IT Project Portfolio Management : 9781580537810

While consulting for a large company’s information technology (IT)
department, I was asked to help find a way to better manage the various
IT projects that were spread among all of its business units. The executives
wanted me to research tools that would help them prioritize the
projects so they would know which ones were healthy contributors to
the corporate strategy and which ones could be axed. The market in
which they were selling their products was slowing down, and they
wanted to centralize corporate governance and trim unnecessary IT
projects. Because they also knew that some IT projects were critical to
the growth and ongoing operations of the company, they couldn’t simply
eliminate a random sampling. Though we had experiences in IT
program management and executive information systems (EISs), we
had little experience in project portfolio management (PPM). After
some research, we realized that implementing a project prioritization
tool would be just the tip of the iceberg in providing a successful and
lasting solution to their problem.

This was a very project-centric company with over 250 ongoing IT
projects running at one time. The market was constantly forcing the
product line to change. Such pressures to decrease the life cycle and
increase the quality of their products directly affected how the executives
wanted IT to improve the efficiencies of their units. This ultimately
made the company a prime candidate to adopt IT project-centric
management techniques. Combining such a need with the realization
that the company had dispersed IT governance across all of
the business units highlighted the notion that this initiative would be
an organizational change exercise similar in scale to an enterprise
resource planning (ERP) or customer resources management (CRM)
implementation. As it turns out, the long-term solution to centralizing
IT project control was too much of a bite for them to take at
once—organizational change needed to come piecemeal if it was going
to succeed.