Project Portfolio Management: A Practitioner’s Approach

Why are so many of today’s technology projects “dead on arrival?” Maybe we are selecting the wrong projects for investment. Why are resources our most common “bottle neck?” Perhaps we don’t understand our project priorities. Why do so many projects turn into “money pits?” Maybe we don’t know when to terminate them. This seminar provides you with the tools and techniques that will help you select the right projects for investment, prioritize them against the other projects competing for the same pool of resources, terminate them when they don’t meet the target objectives, and complete them successfully to meet organizational goals. This “how to” seminar introduces an integrated project portfolio management methodology that will help you meet your organizational goals and maximize business value. The focus of the seminar is on a management framework called Project Portfolio Management Scorecard (PSC) that directly links business strategy to desired results – an ideal fit to measure, manage, and maximize the performance of a project portfolio. This can be easily integrated into a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) if your organization is already using such a system. PSC promotes strategic alignment and eliminates projects that have little or no strategic value. Furthermore, it provides a metrics-driven discipline for assessment, prioritization, selection, tracking, and management of projects in a portfolio. Through case studies and real world examples you will learn how to enhance business value and return on investment through managing projects in a portfolio using a scorecard approach.

Duration

2 days

Who Should Attend

Senior managers
Program managers
Portfolio managers
PMO managers/officers
Project planners
Project managers

Learning Objectives

• Define a project, program, and a portfolio.
• Delineate an overall project portfolio management (PPM) methodology.
• Discuss the four building blocks of portfolio management.
• Illustrate the role of a project portfolio in translating strategy into results.
• Introduce a PPM scorecard (PSC) that synthesizes and integrates the numerous and complex metrics related to different portfolio management processes into one framework.
• Discuss classification of projects that will help you in effective allocation and management of resources.
• Introduce the Initial Project Assessment (IPA) and Mid Project Assessment (MPA) processes.
• Present quantitative techniques to objectively assess a project for its own merit and its relative merit against other projects.
• Illustrate the use of weighted scoring models to quantify project intangible benefits.
• Evaluate decision techniques that clarify choices involving both risks and opportunities.
• Define criteria to prioritize projects.
• Apply proper criteria to reprioritize projects when resources become limited.
• Build a business case for each project and rank and prioritize projects based on strategic fit, risks, opportunities, and other key criteria.
• Delineate criteria to determine when a project no longer serves its purpose and needs to be terminated.
• Review major commercially available portfolio management software tools.
• Identify steps to build the foundation to successfully implement PSC framework to manage project portfolios.