PM ADVISORY:

Project Portfolio Management – The Art of Saying “No”

Part 2 of 6: First, Know Where You Want to Go

By Jeff Oltmann

Why Portfolio Management?

Can your organization say “no”?  Effective project organizations focus their limited resources on the best projects, declining to do projects that are good but not good enough.  They use a discipline called project portfolio management (PPM) to make and implement these tough project selection decisions.    

Part 1 of this series reviewed the benefits and process of PPM.  This article is part 2, and will explore the first step of the PPM process, clarify business objectives.  Future articles will examine the subsequent steps.

Exhibit 1 shows the five-part PPM process.  This process identifies the most important differentiators between projects, for example ROI, risk, efficiency, or strategic alignment.  Then it uses these differentiators to select the highest impact projects, clear out the clutter, and set priorities.  Tradeoffs are made in a disciplined way, rather than allowing the loudest voice to win.

Click here to read entire paper

About the Author Jeff Oltmann, PMP Jeff Oltmann , is principal consultant at Synergy Professional Services, LLC in Portland, Oregon (www.spspro.com). He is also on the graduate faculty of the Division of Management at Oregon Health and Science University. His specialties include strategy deployment, operational excellence, and project portfolio management. Jeff is a seasoned leader with over 20 years of experience managing successful technology programs. He ran the Program Management Office (PMO) and a $60M project portfolio for IBM’s xSeries development facility in Oregon. Jeff’s hands-on program management experience includes program budgets over $100M and worldwide cross-functional teams of over 100 members. Jeff welcomes your questions and ideas. You can contact him at jeff@spspro.com or read previous articles at www.spspro.com/resources.htm.