Project Portfolio Management: Pure Simplicity

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is "a processdecentralization of resources.
that ensures your company spends its scarceThe second way that project portfolio management
resources on projects that will deliver the most valuecan simplify a project driven organisation is through
to your organisation. It is a particularly importantstandardized process, or project management
process for validating the costs involved in a project."methodology. Gaining predictability and control is
Put simply, project portfolio management presents animperative for the success of projects. A centralized
amazing opportunity for a business to simplify andPPM model gives organisations the opportunity to
streamline work processes that would otherwise bestandardize every process.
ostensibly complex. When creating a project portfolioThe third is status reporting, because the PPM
management structure, one must be careful as tocentralizes and standardizes the projects, this also
not get duped into the same replication ofmeans that status reports are simple outputs that
complexity that was caused by the lack of a PPMcan even be created by pressing a button. This takes
solution in the first place.out elements of subjectivity, where the "standard"
There are several ways that a central projectreport formats are created by the project managers
portfolio management system can simplify a projectalmost always In ad hoc fashion.
driven organisation.These are just a few examples, and there will
The first means of simplification is throughinevitably be a price to pay in the transition from
information management. To manage adecentralized ad hoc project management to
project-driven organisation requires a substantialcentralized project portfolio management. For
amount of information. This information may come ininstance, as project manager you will need to
a variety of forms, and managing multiplecommunicate the direct benefits of a PPM model to
informational facets including proposals, project plans,get your stakeholders onside with the transition, and
resource alignments, estimatations, standardyou will also need to ensure that all mess is cleaned
templates, status reports let alone people can proveup beforehand so the transition between models can
to be exceedingly difficult as it all consumes copiousbe carried out without and baggage. By centralizing
amounts of time and energy. The key to managingyour processes through project portfolio
information is to centralize everything as to avoid themanagement, you will be alleviating the pressures of
manual overhead, poor visibility and banal processesthe perplexities and turbulences of modern
– such is the advantage of project portfolioproject-oriented organisations – so it's definitely
management, where information management issomething too consider.
devoid of sporadic distribution of data and