Effective Software Project Management

The Perspective of the Enterprise

Whether the enterprise is publicly traded or privately owned, it is in business for one reason and one reason only—to make money for its stockholders or for its owners. When you come down to basics, they have no other reason for their existence. The alternative is to go out of business. In making money the enterprise must decide how to invest its resources across the lines of business. They can do that in a variety of ways.

An enterprise may have several portfolios: strategic, tactical, operational, infrastructure, maintenance, and others. The focus here is on the strategic portfolio, but much of the discussion applies similarly to the other portfolios as well. To reach its goals and objectives for the planning horizon the enterprise will define a number of strategic initiatives mapped to each of its goals or objectives. Each strategy will have a certain amount of resources (money or people) assigned depending on the priority or importance of the strategy to the enterprise. The more resources as a percentage of the total that are allocated to a particular strategy, the more important it is to the strategies of the enterprise. These resources will be distributed to projects requesting those resources based on some evaluation criteria. That criterion is often related to the bottom line impact of the proposed projects. For example, the enterprise allocates $15M to a particular strategy, and there is a total of $20M of project proposals seeking to ...