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

Putting It All Together

This chapter showed you a model for Project Portfolio Management and described several contemporary tools and processes that you might employ to implement it. In effect, I have given you a starter kit for building your own Project Portfolio Management Process. If you are a project manager and have to submit your project to a portfolio committee for approval, you now have a strategy for doing that, along with some hope for success.

This chapter has also outlined a Project Portfolio Management life cycle using an agile strategy. At regular intervals, say quarterly, the performance of each project in the portfolio is assessed against the planned performance for the just completed cycle. Adjustments to the project contents will be made in order to maximize the expected business value from the next cycle of the portfolio. Adjustments can be of several types:

• Some active projects will be continued for the next cycle
• Some active projects will be canceled
• Some active projects will be judged complete
• Some new projects will be added to the portfolio for the next cycle

Care must be taken to not change the contents of the portfolio more than common sense would suggest. Too much variation in contents from cycle to cycle can turn out to be counterproductive.