Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, Sixth Edition

Preparing Your Project for Submission to the Portfolio Management Process

Now that you understand the portfolio management process, you should have a pretty good idea of what you need to do to prepare your project proposal for submission and consideration as part of a portfolio. Your organization may require you to follow a prescribed procedure for proposing your project. If not, I suggest that you prepare your project proposal in one of the following ways:

• Adapt the POS, which was discussed in detail in Chapter 4. The POS will work quite well but may need some additional information, such as cost and time estimates, that is traditionally not part of the POS.
• Try a two-step approach. Submit the POS first to determine the alignment of your project, and then prepare a detailed project plan to submit time and cost data to the prioritization and selection phases.
• Develop an entirely new submission process based on the five-phase portfolio management process.

The next three sections describe each one of these options.

A Revised Project Overview Statement

As discussed in detail in Chapter 4, the POS is a short document (ideally one page) that concisely states what is to be done in the project, why it is to be done, and what value it will provide to the organization when completed.

When it is used in the portfolio management process, the main purpose of the POS is to have the portfolio committee evaluate the project and determine whether it is in alignment with the corporate strategy. ...