| ©2003, PDF for download, 106pp., Center for Business Practices
Organizations are only moderately satisfied with their current project portfolio management methods, and only a few of them would rate their method as excellent. In particular, the methods are not easy to use. These conclusions are among the results of a survey of sixty-four project management practitioners by the Center for Business Practices, the research arm of the consulting and training organization, PM Solutions.
The CBP surveyed senior practitioners with knowledge of their organizations’ project management practices and business results. The survey, Project Portfolio Management: A Benchmark of Current Business Practices, was designed to better understand a variety of issues in today’s rapidly changing business environment.
According to the research, top performing organizations are consistently better in all phases of PPM (inventory, analysis, planning, tracking, review). Areas where top performers are particularly better than poor performers include having a central repository to capture project information, having information available on resources, optimizing the project portfolio, planning from a portfolio perspective, actively balancing resource capacity and demand, and actually making changes based on optimizing the portfolio.
Some other results of the research include:
- More than half of the respondents have a PPM process in place (64.1%).
- Organizations’ PPM practices are immature. More than half (60.9%) of organizations are at level one or two (on a scale of 1-5) in PPM maturity.
- For those organizations that have no PPM process in place, the biggest challenge to implementing effective PPM is lack of executive support (65.2%).
- There is no standard practice for who (what organizational unit) is responsible for performing PPM.
- A significant number of organizations do not have enough resources in place to make their project portfolios achievable.
Project Portfolio Management: A Benchmark of Current Business Practicesis the first survey to provide benchmark data on a wide variety of portfolio management issues. The findings are helpful in gauging the value of project portfolio management and what practices, in general, are most effective. |
