Prioritizing the It Project Portfolio

Develop a decision framework for project portfolio management at XYZ highlighting objectives, constraints, risks involved, alternatives, and information required for analysis.

There are five major variables to consider when starting a major IT projects and there are scope, time, cost, quality, and risk. Most major IT projects will require a project manager to handle to overseeing of the project. The project management refers to the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to achieve specific targets within specified budget and time constraints. Project managers activities will include the planning of the work, assessing the risk, estimating the costs required to complete the project, and several other important duties. As in other areas of business, Project management for

The Case Study for PROJ587 will place the student in the role of a senior manager in charge of one of your company’s Strategic Business Units (SBU). Your first task in this new position is to develop a project portfolio management process and then use this process to select projects for your SBUs portfolio. The Case Study will involve the application of the tools and techniques of multi-project/program management and will deal with the analysis and establishment of project management systems based

To give team members control over the ranking of projects, each member was asked to write three different criteria on three Post-it Notes. These Post-it Notes were divided into similar item groups and each group was named. This process established the important criteria for selection. The criteria were used to determine how well each project would fit into the strategy of the company

Jeffrey Pinto defines project portfolio management as, “the systematic process of selecting, supporting, and managing a firm’s collection of projects.” (p. 92). Many large firms can have multiple projects going on at the same time. These projects might support each other or can be stand-alone projects. This essay will examine the keys to successful project portfolio management and analyze the key difficulties in successfully implementing them.

How do the five major variables of project management-scope, time, cost, quality, and risk – relate to this scenario?

Project three proposes that the company replace all the PCs for the company's sales team and upgrade the CRM (customer relationship management) software. Although this project isn't expected to have a direct impact on revenue, furnishing the sales team with new equipment and more powerful, up-to-date software is likely to motivate the sales people. Criteria one is scored as 'Y'. Project three will not cut any costs; therefore, it will earn an 'N' score for criteria two. Additionally, project three is not mandated by law, earning criteria three an "N' score as well. What CRM software solutions our company's competitors are using is unknown, thus resulting in a 'U' score for criteria four. The total score for project three is one.

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is the centralized management of the processes, methods, and technologies used by project managers and project management offices (PMOs) to analyze and collectively manage current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics.

The IT portfolio management process rationalizes an organization’s suite of IT applications to meet its business needs. IT portfolio managers analyze existing applications, current and future projects to identify gaps and risks within an organization’s IT portfolio. Project portfolio management (PPM) ensures that projects have a set of objectives, which when followed brings about the expected results. Therefore, PPM can be used to bring out changes to the organization which will create a flexible structure within the organization in terms of project execution. In this manner, the changes would deal with risks the appropriate way to accomplish the strategic goals for the organization.

The success of the project can be based on some criteria. One of the criteria is whether the project was accomplished within the planned time and cost. The other criterion concerns the output. In this case, if the output matches the expected in terms of the amount of cost saving. If the project generates the required amount, then it was successful.

In large organizations, all the three domains, projects, programs, and portfolios, have to meet the maturity standards. The IT portfolio plays high-level strategic roles by ensuring that project investments are being managed most appropriately. The main benefit of IT portfolio management is enabling measurement and objective evaluation of IT investments and alignment with the business strategy which will maximize the value of IT investments while minimizing risk. However, the ignoring of the IT portfolio management will impact negatively on the communication and alignment between IT and business leaders, which lead to the wrong distribution of the resources and budgets on projects

Note however, that outcome, time and budget are interrelated, and during a project you may need to do trade-offs between them. For example, if you want to get something done more quickly, you may have to pump in more money into your project for additional resources.

Modern organisations devise a plan prior to the beginning of the project, in order to achieve desired objectives. The collection of programs, projects, or objectives managed to achieve the desired results is known as a portfolio, and the co-ordinated management of one or more portfolios in an effort towards achieving the organization’s objectives, is known as portfolio management (Project Management Institute, 2013). Portfolio management plays a critical role in any major decisions taken by the organization with respect to prioritizing and allocating personnel, and to evaluate the effectiveness of the organizational strategies.

We have analyzed the current state of the portfolio of projects, what kind of metrics are currently being collected, and how the collected metrics are being presented to PPM. We 've also analyzed whether PPMs are able to garner what they need to know to make business decisions. Based on the analysis, we have proposed a new set of metrics that need to be collected from the project teams and new ways of reporting them to the PPM.

Based on a report by AMR Research 75% of IT organizations have little oversight over their project portfolio, this can cause duplicity of projects and increase the total cost of IT expenditure. Dennis S. Callahan CIO of Guardian Insurance claims that portfolio management has reduced their companies overall IT application expenditures by 2% and maintenance cost have been reduced by a 12%, Eric Austvold, a research director at AMR Research, says that portfolio management reports has saved 2 to 5% annually on companies IT budgets. IT portfolio management can be defined in the company ICT Governance. (Datz, 2003)