Field notes on running project portfolios. Written for PMO leads, portfolio managers, and the program teams who turn a list of projects into delivered outcomes.
Project management delivers a single piece of work well. Project portfolio management decides which work gets funded in the first place. Here is the difference in scope, ownership, funding, and success measures, plus where programs sit between the two.
A PMO earns its place by making decisions better, not by collecting status. Here are twelve PMO best practices that hold up in real organizations, a checklist you can audit yourself against, and the failure patterns that get project management offices disbanded.
Dependency mapping is how you make the links between work visible before they turn into slippage. Here is the five-step process, a template you can copy, a worked example, an honest look at the tooling, and how to run the mapping workshop that produces most of the value.
Twenty five worked examples of project dependencies, sorted by type: mandatory, discretionary, internal, external, and cross-project. Each one includes what it looks like in a plan and what to do about it once you have found it.
IT portfolio management covers three portfolios, not one: projects, applications, and infrastructure. Here is how the pieces fit, how the TIME model and run-grow-transform actually get used, and where IT PPM differs from ordinary project portfolio management.
There is no current Gartner Magic Quadrant for Project and Portfolio Management. The last one was published in May 2019, and the market was split into two reports: Adaptive Project Management and Reporting, and Strategic Portfolio Management. Here is what each one covers, which you should read, and how to build a shortlist from it.
A PMO analyst collects, cleans, and interprets project data across a portfolio, builds the reporting leadership relies on, and spots the project that is slipping before it turns red. Here is what the role involves day to day, a job description you can adapt, the skills that matter, and how it differs from a project manager and a business analyst.
Hiring a project manager is one of the hardest headcount cases to make, because the role produces no visible output of its own. This guide shows how to price the do-nothing option, which four alternatives to put in front of finance, a worked example with the arithmetic, and what to do when the answer is no.
A PMO manager leads the project management office: setting delivery standards, running portfolio governance and reporting, and making sure the projects an organization funds are the ones it should be running. Here is what the role actually involves, a practical job description, and how it differs from a project manager.
A project portfolio manager decides which projects an organization should fund, in what order, and against what capacity. Here is what the role does, how it differs from a project manager, a program manager, and a PMO manager, and what a credible job description looks like.
Resource leveling and resource smoothing both resolve over-allocation, but leveling can move the project end date while smoothing works only within available float and keeps the date fixed. This guide explains each technique, the effect on the critical path, a worked example, and when to use which.
A dependency matrix is a grid that maps which tasks or projects depend on which, with items listed down the rows and across the columns and a mark in each cell where a dependency exists. This guide covers what it is, how to build one, a worked example, and how it differs from a dependency log.