a major cause of future cost overruns.

One way to correct this is to expand the discussion at each decision gate to include explicit analyses of resilience. While project sponsors will inevitably express confidence that the proposed plans will meet investment goals, that confidence is enhanced when the plan explicitly identifies both key inflection points and alternative strategies that could be deployed to adjust to changing circumstances. For example, the final investment decision for a global megaproject considered the potentially serious impact of certain geopolitical risks. It was difficult to predict the timing of these risks or how they would manifest, so—to increase resilience and, therefore, investor confidence—a variety of alternative strategies were defined, each with clear trigger events. The necessary resources were earmarked upfront.

Leadership drives the change

Among the many lasting changes from the COVID-19 pandemic is an increased focus on the importance of preserving capital while meeting short- and long-term investment needs. As part of this, leaders will need to rethink where and how capital-expenditure risks are managed. Progress will require an in-depth reassessment of organizational culture, as well as key project approval and risk-management processes. This is not easy, but the rewards are significant; trapped capital can be unlocked, short-term capital expenditure can be reduced, and systematic improvements in cost-risk performance can be realized. These changes will position companies to optimize portfolio performance once capital expenditure begins to ramp up again in the postpandemic world.

Katy Bartlett is a consultant in McKinsey’s Denver office; Steffen Fuchs is a senior partner in the Dallas office; Mark Kuvshinikov is a partner in the Houston office, where Dick Westney is a consultant; Peter Trueman is a consultant in the Sydney office; and Simon Webb is an associate partner in the New York office.

The authors wish to thank Rudi Blankestijn, Matthieu Dussud, and Piotr Pikul for their contributions to this article.

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Project Portfolio Management

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What Is a Project Portfolio?

What is project portfolio management (ppm), project portfolio management vs project management, the project portfolio management process, what does a project portfolio manager do, 5 project management processes for ppm.

  • Project Portfolio Management Software

Must-Have Features of Project Portfolio Management Software

How to use portfolio management software, project portfolio management roles & hierarchy, which industries and organizations benefit from ppm, project portfolio management (ppm) key terms.

A project portfolio is a collection of projects, programs and processes that are managed together and optimized for the financial and strategic goals of an organization. A portfolio can be managed at either the functional or the organizational level.

Unlike a project, which has a defined end goal or deliverable, a portfolio represents a more strategic planning commitment to continuously optimizing the allocation, prioritization and scheduling of resources across many projects.

Project portfolio management (PPM) is the analysis and optimization of the costs, resources, technologies and processes for all the projects and programs within a portfolio. Project portfolio management is typically carried out by portfolio managers or a project management office (PMO).

Related: 15 Free PMO Templates for Excel and Word

The key focus of PPM is to make sure that all the outcomes in the portfolio support the strategic goals and business objectives of the organization. The project portfolio manager or PMO does this through business analysis, reviewing budgets and forecasting while minimizing risk and managing stakeholder expectations.

Project portfolio management tools (PPM tools) are often used to collect and analyze that data to ensure that their project portfolio is aligned with the overall strategic planning and goals of the organization. ProjectManager has powerful, yet intuitive, tools for managing project portfolios. Track all your projects with a customized dashboard, manage your portfolio on a roadmap, even allocate resources across your projects. It’s easy to do all this and more with ProjectManager. Try it free.

ProjectManager's portfolio management summary showing several projects

ProjectManager’s portfolio dashboard is one of its many PPM tools .

In the hierarchy of business management, project portfolio management is the link between project management, which we will define briefly below, and enterprise management, which deals with the overriding vision, mission and strategic planning of the organization.

To understand where project portfolio management and project management differ, we must first define each and explore the areas where they diverge.

Project management is, quite simply, the management of a project. A project is a temporary endeavor that results in a product or service. It has a beginning and an end. Project goals are defined, and tasks are broken down into a schedule. Cost and budgets are set; resources are assigned, and stakeholders are reported to.

Project portfolio management, on the other hand, is a higher level approach that orchestrates, prioritizes and analyzes the potential value of many projects and programs in a portfolio to manage them simultaneously and optimize resource management. The goal of the portfolio management process is to manage and leverage the life cycle of investments, initiatives, programs, projects and outcomes to best reach the overall goals and objectives of an organization. Therefore, project management is a subset of project portfolio management. It leads to the ultimate objective, which is meeting the strategic goals of the organization.

There are five basic project portfolio management steps:

1. Define Business Objectives

Before you start thinking about portfolio management, you’ll need to understand your organization’s business objectives and strategic goals. The idea is that your project portfolio aligns with the strategic planning of your organization, so you’ll need to check if its financial objectives and customer value are good enough for your organization.

As a project portfolio manager you’ll need to reach an agreement about the strategic goals of the project portfolio with stakeholders, and then proceed to establish valuation criteria for project selection .

2. Collect Project Ideas for Your Portfolio

Once you’ve defined your portfolio’s strategic goals it’s time to start building it. To do so, you’ll need to start collecting projects. Those could be in-progress projects or project ideas that are similar enough to be managed simultaneously. Gather project management data and prepare the valuation criteria to choose the best.

3. Select the Best Projects for Your Portfolio

To determine which are your best projects for your portfolio, you’ll need to do a cost benefit analysis and use your valuation criteria. This valuation criteria will measure the amount of value that each project brings into the portfolio.

There are a variety of aspects that can go into the project selection scoring criteria, such as the payback period, net present value, or risk level.

4. Validate Project Portfolio Feasibility

Now that you’ve chosen the projects that are the best fit for your portfolio, it’s time to do a feasibility study that takes into account all the financial risks, capacity planning and resource management constraints.

Doing this will guarantee your project intake process prioritizes the best projects while also considering what is feasible considering the available resources of your organization.

5. Execute and Manage your Project Portfolio

Now you’ll need to coordinate the execution of the projects and programs in your portfolio simultaneously by working with project and program managers.

Related: Free Multiple Project Tracking Template for Excel

Project portfolio managers oversee the management of the project portfolio which includes approving or rejecting project and program ideas. They are responsible for getting a return on investment and meeting the goals and objectives of their organization. The project portfolio manager can be tasked with managing one or more portfolios.

The job is done by working with various portfolio management tools, financial algorithms and models to help the project portfolio manager align the projects to strategic goals of the organization. They are further guided by a set of valuation criteria and standards that help them through the portfolio management process.

Project portfolio managers are often involved with the PMO , which also sets the processes and standards for the portfolio. The project portfolio manager and PMO can also provide direction on what project management methodologies are used, whether traditional waterfall or an agile framework, when managing the project.

Project portfolio management requires a balance of resources, time, skills, budgets, risk mitigation and running the projects in the portfolio frugally and expediently without sacrificing quality. Managers do this through the use of five key project management processes.

  • Change Management : Identifying and prioritizing change requests. These can be feature requests, business strategy, regulatory requirements, etc., based on business strategy, capacity planning, demand, financial and operational constraints.
  • Risk Management : Identifying risks in projects that make up the portfolio, and developing a risk management plan to mitigate uncertainty within the project portfolio.
  • Financial Management: Managing financial resources related to the projects in the portfolio and demonstrating financial results of the portfolio in relation to the organization’s business goals and strategic objectives.
  • Pipeline Management: Ensuring project proposals are in the pipeline and using valuation criteria to determine if they’re worth executing.
  • Resource Management : Efficiently and effectively using an organization’s limited resources, from materials and equipment to people and financial resources.

Project portfolio management software is a tool that’s designed to centralize the management and maintenance of a project management portfolio. With the increasingly large amount of data now associated with a single project, let alone a portfolio, the use of portfolio management software has become a necessity for project managers.

Project management training video (7y5z887r5q)

Portfolio managers and project management offices (PMOs) use portfolio management software to gather data, analyze information and use the results to better manage the portfolio and achieve the goals of their organization. Typical PPM software offerings are also used for portfolio optimization to better achieve the financial goals of the organization. Managers or PMOs use portfolio management software to find complementary processes, methods and technologies that will help each project succeed and the portfolio flourish. Microsoft Project is one of the most commonly used project management software, but it has major drawbacks that make ProjectManager a better choice for project management, program management and portfolio management.

Desktop vs. Online Project Portfolio Management Software

Managing a portfolio is like keeping many plates spinning at once. To keep up, you need robust project portfolio management software. The question is, what kind should you go for?

In terms of features, desktop and online software applications, at this point, are on an even playing field. It depends on the product, of course; but for the most part, both offer similar PPM tools. The major differences are price, security and speed. For example, desktop portfolio management software tends to cost more and require a license for each team member to use. This can add up.

Pros of Desktop PPM Software

Security on a desktop, even one linked to an office intranet, is likely better than many online services. Performance for a cloud-based software depends on your internet connection, and if your service goes out you’re out of luck. This, obviously, is not a concern for desktop apps.

Pros of Cloud-Based PPM Software

Online apps are monopolizing the project management sector, and for good reason; they excel at connectivity, collaboration and real-time data. So long as your team has an internet connection, they can use the tool—no matter where they are. This creates a platform where even distributed teams can work together anywhere and at any time. As teams update their status, you get live data that is more accurate and timely to help make effective decisions.

Gantt Charts icon

See All Your Projects Together

A Gantt chart is a visual tool that helps plan and schedule a project, but it can also be used as a roadmap to view all the projects in your portfolio on a single timeline. This helps managers find synergy between projects and work to make the portfolio more effective and efficient.

Gantt Charts image

Get Live Data Across Portfolio

Being able to monitor your project portfolio is key to keeping it on track. A portfolio dashboard collects information on all your projects, calculates that data and then displays it in easy-to-read graphs and charts that can be read at a glance.

Dashboards image

Use Detailed Data to Make Better Decisions

Better data leads to better strategies when managing your portfolio. Managers need a tool that can mine information from their project portfolio and present them with detailed reports. Being able to share and filter those reports to target the information your stakeholders want to see is also key.

In-Depth Reports image

Keep Team’s Tasks Balanced

Project portfolios work at the task level. To get the level of performance you need, your teams have to have the right number of tasks. Balancing their workload keeps your portfolio progressing as planned, so you need a portfolio tool with a feature to track who’s working on what.

Resource Management image

Easy Change of Assignments

If you’re using the roadmap or dashboard, and see that there’s a need to reassign a task, the last thing you want is to have to go into another application to adjust a project in your portfolio. With a task management feature, you can stay in one tool.

Task Management image

View Your Portfolio in Real Time

The sooner you know something, the faster you can act. This can make the difference between taking advantage of an opportunity and missing a deadline. With online portfolio management software, you see what’s happening as it happens and can respond quickly to take advantage.

Live Data image

Projects are hard enough to manage, and a portfolio of them even more so. It’s many times more complex and requires robust project portfolio software. In this section, we will use ProjectManager as an example on how to use portfolio management software. If you want to follow along, then sign up for a free 30-day trial of ProjectManager. Once you’ve got our PPM software up and running, follow these steps.

1. Set Goals & Objectives

Having goals and objectives for your project portfolio is important, as it gives portfolio managers a target to hit when trying to increase their return on investment and keep risk at bay.

Start by writing down the goals and objectives for each project in your portfolio. There will likely be a number of detailed project management documents describing these projects. Attach them to our portfolio management software, which has unlimited file storage.

A screenshot of ProjectManager’s PPM tools unlimited file storage window

2. Group Related Projects

Grouping projects in a portfolio and creating reports around them collectively, rather than individually, gives portfolio managers the data they need to make better business decisions about costs, resources and more.

Keep all the projects in your portfolio together in our overview section. Compare status, budget and more of everything in your portfolio, all in one place. Now you can use resource allocation to boost one of the projects that might be underperforming.

A screenshot of ProjectManager’s project portfolio management tool, which displays multiple projects at once

3. Create Milestones

Milestones mark the end of one major phase and the beginning of another. They can be easily inserted on the Gantt chart, where they’re represented by a diamond symbol.

Set milestones and break up your projects into more manageable parts. This boosts the team’s morale by giving them a series of successes as they work through their tasks. Managers can use milestones as a means to measure progress.

4. Set Dependencies

Tasks are not all the same. Some can’t start until another has finished, or must start or finish at the same time as another. It’s important to know which of your tasks are dependent to keep the portfolio healthy.

Link dependent tasks by dragging one to the other to avoid blocking teams. This prevents these dependent tasks from falling through the cracks during the execution of the project. Once you have set dependencies, you can filter by critical path .

5. View Roadmap

When managing a portfolio, it’s important to keep the big picture in sight. Without it you can easily get lost in the weeds and fall behind schedule.

Keep goal-minded with the roadmap tool, which places all the projects in your portfolio on one Gantt chart. See every project on a timeline and quickly discern if there are any conflicts and resolve them before they interfere with the goals and objectives of your organization.

A screenshot of ProjectManager’s PPM roadmap view, which shows all the projects in your portfolio together on a timeline

6. Balance Resources

Workload represents what your team has been assigned, in terms of their tasks. If you overburden one team member, they’ll not be as productive and morale will suffer.

See the planned effort for every team member working across your portfolio in a color-coded chart that shows who has too many hours assigned and who has too few. Then you can reallocate their hours right from the same page, improving efficiencies.

A screenshot of ProjectManager.com’s PPM workload page, showing team member’s task load and labor costs

7. Track Portfolio Progress

A dashboard is a tool that graphically depicts various project metrics, so you can see how your project is performing. It’s a high-level view that can alert you of issues to address before they become problems.

Use our cloud-based dashboard to see your portfolio’s progress in real time. Mini-dashboards appear for each project that offer important metrics such as progress, budget and costs. You can also customize the dashboard to show only certain projects, and you can create reports based on projects that are filtered in this manner.

ProjectManager’s dashboard view, which shows six key metrics on a project

8. Analyze & Present Reports

Status reports are a way to measure the current state of your project. They communicate important data to stakeholders, keeping them updated. They also maximize portfolio performance.

Use the built-in reporting tool for a deep dive into project data to see progress and measure performance. A portfolio status report is perfect for stakeholder presentations. If they have questions, the status report can be filtered to bring up just the information they’re interested in.

ProjectManager's portfolio management status report

9. Collaborate with Stakeholders

Collaboration means working together to increase productivity. This can be at the task level for teams, or on an executive level. Ideally, it’s practiced throughout every department in an organization.

Project portfolio managers have the tools they need to stay in touch with every project manager leading a project in your portfolio. Get in touch with anyone by tagging them in a comment. They’ll get an email notification. Alerts can be customized, so your inbox doesn’t get cluttered.

Task list in ProjectManager

Project Portfolio Management Tools

With software moving from the desktop to the cloud, project portfolio management grew more efficient and effective. Some of the features that serve portfolio managers are the following:

  • Online Gantt Charts
  • Real-Time Dashboards
  • Shared Calendars
  • Time Tracking and Timesheets
  • Project Groups
  • Dynamic Reporting
  • Collaborate with Remote Teams
  • Resource Management

The following is a hierarchical listing of the team members involved in managing and executing a project portfolio.

  • Board Member: Members of the board are responsible for governing an organization and bear the legal responsibility for the organization. Their skills and experience help guide the organization to achieve its vision.
  • Project Portfolio Manager: This individual manages the plans, development and implementation of the portfolio, keeping in mind best practices to make sure that the portfolio is performing as expected and right what is preventing that.
  • Program Manager: Programs differ from portfolios in that all the projects collected under it are related. Therefore the program manager’s role is similar to that of the portfolio manager, coordinating the projects in the program to work together to achieve their shared objective.
  • Project Sponsor: This position is usually held by a manager or an executive who is tasked with being accountable for the project. They are the hub that connects the project to the business and those responsible for making large strategic decisions for the organization.
  • Project Owner: This person is the one who is usually working with the sponsor and is responsible for the project’s implementation. Therefore, they usually come from the business unit that is getting the final deliverable for the project.
  • Project Manager: They are responsible for the planning, scheduling, monitoring and reporting of a project. They also assemble and lead a team hired to execute the plan. They build the budget, manage resources, etc.
  • Project Coordinator: Working under the project manager, they take smaller tasks off the project manager’s desk to free them up for larger managerial responsibilities. Mostly, this means that the project coordinator is handling administrative duties.
  • Team Member: Hired because of skills and experience related to the project, these individuals are assigned tasks and oversee their completion. They meet regularly with the project coordinator or project manager, to whom they update their status.

Any industry that is working on multiple projects at the same time benefits from the discipline of project portfolio management. Obviously, that’s a lot of industries and organizations.

Some of the industries and organizations that are reaping the rewards from using project portfolio management include:

  • Computer software
  • Hospitals and healthcare
  • Construction, automotive
  • Financial services and banking
  • Service and staffing recruiting
  • Telecommunications
  • Government administration

The following is a mini-glossary of project portfolio terms that have been used in this guide.

  • Portfolio Management: Controlling a portfolio of projects to make sure they align with the overall strategic goals and objectives of an organization.
  • Program Management: Managing a portfolio of projects with the same aim as portfolio management, only the projects in the portfolio are all similar or related.
  • Project Management: Planning, executing, monitoring and reporting on one project, from start to finish, including controlling scope, costs and schedule.
  • Project Management Office (PMO): Group within an organization that’s tasked with maintaining standards for project management within that organization, often oversells portfolio and program management.
  • Change Control Management: Process to identify and successfully respond to change in a project or portfolio.
  • Portfolio Reporting: Creating charts, graphs and other reporting documentation to communicate progress and other portfolio metrics.
  • Risk Management: Identifying and resolving risk before it happens and after.
  • Resource Management: The process of allocating resources throughout the life cycle of the portfolio.
  • Pipeline Management: Making decisions for estimating and selecting which projects to fund that align with an organization’s strategy.
  • Financial Management: Understanding each project’s unique risk and using this knowledge to make decisions across the entire portfolio.

All these factors and more make it clear that project portfolio management is a methodology that can serve any organization with a portfolio of projects. And, with ProjectManager , you have the best PPM tool in the market to fully take advantage of all these business benefits.

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Project Portfolio Management Resources

  • Project Closure Template
  • RACI Matrix Template
  • Communications Plan Template
  • Best Project Portfolio Management Rankings
  • Project Management Trends (2022)
  • 5 Benefits in Adopting PPM (Project Portfolio Management)
  • What do Portfolio Managers do?

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Project Portfolio Management Header

Everything You Need to Know About Project Portfolio Management (PPM)

Jörg Leute, author for the Meisterplan blog

by Jörg Leute

Updated on September 15, 2023

In this blog post, we’re trying to condense everything we know about project portfolio management. It’s quite a read, so get your favorite warm or cold brew ready. Ready, set, go!

Table of Contents

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) in a Nutshell Why It’s a Good Idea to Do Project Portfolio Management The difference between portfolio management, program management and multi-project management Project Portfolio Management 101 – A Cookbook There’s More to PPM – The 4 Pillars Advanced Project Portfolio Management How to introduce PPM to your organization Pitfalls of Project Portfolio Management and How to Address Them Conclusion – Successful organizations manage their project portfolio

Small shops, medium-sized businesses, large enterprises — there’s one thing that unites them all: they want to create this new product, complete this important project, or make an internal change. The drive for growth, efficiency and excellence is a universal ambition that goes beyond the size of an organization.

Another thing that unites organizations is that there aren’t enough resources to do all the great work everybody would love to carry out. Organizations are constrained by their scarce resources. Every one of them. No exceptions.

What all organizations need is to  choose the right people for the right projects at the right time . This is called  Project Portfolio Management .

With Project Portfolio, organizations can:

  • focus on the right projects by aligning them with the company's goals and strategy.
  • optimize resource usage by lining up projects according to their resource needs while paying attention to bottlenecks.
  • actively manage risks by consciously selecting, canceling or resuming projects with a certain risk exposure.
  • streamline decision-making processes, make prioritization criteria transparent and get better insights into investments.
  • swiftly respond to change in environment, competition or organizational strategy.
  • react faster to upcoming issues and understand the consequences of changes to the portfolio.

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) in a Nutshell

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is the discipline of analyzing, prioritizing, selecting and monitoring the right projects for the organization. Just like financial portfolio management, where a portfolio consists of financial assets with certain profit outlook and risk exposure, a project portfolio is the expression of the organization’s appetite for risk and for returns in order to maximize the return on investing its monetary and personnel resources.

Why It’s a Good Idea to Do Project Portfolio Management

PPM can be a great lever to enable organizational success. By including all stakeholders in the process, the organization becomes more efficient, wastes less resources on the wrong investments, gets everybody on the same page and streamlines the creation of value. The staff will work on the right projects without being overloaded or bored.

Ignoring PPM is short-sighted

I remember talking to a CEO a couple of years back. We had a discussion about the value of balancing projects and available resource capacity. He told me that he actually didn’t care that much about how much burden projects put on his staff; he just wanted to get the work done. Another CEO told me that resources were never a problem, as there were always outside contractors available in abundance to take over the work.

I disagreed back then, and I disagree even more today. In times of skilled labor shortage, it’s simply not possible to fill lacking internal capacities using contractors. And it’s even harder to find enough internal people for the important jobs. Nowadays, the need to select the right projects for the scarce resources available and to aim for a “sustainable pace” are key to dealing with people.

So, negatively put, organizations that do not actively monitor their project portfolios run the danger of :

  • not knowing what is happening in the organization, especially where problems are or could arise.
  • wasting resources on the wrong projects, or even on redundant projects
  • risking wait times for projects through bottlenecks that are blocking other projects.
  • running projects which were heavily advocated for by people with influence, not projects that contribute the most to organizational goals.

The difference between portfolio management, program management and multi-project management

When I met my first “real” program manager back in 2005, I was impressed. This guy was intelligent, kind and IT savvy — a jack of all trades, managing a program with an 8-figure budget. He was the one to tell me that the difference between multi-project management and program management is that a program aims to generate more value than the sum of all projects would individually.

To summarize:

Project portfolio management .

has a strategic perspective on the whole organization. It is about selecting and monitoring the right investments that promote the company’s strategy. This means that the organization is aligning its operative focus to the strategic objectives. i.e., strategic alignment. Furthermore, a portfolio has a clear start and end — independent of the duration of the projects in it. It can be considered a fiscal cut or fiscal budget.

The following graph summarizes Traditional PPM nicely. It shows that projects are collected, decided upon and then executed.

Cf. Dammer, Henning (2007): Multiprojektmanagement.

Program management 

focuses on executing a bundle of projects that align with a common goal. In combination, these projects create more value than the sum of all the projects would individually. The program coordinator focuses on coordinating resource demands, schedules and results. A program lasts until the final projects end. Programs usually take a long time — at least months. Complex programs can span across many years and budget cycles.

Multi-Project Management 

refers to the discipline of carrying out multiple projects at a time while trying to ensure that every project reaches its goals. In contrast to program management, where all projects work towards a common goal and typically have dependencies, a project coordinator allocates shared resources or skills across different projects, even if they are unrelated.

Make sure to check out this detailed article about the  difference between project portfolio management and program management here.

Project Portfolio Management 101—A Cookbook

Urgh, unpleasant memories arise when I think back to my first “real” PPM workshop in the early 2000s. Everything started out great. We had a common understanding of selecting all the project ideas and capturing them in one tool. The mood was great, the seniors (one was smoking a pipe, no joke!) were satisfied and thought I was on the right path.

Everything changed when I tried to understand what their strategy was and how this strategy could be applied to projects. The room became silent, and nobody had a clue about the company’s strategy. Nobody knew how to apply a fuzzy strategy onto projects. Long story short, the workshop went downhill, and we ended it pretty early. Ouch.

From all the other PPM workshops, the lessons we learned and the mistakes we made, we have compiled a list of suggestions that every company should follow to successfully establish a PPM practice:

  • Have a company strategy/business goals. At best, have a strategy for the mid-term that can actually be used to decide if a project supports that strategy or not. What works best from my experience is to work with an "objective key result" (OKR) approach, either on a yearly or quarterly basis.
  • Break down the company strategy/business goals into different aspects and offer compliance levels for each evaluation criteria. For example: Goal: "Reduce carbon footprint by 10%". Compliance levels: "not at all; somewhat; mostly; yes".
  • Collect all project candidates. This process can take the form of a very classical "demand management" process or a more modern approach where a backlog of epics/business epics/features are collected.
  • Capture the resource demand for each idea. Estimate additional financial costs (external costs like contractors as well as capitalizable investment costs) and potential benefits (revenue, cost savings etc.). Eventually, create a risk profile for each project and estimate the project complexity.
  • Capture carryover projects separately and update the remaining financial and resource demands.
  • Discover dependencies between the different projects. These can be (1) the inability to start without the delivery of another project, (2) the need for deliverables from another project at a certain point of the execution, or (3) creating synergy between mutually beneficial projects.
  • Measure all project ideas against the evaluation criteria. By doing this, a prioritized list will emerge.
  • Take inventory of financial resources (CapEx and OpEx budgets) as well as resource capacities across departments, roles and skills.
  • Check the feasibility of the project portfolio , considering financial and resource constraints, benefits and risk profile. This will lead to different alternatives.
  • Have executive leadership make a final decision.
  • Communicate the portfolio to all involved stakeholder groups, especially individual project managers.
  • Start the individual projects by assigning an agile team or project team, a project coordinator/manager and a definite time period.
  • Monitor the project progress. Provide comprehensive management dashboards to understand the status quo. Maintain communication between executive stakeholders, project managers, resource managers and project portfolio managers.
  • Reflect on your PPM system ; streamline portfolio management and project management processes, try to eliminate waste and take small (or sometimes large) steps to drive continuous improvement.
  • Start over.

There’s More to PPM — The 4 Pillars

You’ve probably already seen that there are different dimensions at play when talking about PPM. Every single one needs to be addressed. They can be categorized into 4 pillars, which are:

  • A robust PPM process. This means capturing projects in their early idea stages and accompanying them until the end.
  • A structural unit, with jobs, roles and accountability.
  • A set of meetings, checkpoints and deliverables.
  • A tool to capture all data, run simulations, save baselines and track progress.

A Robust Project Portfolio Management Process

The exact implementation of the right PPM process for your organization will, of course, differ. From what we’ve learned, at least these four areas need to be implemented:

The business strategy for an organization is determined by senior management. Strategic objectives need to be translated into criteria to evaluate projects and determine their priority. All projects, including those already in progress, should be evaluated and prioritized based on the established criteria.

Potential projects are proposed, and project initiatives need to be created with a description, benefit estimates and effort required. In addition, proposal coaching has to take place where a portfolio coordinator and the project initiator discuss the idea, enhance it and decide whether it should proceed to the next step. If there are different committees in your organization that review and decide on various project types, the portfolio coordinator will guide the initiative to the appropriate committee.

A portfolio board meeting is the highest-level decision-making committee for PPM. The portfolio board monitors overall progress, resolves conflicts, confirms the portfolio's composition and decides on future resource deployment. Finally, the decisions from the portfolio board meeting are communicated throughout the company, project managers are selected and resources are staffed.

Transparent communication between teams about project progress and requirements is crucial for successful project execution. Any conflicts that arise during project management are escalated to the project portfolio managers/the execution steering committee. Only issues that cannot be resolved within this process are brought up in the portfolio board meeting.

Looking for something to start with?  Have a look at our in depth description of what we consider an essential PPM process. We call this Lean PPM ™.

An Organizational Structure with Clear accountability

PPM is not a one-time activity — quite the contrary. It is an organizational function that successful organizations run with dedicated personnel. This is typically hosted in the Project Management Office (PMO), a Project Portfolio Management department or another specific staff department attached to the CEO or CFO office.

Please refer to our  complete list of roles and responsibilities  that need to be either established or involved to run a successful PMO operation. The most important jobs/roles that need to be taken over in PPM are:

The project portfolio manager (or portfolio coordinator)  is the owner of the PPM process, the facilitator and guide of the project portfolio board, the person responsible for the translation of the strategy into tangible prioritization criteria, the person preparing decision meetings and (perhaps most importantly) the person who stays in touch and actively communicates with executive stakeholders.

Project Managers/product owners  are people who take over responsibility for the implementation of a project or the success of a product. They report the project progress or status of the product implementation, escalate issues and present their capacity demands to the decision-making board.

Resource Managers  staff people on projects, make sure their people are neither overworked nor bored, look after long-term development (of hard and soft skills) and resolve issues in the day-to-day minutia.

Meetings, Checkpoints, Deliverables

Along the PPM process, certain meetings have to take place. These meetings are necessary to communicate business objectives, synchronize stakeholders, select the right projects and monitor their progress. The most essential meetings to set are:

  • A portfolio board meeting in which decisions are made about approving, stopping or changing the resourcing of projects.
  • A Pipeline Review Committee Meeting is the meeting that prepares a tentative portfolio (or many) through a ranking of investments and a thorough check of their feasibility.
  • A meeting to resolve resource conflicts on the operational level.
  • Executing steering meetings , in which the status of single projects is monitored and problems are discussed and potentially overcome.

All these meetings are explained in more detailed in our  free downloadable summary of the Lean PPM Meetings here .

A Project Portfolio Management Software Tool to Support All Stakeholders of the PPM Process

Along the whole PPM process, project portfolio management software has to support decision makers, operational managers and team members doing their jobs. That means:

  • PMOs and project portfolio managers need to be supported to gather data and make plans that actually work, through questionnaires, evaluation criteria, automatic ranking of projects and simply sorting out wrong projects.
  • Executives need comprehensive dashboards and reports to decide on different investment alternatives and to understand and monitor the progress of the current portfolio.
  • Resource managers can understand what is going on and put the right people on the right jobs.
  • Project managers can report in a simple fashion to get money and capacity from the portfolio board.
  • Last but not least, team members know what they’re supposed to work on at any given moment.

There is already a vast set of tools on the market. There is a great bandwidth spanning from simple Kanban boards to sophisticated “all-in-one solutions”. We at Meisterplan have been trying to create a project portfolio management software that supports all roles in an easy and intuitive way.

Portfolio Designer Screenshot

Advanced Project Portfolio Management

Okay, that was it for the basics of PPM. Modern companies have changed the way they deal with their project portfolios. This means that their portfolios have become too big to handle or that they’re working in a less “plan driven” way. Let me explain a couple of ways to deal with this:

Structure Portfolios into Sub-Portfolios

Organizations running less than 50 projects typically only need one project portfolio. However, for organizations running more projects or with different lines of business, separate resource pools or multiple locations, it may be beneficial to structure the portfolio into sub-portfolios.

Everything is fairly simple as long as the portfolios are separated and there are no dependencies between projects within the different portfolios. The complete budget of the whole organization is split up between the separate portfolios, portraying the company’s general business goals and priorities.

These dependencies can be subject matter dependencies (e.g., project B waits for a deliverable from project A) or resource dependencies (e.g., project B has to wait because a critical resource is still working on project A).

To overcome this, we suggest this structured approach:

  • Plan all independent projects of the sub portfolio.
  • Spell out all subject matter and all resource dependencies between the projects of each sub portfolio.
  • Get in synch with the project portfolio manager of the other portfolio and discuss if conflicts can be overcome by changing the timing of the project.
  • Meet in a portfolio board that has the authority to make top-down decisions and to prioritize projects across organizational units.
  • Adjust plans according to the portfolio board's decisions.

The visualization of dependencies and the transparency that is needed to get all portfolio managers in sync calls for a tool.

An Agile Approach to Project Portfolio Management

Modern approaches like SaFe (Scaled Agile Framework) break the organization down into value streams. Comparable to the sub-portfolios we looked at above, a value stream can be considered as a business service, product or customer journey. Money is not distributed in absolute sums but rather in percentages, indicating where the company sees the priority “at the moment”. Each value stream consists of ARTs (agile release trains) which, in turn, consist of several agile teams, typically following a scrum or kanban approach.

SaFe implements a so-called Lean Portfolio Management approach. It includes processes, responsibilities, evaluation criteria and metrics to make sure the organization is focusing on the right things and the project teams are delivering the right outcomes.

SaFe compared to other project management methods

The main difference between a traditional project management approach and the SaFe framework is that the latter focuses on something called the “portfolio backlog”. Instead of managing individual projects with a start and end date, SaFe organizes work into epics. These epics are prioritized in the portfolio backlog based on the strategic objectives and value they bring to the organization. Then, following agile principles, they are worked on “as soon as possible”.

In my personal experience, however, even very agile organizations want to know when things will be done. This is why agile teams utilize roadmaps to determine future work and establish expected timelines for results. What sets them apart is the way they deal with effort estimations.

But how do you estimate effort in agile work?

Each work item (e.g., epic, feature, etc.) is estimated in story points. Every team has a velocity (per sprint/per month/per quarter). The exercise then is to determine which team can take over the work item, make sure that no dependencies are broken and that the total capacity in story points is not exceeded.

Instead of using story points, estimations are "normalized" into efforts in hours or days. These are then used to select the work items and balance them with the available team capacities. The upside of this approach is that effort estimations by the hour can be used to distribute the work across teams. This shouldn't be done with story point estimations as they are very team specific and cannot be applied to other teams.

How to Deal with Cross-departmental Projects (Traditional and Agile)

There are multiple ways to deal with cross-departmental projects. Depending on the size and the duration of the project:

  • a new project team with resources from all involved departments can be formed
  • or projects can be split into sub-projects that are run by different project teams with an extra, overarching program manager.

Cross Team Dedicated Capacity

  • For agile organizations, projects can be broken down into epics/features/user stories and separately run in the scrum/kanban cadence of each team. Also here, a project coordinator takes care of keeping everybody in synch and making sure that the stories are prioritized in each involved team in the right order to be delivered at the right time.

Cross Team Deconstruction and distribution

For a more intense look at this topic, refer to  our blog post on this topic .

Budget or People? What is the real constraint?

To answer very briefly: both are important. Without financial resources, no investments can be committed to. Without people, nobody will carry them out.

Focusing on only one or the other will not work:

  • Focusing on people only neglects that people cost money, and this money has to be made available to pay people, and to pay for operational expenditures on projects as well as capitalize investments.
  • Focusing only on money is a problem because one single bottleneck in the company can wreak havoc on the complete portfolio and, through that, endanger the delivery of all projects. This would jeopardize go-to market deadlines, prevent the company from reaching its strategic goals or simply put people in unproductive waiting patterns.

So, a portfolio has to be balanced from both financial and resource management perspectives while at the same time respecting the project-interdependencies. This is not an easy task and has to be supported through a software that allows the creation of multiple scenarios side by side.

Get People Involved

All your stakeholders will support you in introducing PPM if they get something out of it. We call this the “PPM Deal”. The core part of the deal is between the people running the projects and the executive team of the organization.

“Regularly provide status updates and future estimates, in return you will be granted capacity and freedom to run your project.”

In the following graph we have condensed how people can be involved and what the benefit it is for them to actively participate in PPM.

How to introduce PPM to your organization.

After hundreds of implementations, we have come up with a simple, seven-step approach on how to introduce PPM to your organization. The steps are:

Step 1: Clarify your goals/business outcomes

Step 2: Set up the PPM process

Step 3: Invite process participants to the project portfolio management tool

Step 4: Train the participants

Step 5: Set up meetings

Step 6: Establish responsibilities

Step 7: Leverage the knowledge of others

You will find more information on each step and on how to set yourself up for success  on these pages . Plus, keep in mind that taking the first step can be difficult. Don’t do everything by yourself — connect with peers, such as colleagues or PPM experts from other companies or PM organizations. Meisterplan provides regular roundtables where you can meet PPM experts, have discussions about real problems and receive assistance.  Click here to sign up for the next one .

Pitfalls of Project Portfolio Management and How to Address Them

While there are many benefits, PPM also has its risks. So, before making a mess, have a look at some of these lessons learned.

Project Portfolio Management Making A Mess

Overly complex processes, wait times and unclear responsibilities lead to a monster machine that nobody will use.

Try to keep it as simple as possible. Speak to people first and convince them before over-bureaucratizing.

Project management processes that are not aligned with PPM practices can lead to an unaligned portfolio. This is especially true in hybrid companies dealing with project management for traditional (waterfall) and agile projects.

Make sure your Lean PPM portfolio captures only the bare minimum amount of data necessary to make decisions.

Resistance to change can slow down or bring down the whole implementation of an organization-wide project portfolio management.

Make your stakeholders aware of the benefits of PPM (see above) and make it clear that this is not a job reduction or employee squeezing machine, but quite the contrary; this is a tool to help attain a sustainable pace of work on the projects that matter.

Inaccurate data and incomplete datasets will negate any knowledge gained.

  • Have a tool that makes it easy to enter or collect just the data that you need.
  • Use interfaces and APIs to avoid double data entry.

Insufficient stakeholder engagement and communication can result in unmotivated users who avoid, complain about or torpedo the process.

Onboard stakeholders early; listen to their reservations and address them.

Unrealistic expectations towards the results of projects.

Have your project portfolio managers communicate early that the very nature of projects is that risks are taken. A healthy project portfolio consists of a mix of high and low risk projects. As a consequence, some projects will go wrong.

Inadequate monitoring of project performance leads to undetected risks in the portfolios.

Project portfolios managers have to make sure the data of their portfolio is:

  • trustworthy

Again, this can be achieved through a deal between project portfolio managers and project managers:  

“I will not interfere with the day-to-day details of your project, as long I will get a short and trustworthy update about the project on a regular basis”

Also make sure to check our document on “ a productive start to PPM “, which also contains a ton of best practices.

Conclusion – Successful organizations manage their project portfolio

PPM is an effective way to align organizations with their goals and objectives. By streamlining processes, engaging the right roles, and leveraging the right tools,

  • the organization takes a holistic view of all projects — not just the ones that generate the most buzz — weighing risks and rewards in the fight for scarce resources.
  • projects are aligned with strategic objectives and strategic goals.
  • there is enough budget to execute selected projects.
  • resource allocation is optimized for maximum efficiency and productivity.
  • competing projects as well as synergies between projects are identified.
  • the organization balances its risk exposure by selecting a mix of projects with higher or lower risk profiles.
  • everybody is informed and everybody knows who is responsible.

We encourage organizations of all sizes to think about their strategic objectives, take inventory and consciously decide where to spend their money and resources in order to achieve the best result.

As a next step we suggest to have a look at the Meisterplan Help Center  regarding your first steps with introducing PPM . Good luck!

P.S. And: Please do get in touch in case we forgot something, misspelled PPM or we’re plainly wrong somewhere!

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PPM 101: What Is Project Portfolio Management?

What is project portfolio management (ppm).

Project portfolio management (hereafter referred to as “PPM”) is a critical component for executives and senior managers to execute strategy. According to Mark Morgan , “there is simply no path to executing strategy other than the one that runs through project portfolio management”. In fact, projects are “the true traction point for strategic execution”. Furthermore, David Cleland states in the book Project Portfolio Management: Selecting and Prioritizing Projects for Competitive Advantage by Lowell D. Dye  and James S. Pennypacker that “projects are essential to the survival and growth of organizations. Failure in project management in an enterprise can prevent the organization from accomplishing its mission. The greater the use of projects in accomplishing organizational purposes, the more dependent the organization is on the effective and efficient management of those projects. Projects are a direct means of creating value for the customer in terms of future products and services. The pathway to change will be through development and process projects. …With projects playing such a pivotal role in future strategies, senior managers must approve and maintain surveillance over these projects to determine which ones can make a contribution to the strategic survival of the company”. Every Project Management Office (PMO) should be heavily involved with project portfolio management.

The Distinction Between Project, Program, and Portfolio Management

Before diving into the details of project portfolio management, let’s provide a brief overview of the difference between projects, programs, and portfolios.

  • PORTFOLIO : a portfolio is a collection of projects and programs
  • PROGRAM : a program is a collection of related projects and other work that share common objectives and are better managed collectively
  • PROJECT : a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result with defined scope resources, and schedule.
Project portfolio management is a senior leadership discipline that drives strategic execution and maximizes business value delivery through the selection, optimization, and oversight of project investments which align to business goals and strategies

Portfolio Management Definitions

First, project portfolio management must be defined. Several definitions of PPM from authoritative resources are given below and provide a balanced view to the subject of portfolio management. Without a complete understanding of PPM, the benefits mentioned above will be reduced.

According to the Project Management Institute (PMI ® ), project portfolio management is the “centralized management of one or more portfolios that enable executive management to meet organizational goals and objectives through efficient decision making on portfolios, projects, programs and operations.”

The Stanford Advanced Project Management series offers a concise definition of PPM: “Portfolio management is the strategy-based, prioritized set of all projects and programs in an organization reconciled to the resources available to accomplish them”.

The Association for Project Management defines portfolio management as “the selection, prioritization and control of an organisation’s projects and programs in line with its strategic objectives and capacity to deliver. The goal is to balance change initiatives and business-as-usual while optimizing return on investment”.

Gaylord Wahl of Point B provides another angle of portfolio management: “Project portfolio management applies the tools and discipline of financial management to product/project management, taking into account: investment strategy, risk, ROI, growth/profitability, balance, diversification, and alignment to goals.”

Acuity PPM defines portfolio management as “a senior leadership discipline that drives strategic execution and maximizes business value delivery through the selection, optimization, and oversight of project investments which align to business goals and strategies”. PPM is about maximizing and delivering value .

What Is the Project Portfolio Management Lifecycle?

Based on the information above, project portfolio management can be broken down into four basic components: selecting the right projects, optimizing the portfolio, protecting the portfolio’s value, and improving portfolio processes. In order to implement portfolio management, we must understand PPM at this highest level. These four components are represented in the diagram below, but it is important to understand that these four lifecycle steps occur in parallel with each other, but for the purpose of understanding  portfolio management, we can define four distinct lifecycle steps.

1) Define the Portfolio — Defining the portfolio includes process such as ideation, work intake , and Phase-Gate to select projects that align with strategic objectives. Part of portfolio definition requires the governance team to define portfolio parameters such what types of projects to include (e.g. operational projects, strategic projects, or both), the dollar threshold at which point projects should be included in the portfolio. At the beginning of implementing portfolio management, it is important for the governance team to decide what a project is and then define which types of projects belong in the portfolio. This results in the portfolio containing a higher percentage of winning projects.

2) Optimize Portfolio Value —this involves all the steps necessary to construct an optimal portfolio given current limitations and constraints (e.g. prioritization , resource capacity planning , portfolio planning, etc.). Portfolio optimization involves intermediate to advanced processes to maximize the value of the portfolio. Governance teams first need to establish Work Intake processes and be able to say no to new requests. Once basic governance is established, it is possible to truly optimize the portfolio. By definition, portfolio optimization means working within current limitations and constraints, and in practice it requires governance teams to reject lower value work in order to increase the overall value of the portfolio.

3) Protect Portfolio Value —during the execution of an optimized portfolio, the aggregate project benefits (portfolio value) must be protected. This occurs by monitoring projects, assessing portfolio health, and managing portfolio risk . It is not enough merely to initiate good projects, senior leadership plays an important role in ensuring that projects meet their intended objectives and deliver the expected value. Some of this responsibility falls on the project sponsor and project steering committee, but the portfolio governance team plays an even greater role to ensure that resources are available for in-flight work, there are no competing priorities that frustrate project completion, and portfolio level risks are addressed.

4) Deliver Portfolio Value —Part of this lifecycle phase involves benefits realization processes to ensure that portfolio value is delivered by comparing expected benefits with actual benefits. This requires teams to proactively measure project performance post-completion. Many companies do not devote resources to benefit realization and therefore miss an opportunity to compare expected benefits against actual benefits. In addition, delivering portfolio value involves improving PPM maturity as higher maturity translates into a greater realization of the benefits of portfolio management. Lastly, ongoing process improvement can improve portfolio delivery.

What Are The Important PPM Capabilities?

Project portfolio management is a multi-faceted strategic discipline that includes a number of capabilities. Each of these capabilities is covered in more detail in the presentation at the bottom of the page. Portfolio Managers are needed to both develop and oversee these processes.

  • Ideation – the process to generate and affinitize a list of new project ideas. The goal is to collect the best ideas from the organization to generate higher quality projects.
  • Work Intake – refers to the steps of developing a project proposal and bringing it to the governance board for a go/no-go decision.
  • Phase-Gate – a governance structure to evaluate, authorize, and monitor projects as they pass through the project lifecycle.
  • Prioritization – the process of evaluating project value in order to assign resources to the most important projects and start work at the appropriate time
  • Portfolio Optimization – refers to optimization techniques used to identify the optimal grouping of projects that maximize the risk-adjusted portfolio value at a given budgetary level
  • Portfolio Planning – the process to optimize the sequencing and timing of approved projects based on resource constraints and dependencies
  • Resource Capacity Planning – the process of comparing future resource utilization of project resources against available capacity to do work
  • Portfolio Risk Management – assesses the risk nature of projects and manages portfolio level risks
  • Portfolio Communication – processes to communicate about all aspects of project and portfolio progress
  • Portfolio Reporting and Analytics – processes to analyze and report against the value and progress of the portfolio
  • Portfolio Value Management – processes to evaluate, measure, and track project benefits at the portfolio level
  • Project Monitoring – processes to measure and track project health and performance
  • Portfolio Governance – the decision making process to select and prioritize project work

When Is It Time To Implement PPM?

There are several signals for when companies should implement project portfolio management.

  • The first indicator for when companies should implement PPM is when they start managing multiple projects. Senior leadership should get visibility of the project portfolio right away; this is important for managing strategy execution and guarding against low value projects.
  • If it is hard to get work done, there are competing priorities (or the priorities change often), and resources are overworked, this is another good indicator to implement basic portfolio management practices.
  • If the organization is overloaded with work, and priorities are unclear, this is another indicator to adopt portfolio management practices.
  • Senior leaders who want to improve their strategy execution should institute basic portfolio management rigor.

Get Answers to Fundamental Questions

Project portfolio management provides answers to eight fundamental questions:

  • What are we working on?   You cannot manage what you cannot see. Organizations with little or no portfolio management discipline may be running far more projects than they realize, or even worse, may be managing duplicate project efforts and not even realize it. Getting visibility of all project work is the first major benefit of tracking your project portfolio. This helps senior leadership eliminate redundant projects and save money.
  • Do we have the right projects?   After getting visibility of all project work, the leadership team can begin to evaluate whether they have the right projects in the portfolio. This requires establishing good criteria for what constitutes a “good” project. Leadership should also develop an intake process to evaluate and approve the right project work.
  • Where are we investing money and people?   Without good portfolio level metrics and analytics, senior leadership may be blind to where they are investing resources across the portfolio. There are many ways to evaluate where money and people are being invested. This is why it is important to categorize projects. One common approach is “Run”, “Grow”, and “Transform”. Categories such as these can greatly inform leadership of how many money is being spent to run the business versus growing or transforming the business.
  • Is our portfolio optimized? Optimizing a portfolio requires understanding the various budgetary or resource constraints of the organization. This is an advanced process to ensure the greatest “bang for the buck”. Portfolio optimization happens on multiple levels such as cost-value optimization, resource optimization, schedule optimization, and work-type optimization.
  • Can we realistically deliver the portfolio? This is an important question that senior leadership needs answers for. When companies do not operate within known resource constraints and/or do not have realistic project plans in place, it is impossible to successfully deliver the portfolio of work according to plan.
  • How are we performing? Understanding actual portfolio performance is critical for senior leadership to successfully and consistently “deliver the goods”. This includes project status, but goes beyond the individual project status report and requires an aggregate portfolio view of project performance in order to get an accurate picture of how the portfolio is performing.
  • Can we absorb all the change? Even if resources are managed well and good project plans are in place, if a lot of projects try to implement multiple changes to the same stakeholder group at the same time, that organization or company may not be able to absorb and handle all the changes coming at them. Good portfolio management will monitor whether the organization can absorb all the changes.
  • Did we get the benefits we intended? This refers to benefit realization and is an important topic. In order to know whether the benefits were realized after the project, the leadership team needs to understand what the benefits are before the project starts and track them throughout the project lifecycle.

By implementing project portfolio management, your company can get answers to these questions faster and with greater confidence.

What Are The Benefits of Portfolio Management?

Companies that do successfully implement project portfolio management (PPM) reap several benefits, listed below:

  • Greater strategic execution resulting in the accomplishment of more business goals and objectives of the organization
  • Maximized portfolio value for the organization
  • Enhanced decision making processes resulting in better decisions
  • Successful management of organizational change
  • Greater visibility of projects in the organization
  • Higher success rate of projects within a complex environment
  • Reduced organizational risk
  • Balanced project portfolio workload

These benefits are real, but require leadership to endorse portfolio management practices and follow defined procedures in order to get organizational buy-in and support.

Acuity PPM Project Portfolio Management Software

Acuity PPM is an excellent lightweight project portfolio management solution that replaces spreadsheets. Acuity PPM helps you track project performance, report project and portfolio status to senior leaders, manage and prioritize incoming project requests, visualize strategic roadmaps, allocate resources and manage resource capacity. All of this helps enable strategic agility in a changing environment.

Schedule A Demo

If you have questions about portfolio management or need expert help, contact us today.

Tim is a project and portfolio management consultant with 15 years of experience working with the Fortune 500. He is an expert in maturity-based PPM and helps PMO Leaders build and improve their PMO to unlock more value for their company. He is one of the original PfMP’s (Portfolio Management Professionals) and a public speaker at business conferences and PMI events.

An Overview of PPM

This presentation will teach you the foundational principles of PPM.

For a free copy of this presentation, just sign up now.

What is a project portfolio?

A project portfolio is a defined set of projects and programs within an organization that is better managed as a collective set of work to accomplish strategic goals.

What is project portfolio management?

Project portfolio management is a senior leadership discipline that drives strategic execution and maximizes business value delivery through the selection, optimization, and oversight of project investments which align to business goals and strategies.

What is the portfolio management lifecycle?

The portfolio management lifecycle includes four essential elements. 1) Define the Portfolio— Processes to define portfolio parameters and select projects that align with strategic objectives. This results in the portfolio containing a higher percentage of winning projects. 2) Optimize Portfolio Value—all the steps necessary to construct an optimal portfolio given current limitations and constraints (e.g. prioritization, resource capacity planning, portfolio planning, etc.) 3) Protect Portfolio Value—during the execution of an optimized portfolio, the aggregate project benefits (portfolio value) must be protected. This occurs by monitoring projects, assessing portfolio health, and managing portfolio risk. 4) Deliver Portfolio Value—Ensure that portfolio value is delivered by comparing expected benefits with actual benefits. Improving PPM maturity translates into a greater realization of the benefits of portfolio management.

What are important project portfolio management capabilities?

The full breadth of project portfolio management includes several important capabilities including: ideation, work intake, Stage-Gate, prioritization, portfolio optimization, portfolio planning, resource capacity planning, portfolio risk management, portfolio communication, portfolio reporting and analytics, portfolio value management, project monitoring, and portfolio governance.

What are the benefits of project portfolio management?

Companies that do successfully implement project portfolio management (PPM) reap several benefits: 1) Greater strategic execution resulting in the accomplishment of more business goals and objectives of the organization 2) Maximized portfolio value for the organization 3) Enhanced decision making processes resulting in better decisions 4) Successful management of organizational change 5) Greater visibility of projects in the organization 6) Higher success rate of projects within a complex environment 7) Reduced organizational risk 8) Balanced project portfolio workload

What are important project portfolio management questions to answer?

1. What are we working on? 2. Do we have the right projects? 3. Where are we investing money and people? 4. Is our portfolio optimized? 5. Can we realistically deliver the portfolio? 6. How are we performing? 7. Can we absorb all the change? 8. Did we get the benefits we intended?

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The complete guide to portfolio management

project portfolio financial management

According to the Project Management Institute , p ortfolio management is   “a way to bridge the gap between strategy and implementation .” 

In this article, we’ll define portfolio management, suggest some best practices, and show you how you can use monday PMO work management to support your organization’s success.

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What is a project portfolio?

A portfolio describes a grouping of projects, programs, or in some cases, both. Project portfolios are created to house and manage important information across these activities to provide collective oversight.

Portfolio management

Think of a project portfolio as a single source of truth to make decisions about resource allocation, forecast performance, and risks, and as a north star for progress and alignment — especially as they relate to goals and strategy.

Read also: Portfolio management vs project management

What is the process of portfolio management?

The process of portfolio management is the selection, prioritization, and control of an organization’s projects and programs. Such centralized management and oversight help establish a standard of governance across the organization.

Put plainly, project portfolio management assigns responsibility, so the organization always has a individual or a group of people closely monitoring the performance of the company’s project investments.

If a project is aligned with the company’s strategies, values, and long-term goals and it’s performing well, then it’s more likely to get funded and prioritized. If it’s risky, underperforming, or misaligned to the company’s greater strategy, then it’s probably going under the microscope to either pivot or get scrapped altogether. 

Building portfolio management into your organization puts you back in the driver’s seat, where you can make more educated decisions about how to effectively deliver against your strategy and take charge of your asset allocation.

Some everyday use cases for PPM are:

  • Identifying potential project returns
  • Forecasting risks
  • Facilitating communication
  • Obtaining stakeholder buy-in

What’s the difference between portfolio management, project management, and program management?

The relationship and hierarchy between portfolio, program, and project management can be described as the following:

  • Project management typically involves managing temporary or unique endeavors focused on a specific product or service
  • Program management entails a coordinated approach to managing related projects in a manner that aligns their connected objectives
  • Portfolio management takes a group of projects and/or programs and manages these collectively as a group, ensuring they’re consistently aligned with the overall strategy

Simply put, projects are the building blocks that make up a program, while programs and individual projects combined form a portfolio.

Strategic goals are everything and with portfolio management, you can ensure your programs and projects are aligned with them.

( Image Source )

Why is project portfolio management important?

Like most project management processes, thoughtful portfolio management has more than one positive ripple effect on business value. Here are a few of the most important:

Strategic alignment

Portfolio management helps organizational and operations leaders see if other large projects are contributing and in line with high-level organizational goals and KPIs.

Reduced inefficiency

When all projects are mapped out in one place, it’s easier to see what is of the highest priority, what can be tabled, and so on. It also creates a track record for seeing how similar projects went in the past, so they can be better implemented in the future.

Risk management

Clarity into a project portfolio aids risk management by consolidating the most important components of projects in one place for evaluation.

Diversification

Having an easily accessible portfolio can also help someone like a PMO assess if the projects being prioritized for the organization have health diversity. Conversely, it can help them see if a project isn’t relevant.

Portfolio management best practices

Much like the day-to-day, portfolio management best practices will naturally vary. Nonetheless, there are tried and true methods that are applicable to most industries.

Perform a hands-on, detailed project inventory

Taking stock of all your projects provides a level of understanding that’s critical to effective portfolio management. Include the project’s title, timeline, estimated costs, business objectives, potential ROI, and how it benefits the business.

Resource management

This way you can create an instant high-level overview with all the information required to provide investors with updates or make better on-the-spot decisions.

Evaluate projects through a strategic lens

It’s important to prioritize the projects that are most aligned with the company’s strategic objectives. Other factors to consider are how risky a project is and whether the project will involve massive reengineering.

Ultimately, a good portfolio manager will identify overlapping project proposals early and cut off any projects with poor business cases upfront, to ensure better alignment between management and stakeholders.

Prioritize, categorize, and fund projects

Once you’ve completed evaluating each project based on strategy alignment, you also will have to prioritize based on available funding and resources. 

A thorough scoring and categorization process can come in handy for this because it also helps you see how much work could be done down the line.

Thoroughly review and manage your portfolio

A first-rate evaluation and prioritization process won’t help if your portfolio isn’t actively managed after creating the approved project list.

A platform like monday PMO work management streamlines this process by allowing you to oversee the status of each project on a data-driven, yet beautifully designed dashboard.

At a minimum, portfolio managers should be monitoring asset performance at a quarterly level but to truly excel, this should occur more frequently.

During the review process, portfolio managers and stakeholders will often meet to discuss which initiatives require and are worthy of additional funding, which ones to pause, and which to stop altogether.

Portfolio management challenges

Portfolio management is highly effective, but it requires serious commitment. Here are 5 major challenges.

1. Having a cohesive relationship between managers & stakeholders

Both the portfolio management team and stakeholders have unique motivations and priorities that need to work in tangent. Managing the engagement between the two isn’t always smooth sailing, as investment decisions are scrutinized.

It takes dedication from the bottom to the top and as much transparency as possible to keep projects on course and relationships intact.

2. Time & resource management

Understanding how much time, capacity, and resources like budget are available across many initiative is tough. On monday PMO work management, you can use a Workload View and Timeline View to provide clear insights.

3. Data visibility

For efficient porfolio management, you need to be able to import and customize the way you or stakeholders see relevant project data.

monday PMO work management lets you use widgets to create custom dashboards — you can set up automations to routinely send reports out. You can also add more than one dashboard view on a board, built exactly how you need it.

Views

4. Inability to operationalize & scale

As your project portfolio grows, it’s safe to say that you need a work management platform that can keep up and cut down on manual work. Excel sheets and email can’t offer automation, calculations, communication, and more all in the same place — which can slow down or prevent organizations from expanding their portfolios.

5. Macroeconomic risks

Even the most perfect portfolio management can be negatively impacted by factors out of an organization’s control, like an economic downturn. However, having an effective platform and project portfolio risk management process in place can help you make better financial decisions before, during, and after a crisis or slow time.

Why you need a portfolio management platform

Keeping track of project status, funding, investment rounds, ownership, and communication is hard enough when people and resources are stretched or limited. Without a portfolio management platform, you might as well be making educated guesses that occasionally meet their mark.

The best tool is one that also considers your project managers’ needs since their data needs to trickle up to higher-level portfolio managers and their corresponding boards and dashboards.

A solution that eliminates manual data transfers or excessive status update meetings should be what you aim for, with the aim of improving your overall processes, impact, and keeping your sanity.

monday PMO work management lets you do that.

Get started with monday.com

How can monday Work Management help with portfolio management?

monday PMO work management is perfectly suited for top-notch portfolio management. Its features and customization options help you and your managers see the big picture so they can easily detect bottlenecks and problems by pulling data from all projects across different programs into one high-level view.

Dashboards

Investing in monday.com checks off all the best practices, as it allows you to:

  • Perform a hands-on, detailed project inventory with a portfolio management board. This board provides a high-level overview that’s easily connected to a more granular project view that your project managers keep up to date.
  • Evaluate projects through a strategic lens with custom columns that make it easier to track funding rounds, funding status, resources invested, estimated current value, and last evaluation.
  • Prioritize, categorize, and fund projects based on custom columns that show priority and custom project scoring.
  • Thoroughly review and manage your portfolio with custom dashboards that provide a snapshot of the overall profitability and health of the portfolio.

The ability to assign ownership to individual tasks, so that you always have a go-to person, provides greater insight into performance and makes it easy to manage any potential risk as they arise.

Check out monday work management pricing here.

Does monday work management have a portfolio view?

monday work management offers many different options to help you get a high-level overview of projects across teams and departments. Our dashboard view is a customizable location where you can choose custom widgets to stay on top of things like budget, project phases, and more across project boards.

What is the goal of project portfolio management vs project management?

The goal of project portfolio management is to stay on top of project data across departments, teams, and more in order to optimize things like efficiency, resources, and budgets. Project management’s goal is to plan, track, execute, and monitor activities in stages in order to achieve a goal and produce a certain outcome.

What features does a good project portfolio management tool offer?

  • Budgeting and reporting
  • Seamless, in-platform communication
  • Automations
  • Import & export
  • Enterprise-level security
  • Project management |

Project portfolio management 101

Julia Martins contributor headshot

Project portfolio management helps you organize data and highlight crucial information during project life cycles inside each portfolio, which saves time and increases efficiency. In this article, learn how you and top-level executives can get a bird’s-eye view of all your business project life cycles and remove barriers to high-level performance.

If you manage various initiatives across different teams and departments, you know how hard capturing and sharing results can be. 

Project management tools offer a way to organize and execute work for one initiative, but you need project portfolio management to gain clarity across teams and departments.

Your team needs structure, and your stakeholders need to see results. Project portfolio management is the brain of the operation. This organizational model helps you organize data and highlight important details during project life cycles within an entire portfolio of projects.

What is project portfolio management (PPM)?

Project portfolio management (PPM) is the centralized management of multiple projects. With project portfolio management, you gain visibility across projects and initiatives to connect your team’s daily to-dos with your company’s organizational strategy. 

In other words, it’s a method to “bridge the gap between strategy and implementation,” according to the Project Management Institute (PMI).

The value of PPM lies in uncovering and prioritizing projects that offer the best return on investment. Then, follow up by implementing the resources necessary to take them on.

How does project portfolio management work?

Once the project selection process has concluded, the project portfolio management (PPM) group actively monitors the entire portfolio of projects to ensure alignment with the organizational goals. In larger organizations, this strategic alignment is often coordinated through a project management office (PMO) or an enterprise PMO for organizations with multiple PMOs assigned to separate projects.

Poorly performing projects require immediate attention as they can negatively impact the performance of other initiatives within the portfolio of projects. Here, the PPM group, or PMO, is tasked with assessing each project's feasibility and making tough choices about the best project to advance or pause. These decision-makers are responsible for maintaining a balance between individual project success and the collective health of the entire portfolio, making sure each contributes positively and maximizes business value.

Project portfolio management vs. project management

Both project management and portfolio management are subsets of work management , which is a systematic approach to coordinating work throughout your organization—from projects and ongoing processes to routine tasks—to drive clarity.

[inline illustration] Project portfolio management vs. project management (infographic)

Project management is ideal for:

Planning, managing, and executing one specific initiative

Team collaboration for one project

Assigning roles and responsibilities for the project team

Task management

Project portfolio management is great for:

Managing multiple projects and large-scale initiatives

Coordinating across cross-functional teams

Assessing the best projects for your organization and resources

Organizing, forecasting, and tracking your team’s priorities

Easily visualizing progress across initiatives for executive stakeholders

Clearly defining and connecting daily work to strategic planning objectives

Staying on top of business goals

Risk management and mitigation

Why is project portfolio management important?

Project portfolio management acts as a gatekeeper between your team’s time and the influx of potential projects. The goal is to assess which projects will generate the highest return on investment and which are aligned with organizational goals. 

Without the oversight of project portfolio management, your team may take on too many projects simultaneously. This can result from improper resource allocation or a disorganized project manager, leading to bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the system, which is a clear indication of poor portfolio management. 

Instead, think of PPM as your personal mission control dashboard. It keeps everything accessible, so the quality of work stays high and each team can hit their goals.

In short, project portfolio management keeps your business agile.

What industries benefit from project portfolio management?

Project portfolio management frees up time and streamlines efficiency across teams. When your company manages different projects simultaneously, staying organized is non-negotiable. Project portfolio management is not geared toward any specific industry—if your company handles a portfolio of projects, your team will benefit from PPM.

Popular industries that benefit from good project portfolio management include:

Information technology

IT teams often have large budgets with smaller teams. Keeping an eye on your team’s workflow prevents errors and over-utilization. Keep tasks on time and use data to drive profitability.

Marketing teams often need their attention on many moving pieces. From e-commerce to websites, there is a lot to keep track of. Keeping the pulse on the company’s objectives as a whole rather than one piece of the puzzle makes project portfolio management ideal.

Construction

Project portfolio management is incredibly beneficial in the construction industry, especially in meeting regulatory requirements and executing the strategic planning of resources and timelines. Every phase of a construction project demands careful sequencing and adaptation to changes throughout the project life cycle. Project portfolio management supports the team while keeping an eye on the whole picture.

Financial services

Precision is the cornerstone of the financial services industry. There is no room for error between banks, credit unions, and credit card companies. Adapting and utilizing project portfolio management ensures that quotas are met, documents are accounted for, and teams are equipped with the tools necessary to get the job done right.

Portfolio manager responsibilities—and other PPM roles

Just like project management, there are some key PPM roles and responsibilities. With these roles, you can ensure everyone understands their responsibilities within the project team and every other team member. 

The project portfolio manager

As you might expect, the project portfolio manager is the person creating and managing the project portfolio. 

As the project portfolio manager, you may not be the project manager for the entire portfolio of projects, but it’s your job to ensure the projects within your portfolio are up-to-date and have relevant recent status updates. You are responsible for keeping tabs on each project life cycle and providing support where needed. Plan to check in frequently with individual project managers to develop a cadence for project status reporting .

The executive stakeholders

Executive stakeholders are any team members or company executives who need a high-level view of what’s happening across the portfolio’s initiatives. For example, if you’re managing a team within the marketing department, the CMO, or head of marketing, might be an executive stakeholder in your portfolio.

The program manager

A program manager has a similar role to a project portfolio manager. The main difference between the two roles and management techniques is that a program manager is in charge of related projects, while a project portfolio manager might not be. 

For example, a program manager might manage multiple projects related to a specific product marketing launch. In contrast, a project portfolio manager would manage multiple projects within the marketing department, which might not be directly connected.

The project manager

Yes, there are still project managers in project portfolio management! Project managers can own individual projects within the larger portfolio. The project portfolio manager may also own and manage some projects, depending on the size and scope of the portfolio.

The project team members

Everyone working on the projects in the portfolio is part of the project team . Your project team may be a cross-functional group of members from various departments within your company, or they could be traditional team members. The main difference between a “project team” and a “team” is that a project team is a group that works together for the duration of a project before disbanding.

The benefits of project portfolio management

Project portfolio management is part of a larger system of work: work management . When used correctly, PPM helps you and relevant decision makers get a bird’s-eye view to make better strategic planning decisions. Teams that use project portfolio management software benefit from:

Increased visibility

Added strategic alignment

High-level, holistic planning and forecasting

At-a-glance insights

More time for creative and strategic work

Real-time project progress

Quicker decision-making

Project data automation

Gain clear reasoning for project methodology

Project portfolio management software

To get the best results from project portfolio management software , you need a tool that keeps your strategy and daily to-dos connected, provides a quick overview, and updates in real-time. 

There are three must-have project portfolio management software features:

1. Real-time project status updates

One principal value of project portfolio management is the ability to get an overview of the progress of every project within the portfolio. To do so, ensure your project portfolio management tool offers reporting features at both the project and portfolio levels. That way, executive stakeholders can get at-a-glance insight at the portfolio level, then drill down into any project-specific status updates where necessary.

2. Timeline and dependency tracking

Because a portfolio consists of many complex projects, make sure your project portfolio management software offers a way to view the timeline of each. You should be able to view any dependencies and adjust if something is off. With a Gantt chart-like view , you can identify key milestones and dates for every project and ensure things are moving smoothly.

3. Workload management

Workload management can help you develop and track your resource management plan . With workload management tools , you clearly understand your project team's responsibilities and deliverables across all of the projects within the portfolio. 

If you need to change or optimize your resource management plan, you can visualize who has the bandwidth and who is close to burnout on the team.

Best project portfolio management practices

Project portfolio management works best when you maintain an updated, real-time portfolio. As the project portfolio manager, it’s your job to check in with the individual project managers regularly and confirm their projects’ data is accurate. That way, you and any executive stakeholders can identify any at-risk or off-track projects and course-correct while ensuring on-track projects are accurately aligned with your company’s strategic objectives.

Project portfolio management processes

Many moving pieces go into the project portfolio management process. It is a continuous effort that requires careful planning to identify, track, and manage projects. The focus is to always deliver high-quality projects that are aligned with business objectives. To get started with PPM, follow these five steps:

Step 1: Align your portfolio to business objectives

PPM can help you connect daily work to strategic objectives—but for you to do that most effectively, you need to know what strategic objectives you’re connecting to. 

If your company sets yearly or quarterly goals, you may have various objectives ranging from revenue goals to churn reduction targets. Clarify which strategic goals, or OKRs , your portfolio is contributing to and how.

Key takeaway: Determine how your project portfolio will support specific company goals.

Step 2: Add projects

Your portfolio should include all relevant projects. Make sure you add the right projects and prioritize them in order of importance, if applicable. As the project portfolio manager, take some time to connect with the individual project managers to align on how each project in the portfolio connects to your strategic goals. Finally, confirm that there are no related projects that you haven’t included in your portfolio.

Key takeaway: Organize your portfolio by adding projects important to your overall business strategy. Communicate with project managers and explain how their projects contribute to the overall plan.

Step 3: Share your portfolio with executive stakeholders

A portfolio is a tool to help you align with your project managers and better prioritize project work. It also provides executive stakeholders with a dashboard of all initiatives across your department. Make sure they have easy access to your PPM software. When executives get real-time insight into project progress, they’re empowered to make better decisions.

Key takeaway: Keep stakeholders informed by sharing an overview of initiatives.

Step 4: Get real-time project updates

Make sure your project managers regularly update their individual projects. That way, your portfolio becomes your team’s mission control for all initiatives. You can see these in one place to better visualize dependencies, identify new project opportunities, and help projects at risk.

Key takeaway: Keep your team accountable for updating projects regularly, so your overview accurately represents project workflows.

Step 5: Use your portfolio for resource management

In addition to helping you and key stakeholders stay up-to-date on project progress, a portfolio is a powerful tool for resource management.

During the project planning stage of each project, you’ll likely have created a resource management plan . But if you see a project falling off track in your portfolio overview, you can redistribute available resources across projects to address that issue.

Ensure your PPM software offers workload management tools to increase resource allocation and redistribution visibility.

Key takeaway: Use project portfolio management software that monitors project timelines and dependencies . This allows you to prioritize and allocate resources effectively. 

The best tools for project portfolio management

Project portfolio management is a vital component of business planning that enables project managers to estimate a project's potential revenue before it even begins. Before making any pivotal decisions, businesses may put the pieces of a project together with the help of a PPM tool. 

Here are a few of the best:

Decision tree analysis

A decision tree is a flowchart that begins with a single central concept and branches out according to the outcomes of potential choices. The model often resembles a tree with branches, hence the term "decision tree."

These trees are employed in decision tree analysis, illustrating a difficult decision's probable results, expenses, and effects.

Cost-benefit analysis

A cost-benefit analysis enables you to assess the financial benefits of a choice, so you can evaluate whether it is worthwhile to proceed with it. It's a helpful tool when you want to prevent bias in your decision-making process, particularly when you have to make a significant choice that will affect the success of your team or project.

Priority matrix

A priority matrix classifies tasks or projects according to criteria, such as effort and urgency, and allows team members to rapidly decide what to tackle first. It takes the guesswork out of where energy should be allocated and prevents important tasks from slipping through the cracks.

See the big picture with project portfolio management

PPM is the best way to collaborate with and across your team. Get a bird’s-eye view of all your initiatives in one place to track the right metrics in the right place.

Ready to try project portfolio management? Learn more about Asana Portfolios to help you effortlessly connect all of your initiatives in one place.

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Up Your Project Management with Project Portfolio Management

project portfolio financial management

If you are a project manager of any kind, you could be facing the ever-growing challenge of managing multiple projects while ensuring they all align with strategic goals. Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is a structured approach that takes project management to the next level.

Let’s delve into the essence of PPM, its significance within organizations, the critical steps involved in managing project portfolios, and the invaluable role of PPM software in simplifying the process.

What is Project Portfolio Management?

At its core, Project Portfolio Management (PPM) helps organizations select, prioritize, and execute projects that align with their strategic objectives (and financial constraints). PPM acts as a framework that allows businesses to make informed decisions, allocate resources efficiently, and optimize their project portfolio for maximum returns. PPM is all about ROI.

What are the Differences Between Portfolio Management, Program Management, and Project Management?

Depending on how teams are structured, there are distinct differences in each management role and their jurisdiction. 

A project has a defined deliverable or endpoint, a program can consist of several projects, and a portfolio focuses on ongoing strategic goals. Portfolios allow organizations to prioritize and allocate resources efficiently, ensuring that all projects within the portfolio are aligned with the organization's overall strategy and objectives. This strategic approach helps organizations maximize their resources and work toward continuous improvement and success.

Portfolio Management focuses on strategically aligning and managing multiple projects within an organization. It involves selecting, prioritizing, and monitoring projects to ensure they collectively meet overarching business goals.

Program Management deals with a group of related projects managed together to achieve common objectives. Program Managers coordinate between projects within the program to maximize their impact.

Project Management includes planning, executing, and overseeing individual projects to create specific deliverables on time and on budget.

In some organizations, Program Managers manage a team of Project Managers, while Portfolio Managers meet with Program and Project Managers to align each project with broader objectives and performance metrics.

See also: Program Management vs. Project Management: Who Manages What?

Benefits of Project Portfolio Management

Implementing PPM offers a plethora of benefits for organizations:

  • Alignment with Strategic Goals PPM ensures that every project undertaken contributes to achieving the organization's strategic objectives.
  • Resource Optimization Efficient allocation of resources (including budget, time, and talent) ensures optimal project performance.
  • Risk Mitigation PPM provides a holistic view of project risks, enabling proactive risk management and mitigation strategies.
  • Enhanced Decision-Making Informed project selection and prioritization leads to better decision-making, reducing the risk of taking on projects that aren’t viable.
  • Improved Communication PPM fosters transparency and communication, ensuring stakeholders are well-informed about project progress and performance.

What is the Project Portfolio Management Process?

The PPM process includes the following steps that increase an organization’s overall efficiency and productivity. 

  • Establish Business Objectives  Define your organization's financial and strategic goals and criteria for evaluating project success.
  • Research Potential Projects Identify and assess potential projects based on how well they will help achieve the objectives, expected returns, and resource requirements.
  • Select Best Projects Use defined criteria to choose projects that offer the most value and strategically align with your organization’s goals.
  • Project Portfolio Feasibility Evaluate the feasibility of the selected projects while considering capacity planning and resource allocation. Ensure that resources are available and can be allocated efficiently.
  • Monitor Performance and Make Adjustments Continuously monitor project performance, making necessary adjustments to align projects with strategic goals. Assess project risks and take proactive measures to mitigate them.

Tips for Successful Project Portfolio Management

How do you maximize PPM at your organization? Like most things, strong leadership and communication will go a long way. 

  • Appoint a dedicated PPM leader (sometimes called a PMO) or team to oversee the process and ensure its successful execution.
  • Conduct regular portfolio reviews to assess performance, prioritize projects, and make informed decisions.
  • Maintain open lines of communication with stakeholders to keep them informed about project progress and changes in the portfolio.
  • Be adaptable and ready to adjust the portfolio to respond to changing market conditions or strategic shifts.

Project Portfolio Management Software

If this all seems like a lot, don’t worry; robust PPM software is available to assist you. PPM software, like Forecast, simplifies and streamlines the PPM process and offers features like resource allocation, data organization, project tracking, easy reporting, and predictive analyses. 

Plus, it can integrate with software you’re already using for accounting, task management, financial planning, or other processes to become your company’s one source of truth for reporting, project progress, and overall business health.

Organizations can optimize their project portfolios, allocate resources efficiently, and make well-informed decisions that drive success by following a structured PPM process and leveraging PPM software. Embracing PPM is not just a strategic move; it's the pathway to realizing the full potential of your organization.

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A business guide to project portfolio management

Most executives do not have a good understanding of what project portfolio management (PPM) is. Top management tends to think about PPM in terms of financial portfolio management. Here is a short guide on how to explain PPM to senior management using business terms.

After agreeing what a project is and what it is not, I will define what project portfolio management (PPM) is through a business angle. The example I will share is from a large European bank for which I worked before, during and after the financial crisis in 2008. The bank had been severely hit by the crisis, and was trying to find survive. We  had more than 150 large projects (above 500.000 euro), but no one had a clear view of the status and the benefits that should be derived from those investments. We had implemented one of the Gartner top quadrant PPM tools years ago, but the lack of discipline to input and to use it made the tool a very expensive and fruitless asset.

Capacity, and not strategy, was determining the launch of projects, meaning that the project was launched if the experts where available, if not, the project was dismissed. By then top management had realized that we had to improve the way we were selecting, prioritizing and executing our projects.

Most executives do not have a good understanding of PPM. So the first challenge was to help top management understand PPM, they tend to think about it in terms of financial portfolio management, how to deal with stocks, shares, investments, very few of them related PPM to their projects and change initiatives. Therefore, I decided to develop a short guide to explain senior management the benefits of PPM using business terms.

Which projects to select for the best interest of our company? What is the best use of its existing and future financial and operational capacities? Alternatively, what are the projects to stop suspend or delay in case of sudden economic downturn? Providing the means to answer those questions more rationally is precisely the objective of PPM. The most important aspects of PPM are:

1. A standard and structured process for collecting all of the new project ideas and demands. This company-wide process must be applied consistently, otherwise  the next step—comparing project ideas—very hard. Every proposed idea requires a business case and some common qualitative criteria, such as strategic alignment, assessment of risk factors, and determination of interdependencies. The ideas for the most strategic projects, such as acquisitions, often will come directly from top management; but management should follow the same process. It is important to note that projects are not only about business ideas or research and development, projects also have to deal with organizational improvements; cost reduction; risk management; regulation, both national and international; laws; asset obsolesced (software, hardware, premises, etc); etc.

2. A procedure for prioritizing and selecting the new project ideas. Ongoing projects must also be prioritized, particularly the first time the prioritization process is implemented. The selection process has to be fair and transparent. Consultants and gurus suggest developing formulas that automate the process of prioritizing and selecting the projects, my recommendation is to not use such a systematic approach — you will waste months trying to collect data, and in the end you will realize that you can not compare it. Focus one a few criteria, such as strategic alignment, risk, complexity. In the end, the exercise is mainly to provide management with different orientations and viewpoints, but the ultimate decision has to make by management based on human intelligence after having strategic dialogue.  

3. The strategic roadmap, which lists the strategic projects for the next two to three years. The company’s strategic objectives and goals should be clearly reflected by this roadmap, and the project list should be prioritized so that the top projects are clearly identified. These top projects usually do not change and are the focus of most of management’s attention. The strategic roadmap is communicated and explained throughout the entire organization. 

4. A governing body — the Investment Committee — that decides in which initiatives the firm will invest and which will be stopped or delayed. It also approves the company’s strategic roadmap. The positioning and the members that participate in such committee determine to a great extend the success of this initiative. I recommend that the Chair should be the company CEO or one of the vice presidents. And the committee should be composed of N-1 directors. It is important to note that very few companies manage to implement a PPM framework across all the departments; they are usually implemented within IT, R&D or technical departments. In the Bank, we decided to implement a company-wide decision body, with the intention to break many silos and work closer together as one company. 

5. A gate approval process that allows for effective portfolio monitoring and control of project funding. This process consists of establishing a few standard phases for a project’s lifecycle — for example, feasibility, initiation, design, implementation, testing and hand-over. At the end of each phase, project feasibility is evaluated and funding is released for the following phase only. If a project is not progressing according to plan, if priorities of the business have changed or if the market has evolved, the gates give top management an opportunity to adjust or to cancel the project before more resources are wasted.

6. A method for monitoring the execution of the strategic roadmap, which consists of a combination of monthly reports, health checks and deep dives. I recommend going beyond the traditional reporting performance indicators; key milestones; high risks and benefits delivered.

7. Finally, a process for capturing the synergies and the benefits. Although one of the major issues with projects is that the benefits are difficult to track due primarily to their lack of ownership, the difficulty of measuring them, and the long time span (e.g., for some projects, benefits can be achieved only five years after the project has been completed).

To avoid these issues, I recommended implementing the benefits-tracking process that we used when we integrated the last company we acquired. During an acquisition, synergies are linked to specific milestones in the integration plans. When a milestone is reached that has synergies attached to it — for example, the closure of some shops — then the benefits can be calculated and compared to the plans. The strategic roadmap has to include these “synergies delivering” milestones that are attached to specific returns even if the project has been completed. By doing so, management has a way of monitoring the benefits of the strategic initiatives.

Keep well and keep focused,

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Project Financial Management Integrations with pmo365

Project financial management integrations with ERPs (enterprise resource platforms) offer major advantages for running projects and portfolios. Organisations often use ERPs to manage their day-to-day business activities such as accounting and procurement. Project teams also use a variety of applications and services to create budgets and estimations. But, getting all these processes to work together requires an efficient financial management system.

In a short and informative webinar , pmo365’s CEO, Laith Adel, shows how pmo365 integrates virtually any ERP or application to a single platform. He demonstrates the simplicity of pmo365 connections, as well as some additional features that assist in optimising your project portfolios.

What is pmo365 ?

pmo365 is a comprehensive project portfolio management (PPM) solution deployed to the client’s own Microsoft Power Platform . A monthly subscription delivers a complete library of Apps, Flows, Reports and Integrations, each designed to drive efficiency in project management. The Power Platform’s Power Automate also enables seamless connections with over 900 Microsoft and non-Microsoft applications. These allow almost any source of data to be connected to your platform. As a result, pmo365 offers high visibility across all projects and portfolios and fosters greater collaboration and efficiency in delivery.

The Architecture of pmo365

pmo365 builds a PPM environment comprised of the pmo365 solution library, your integrated apps and ERPs, and the Power Platform’s ‘Dataverse’. All data is routed to the Dataverse so a ‘single source of truth’ exists for all projects. The Dataverse is a powerful, secure exchange which collates and distributes data. It manages all project software and documentation, including project schedules and financials, and generates instant reports and insights on performance.

So, pmo365 centralises and updates all your project data in real-time. It uses inputs from connected platforms like Oracle and Jira, as well as Microsoft software like Dynamics, Project and Excel. Using an iterative customisation process called ‘introduce, integrate, replace’ (I.I.R.), pmo365 developers configure your solution in stages. First, they introduce the solution library (which includes a basic project template for setup). Then, they integrate the existing software applications that your teams are currently using. Finally, they replace software that is no longer required. Customisation means virtually any configuration of data is possible, so solutions can be continuously improved over time.

Using pmo365 for Project Financial Management

In the webinar demonstration, Laith describes processes a project manager or project team would ordinarily perform in managing project financials. Then he shows how these processes are optimised with pmo365 .

Step 1: Estimations and Project IDs

Making estimations of costs is the first stage of project financial management. It is typically done in Microsoft Excel, where estimation results are manually recorded into a project brief for approval. Then, if the project manager is satisfied with predicted costs, they will approve the project. A budget is subsequently allocated based on the projections supplied.

Project IDs are an important way to organise project financials. pmo365 allows users to assign project IDs to budget components, such as labour expenses , or to the entire project budget. Either way, the assigned item is thereby associated with that project account in the financial system. Consequently, its actual expenditures can be tracked and analysed against the budget automatically.

Step 2: Commitments

After a budget has been approved and a project ID associated with the project account, the organisation is ready to begin making expenditure commitments . That entails allocating resources to a project item and committing funds to it. This step applies to any project expenditure that is critical to delivery. In other words, funds must be committed for the project plan to proceed to the next stage. A classic example of a commitment is allocating funds to internal labour costs . That commitment would likely be made when setting up a timesheet reporting procedure. Commitments can be entered into the Financials tab in pmo365 ‘s Project App. Users can thereby track all project expenditures (and other artifacts) within the one connected solution.

Step 3: Actuals

The final stage of the process for financials is managing actuals, which are the actual funds paid out. Project managers frequently perform this task manually, entering internal timesheets or invoices from contractors and comparing them to the labour budget. Managing actuals is simplified with pmo365 because all data is maintained in one place. Calculations are performed automatically, and all payments flow directly via an approvals process so project managers don’t have to manually input expenditure. The financials tab updates instantly and indicates if the project has stayed within the labour budget or exceeded it.

The Project Centre App

In the next section of the webinar, Laith shows how the Project Centre (Enterprise) App integrates ERPs. He offers a simple example of how pmo365 Apps and tools seamlessly connect to external software platforms.

One method for estimating resources (as described above) is creating a timetable in Excel and then importing the data into your project software. Alternatively, you can design a simple timetable using a GANTT chart template in pmo365 . Then, you assign resources directly using the Resources tab of the Project App. However, if you don’t want to utilise the GANTT chart here, you can just enter resourcing constraints. In this case, an instant resourcing request is generated for the project manager, eliminating the requirement for a GANTT chart.

The Financials Tab

pmo365 integrates with ERPs primarily through the Financials tab of its Project Centre App. Under the tab, the project manager establishes the applicable financial year and then imports cost estimates from the Resources tab. The total forecast is thus derived from all applicable entries in the Resources tab.

Laith creates a demo business case which is being submitted for approval. He uses labour and services as examples of two cost components. This is where the first trigger of integration  occurs.

Commitments

By establishing project commitments, integration occurs either from pmo365 to ERP, or the reverse, from ERP to pmo365 .

ERP to pmo365

The first step is locating the essential project data in a spreadsheet like Excel or an ERP. With pmo365 , users can issue a work order through pmo365 ‘s backend, which replicates the data in the Project Centre App’s cost management table (alongside the financial breakdown under ‘total committed’). With this single step, users may directly incorporate project financial data from their existing ERPs and other data systems. Faster financial management processes are achieved instantly with an all-in-one solution and real-time updates of data.

pmo365 to ERP

Data transfer from pmo365 to an ERP is similarly straightforward. Users create a new work order and select the appropriate contract for integration. The cost estimation is then automatically generated into Excel or the organisation’s ERP, and pmo365 instantly updates new data to the ERP.

Actuals follow the same structure. Users only need to choose the project data from Excel that they want to import to Project Centre. In this demonstration, Laith selects the ‘month spend’ column from an Excel spreadsheet. Through a simple back-end activation, the month’s spending data is merged with the Financials tab in the pmo365 Project Centre App.

Other Useful Features

Laith concludes the webinar by demonstrating some of the other useful features in pmo365 ‘s project financial management. There is the ability to add new requests and cost orders throughout the project lifecycle if unexpected developments occur. There is also the ability to update costs orders if an item amount changes during delivery. So, even where there are changes to a project during its execution, they can all be tracked automatically using integrations of data stored in ERPs and other software.

Finally, Laith shows how project teams can examine financial reporting on a program or portfolio level with pmo365 reporting and dashboards. Program and portfolio managers gain real-time visibility and control over all initiatives with pmo365 ‘s integrated data platform. They also benefit from informative data visualisations and analysis, with the ability to observe (and adjust) portfolio performance in alignment with strategic goals.

Learn more about pmo365 ‘s project financial management solution

For more information on pmo365 and how our versatile solutions for project portfolio management can help you, book a live demo with us today.

Laith Adel

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COMMENTS

  1. Powerful Project Financials

    To a portfolio manager, powerful project financials means they have a way of allocating scarce resources to the projects that best support the strategic goals of the business. Likewise, the portfolio manager is able to understand the performance of their projects and can use that information to periodically reallocate project budgets.

  2. Project Financial Management: Managing Project Financials

    Project financial management is the process of controlling the financial aspect of a project, such as its cost, revenue and profit. To do this requires planning, estimating, budgeting, funding, managing project expenses and billing. The budgeting part of project financial management is by far the most important aspect of this process.

  3. Managing project portfolios to unlock trapped capital

    2. Reducing financial risk by managing shared risks across the portfolio. We have already noted that the level of management reserve required at the portfolio level will be less than the sum of the reserves required for each project, but risk mitigation may also be more cost effective at the portfolio level.

  4. Project Portfolio Management (PPM): The Ultimate Guide

    Project portfolio management (PPM) is the analysis and optimization of the costs, resources, technologies and processes for all the projects and programs within a portfolio. Project portfolio management is typically carried out by portfolio managers or a project management office (PMO). Related: 15 Free PMO Templates for Excel and Word

  5. Project portfolio management: everything you need to know

    Just like financial portfolio management, where a portfolio consists of financial assets with certain profit outlook and risk exposure, a project portfolio is the expression of the organization's appetite for risk and for returns in order to maximize the return on investing its monetary and personnel resources.

  6. PPM 101: What Is Project Portfolio Management?

    According to the Project Management Institute (PMI ® ), project portfolio management is the "centralized management of one or more portfolios that enable executive management to meet organizational goals and objectives through efficient decision making on portfolios, projects, programs and operations."

  7. Project portfolio management

    Project portfolio management ( PPM) is the centralized management of the processes, methods, and technologies used by project managers and project management offices (PMOs) to analyze and collectively manage current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics.

  8. Portfolio Management for Projects: A Complete Guide

    Project management typically involves managing temporary or unique endeavors focused on a specific product or service. Program management entails a coordinated approach to managing related projects in a manner that aligns their connected objectives. Portfolio management takes a group of projects and/or programs and manages these collectively as ...

  9. Project Portfolio Management 101 [2023] • Asana

    Project portfolio management (PPM) is the centralized management of multiple projects. With project portfolio management, you gain visibility across projects and initiatives to connect your team's daily to-dos with your company's organizational strategy.

  10. A Complete Overview of Project Portfolio Management

    Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is a management strategy that evaluates potential projects and uses that evaluation to prioritize and implement projects. Together, project managers and stakeholders analyze potential projects based on data-driven conclusions that direct decision makers toward the most appropriate and rewarding projects.

  11. Project Portfolio Management Guide

    The term project portfolio management (PPM) refers to the way a team efficiently organizes and manages groups of related projects to achieve strategic goals. Managers prioritize portfolios using predetermined criteria, and allocate resources according to priority level. The objective of project portfolio management is to increase efficiency by ...

  12. What is Project Portfolio Management (PPM)?

    Project portfolio management refers to the centralized management of one or more projects to achieve strategic objectives. It is a way to bridge the gap between strategy and implementation by ensuring that an organization successfully selects, prioritizes, and executes projects. PPM is best conducted using PPM tools or enterprise project ...

  13. Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Process

    Project portfolio management (PPM) refers to the consolidated planning, tracking, and management of processes, projects, and technologies to help project managers command and evaluate projects —both existing and proposed — based on specific details.

  14. Complete Guide to Project Portfolio Management

    At its core, Project Portfolio Management (PPM) helps organizations select, prioritize, and execute projects that align with their strategic objectives (and financial constraints). PPM acts as a framework that allows businesses to make informed decisions, allocate resources efficiently, and optimize their project portfolio for maximum returns.

  15. A business guide to project portfolio management

    7. Finally, a process for capturing the synergies and the benefits. Most executives do not have a good understanding of what project portfolio management (PPM) is. Top management tends to think ...

  16. Project Portfolio Financial Management

    Our Mission The mission of PPFM is to the dedicated delivery of professional services to the campus community. As we strive to create innovative practices promoting a positive and successful partnership with stakeholders concerning, Gifts & Endowments, Contracts & Grants and Capital Projects.

  17. 25 Best Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Tools In 2024

    Methodologies & Frameworks Just getting your feet wet with project management? Start wrapping your arms around the art and science of the craft here. Get information and expert insights on landing a role and choosing a career path in digital project management. Project & Task Management Cloud-based Project Management Software

  18. Project Financial Management Integrations with pmo365

    Project financial management is improved with a common, real-time platform. We show how pmo365 integrates with all your ERPs and applications. ... pmo365 is a comprehensive project portfolio management (PPM) solution deployed to the client's own Microsoft Power Platform. A monthly subscription delivers a complete library of Apps, Flows ...

  19. Project portfolio management

    Project portfolio management. From strategic planning to demand intake, portfolio prioritization, and project execution, we have resources to help you improve your portfolio management. Dig into our helpful guides, how-to walk-throughs, and templates to get started managing your portfolio like a pro.

  20. Financial Advice & Consultation

    With you all the way. Intelligent financial advice and creative consultation require attention and partnership to flourish. This is why PFM forges a close working relationship with each of our clients, ensuring our efforts to empower, mobilize and educate today help to yield sustainable outcomes tomorrow. Learn More.

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    Miranda Marquit, MBA, is a freelance contributor to Newsweek's personal finance team. She has an M.A. in journalism from Syracuse University and has been writing and podcasting about money since ...

  22. Project Manager Financial Services jobs

    98 Project Manager Financial Services jobs available on Indeed.com. Apply to Project Manager, Finance Project Manager, Senior Portfolio Manager and more! ... AVP Portfolio Project Management. CardWorks. Hybrid remote in Woodbury, NY 11797. $119,570 - $132,855 a year. Full-time.

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    Andrew Del Biaggio. Providing services: Program Management, Accounting, Human Resources (HR), Project Management San Jose, CA

  24. About Us

    Brigitte is a licensed real estate agent (DRE#00585719). Alongside her career in property management, Brigitte has worked in both residential and commercial real estate sales. Prior to joining Provident Property Management, Brigitte worked with Red Carpet, Century 21 SCVA and LAD Property Management. Brigitte is fluent in French and Englis.