Downloads (Whitepapers)

The CIO as Portfolio Strategist

As organizations undergo the transformation from information technology (IT) to business technology (BT), they will have to make many important decisions in the process of moving from the current "as-is state" to the "to-be state." Complicating matters are two powerful and related trends: 1) rapidly emerging and disruptive technology paradigms such as cloud computing that are changing the economics of sourcing and empowered BT, and 2) tech-savvy business managers and staff provisioning their own technology solutions. A next-generation BT environment requires re-architecting and orchestrating the multiple technology portfolios including the service portfolio, applications portfolio, project portfolio, and asset portfolio. Successful transformation strategies will require a strong governance framework and a CIO capable of informing the decision-making in the role of portfolio strategist.

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P3O: The Added Value of Portfolio, Programme and Project Offices

By Maarten Heering, Gijs Meijer, Klaas-Jan Molendijk and Tanja Muis

At the end of 2008, the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), creator of the PRINCE2 and MSP methods, introduced a new guidance for portfolio, programme and project offices. This article provides an analysis of the new direction and aims to support organisations that are wondering if, and more importantly, how much value can be added by implementing P3O. It is expected that P3O will be a widely used standard, as well as PRINCE2 and MSP, but what are the contents of P3O? What value does it add? In this article we give insight into our vision on the new portfolio management method.

P3O: an integral approach

As PRINCE2 is aimed at project management itself and MSP at programme management, P3O provides guidance to managing the complete portfolio of changes in an organisation. An important asset is that P3O, apart from temporary initiatives (programmes and projects), focuses on the continuous management of these changes. Strategic prioritisation of the right programmes and projects, and congruence with business as usual are important starting points. Offices, known as PMO's (Portfolio, Programme or Project Management Offices), are essential in P3O.

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Best Practices in Project Portfolio Management: Application of the Distributed Portfolio Model

By Harvey A. Levine

It is hard to dispute the value of Project Portfolio Management (PPM). The concept has enjoyed rapidly increasing popularity over the past decade, leading a multitude of businesses to experience improved benefits from the execution of their projects.

By adopting a structured, rational approach to the selection of projects, and by building a process that partners the project side of the business (via the Project Management Office) with the operations side of the business (via the Governance Board), these firms have improved results and reduced waste and conflict of resources.

This paper reviews emerging best practices in PPM that involve the development and management of multiple portfolios in firms that have several business units or product lines. Based on studies of such firms, we have developed a structure for the process and organization of this application, which I call the Distributed Portfolio Model (DPM).

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Portfolio Management & the Sin of Annual Budgeting: A study in linking strategy, portfolio management and annual budgeting

By Rob Velders, Odysseus Group

Most companies continue to fail in aligning their investments with the strategic objectives of the organization. The decision-making process in many organizations remains heavily political; intuition led and silo based. Portfolio management (PFM) is the field which covers this alignment of investments with objectives. But merely describing PFM 'out of the box' is not enough to cover the helicopter view. Strategy has a strong connection with portfolio management. Therefore, it is important to have a clear definition of strategy before handling portfolio management. Strategy is the main brain of the company; to make it somewhat more 'tangible', section 1.2 of this whitepaper describes some definitions of strategy, provides background in macro- and micro trends and forms the bridge to the arena of portfolio management. Still, many professionals in project management do not have a clear view of what portfolio management is exactly. And more importantly: what can be obtained with it?

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