Portfolio Management - Review 2 (PMI's The Standard for Portfolio Management)

In previous posts I considered:

• What is Portfolio Management
• Management of Portfolios(MoP) – OGC (now Axelos)

This is the final post in this series on Portfolio Management. It will contain the review of the Project Management Institute's(PMI) Portfolio Management Standard, and I will provide some links to references and research papers I have found useful in developing my understanding.

I have an admission (if it is really that), I was a member on the PPMS core team that developed the first PMI Portfolio Management Standard 2005-2006. You will find my name on page 167 Section X2.9.1 in Appendix 2. The same core team also worked on the 1st edition of the Program Management Standard.

The third edition of the Standard for Portfolio Management has developed considerably from those early days. The first edition had three chapters 

If you care to look at Appendix X2 you will find some of the reviewers for this edition were involved in building the first edition so there is continuity of thought and ideas.

This post will examine the PMI Standard for Portfolio Management and how it can aid organizations in adopting Portfolio Management as part of their strategic delivery process.

Note all figures and images in this post are copyright of the Project Management Institute. 

Portfolio Management – Review 1 (MoP)

The three reference books identified on the previous post have their own process models

• Management of Portfolios(MoP) – OGC (now Axelos)
• Portfolio Management Standard (PMI)
• The Wiley Guide to Project, Program and Portfolio Management

Over the next two posts I will review parts of the two main publications and include thoughts from the Wiley Guide.

We can explore the models for similarities and differences, not to chose one model as the only path to Portfolio Nirvana, but rather to look at the practices and processes that will fit within our own organizations and business environments.

I am not seeking to cause process chaos by proposing a cut and paste from different models, but simply to help people understand that they do not need to become a slave to one model.  

They can legitimately choose a core model to adopt as a guiding philosophy for their portfolio management approach and then utilize concepts / processes from other models to tuning to suit the business environment, creating their ideal for their organization.

This post will explore the Management of Portfolios (MoP) Manual from Axelos, originally developed with the Office of Government Commerce in the UK.

"MoP® is a (registered) Trade Mark of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved"All figures and images in this post are copyright of AXELOS Limited

What is this thing called Portfolio Management?

In May's blog we explored the meaning of project success and it was clear that project management is focused on doing the project right, with a wider view of success identifying the need to deliver on more than the key constraints of time, budget and scope.

Over the next few weeks I will explore Portfolio Management which is predominately about choosing the right projects that are aligned to the organization's strategy.

For those who wish to research deeper the sources for this series are:

• The Wiley Guide to Project, Program and Portfolio Management
• Management of Portfolios - Published by Axelos in the UK
• The Standard of Portfolio Management (Third edition) - published by PMI

Project Success - Part 4 - Reasons to be Cheerful

IMPROVING THE LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESS

Wrapping up this series on Project Success I want to revisit some of the earlier themes and identify what you as the Project Manager or Project Owner can do to enhance the likelihood your project being judged a success.

We have already identified in previous entries that a key theme of success is to understand what type of project the organization is initiating or selecting.  

Organizations tend to opt for simplistic assessments of project type. They often equate difficulty of their projects based on size

• how big the scope is
• how large a budget will be required
• estimated time / duration for the project
• team, etc... 

They use $ and estimated counts to categorize their projects and it is true that bigger projects have a higher risk of failure. However, while size of project brings its own set of unique challenges, the real issues that drive the difficulty of projects are:

• complexity in the solution, and the stakeholder relationships
• uncertainty of requirements, or in the project environment
• urgency of delivery

These issues bring an order of magnitude increase in the difficulty of a project, well above the challenges of a large big project.