تاثیر مدیریت پرتفولیو پروژه در پروژه های فناوری اطلاعات

The ever-increasing penetration of projects as a way to organise work in many organisations necessitates effective management of multiple projects. This has resulted in a greater interest in the processes of project portfolio management (PPM), with more and more software tools being developed to assist and automate the process. Much of the early work on PPM concentrated on the management of IT projects, largely from the perspective of the management of resources and risk. Many of the recent articles have been by vendors of the software, promoting the value of the PPM process. However, the claims made in those articles are typically only supported by anecdotal evidence. In this paper, we assess whether there is a correspondence between the use of PPM processes and techniques, and improvements in the performance of projects and portfolios of projects. Based on our findings, we introduce a three-stage classification scheme of PPM adoption, and present a strong correlation between (1) increasing adoption of PPM processes and a reduction in project related problems, and (2) between PPM adoption and project performance.

Recently, information technology (IT) has moved beyond the implementation of IT applications to an age of IT-enabled change. The trend towards increasing use of IT continues and the challenge remains how to better manage IT projects in order to maximise their economic benefits. Part of that challenge can be tackled by “doing projects right” and part by “doing the right projects” [1]. While Project Management concentrates primarily on the former, Project Portfolio Management, hereafter referred to as PPM, is focussed on the latter. Contrary to Project Management, which focuses on single project, and Programme Management, which concerns the management of a set of projects that are related by sharing a common objective or client, or that are related through interdependencies or common resources, PPM considers the entire portfolio of projects a company is engaged in, in order to make decisions in terms of which projects are to be given priority, and which projects are to be added to or removed from the portfolio (see also Lycett et al. [2]). PPM has largely developed around the following elements: providing a centralised view of all the projects in an organisation, enabling a financial and risk analysis of projects, modelling interdependencies between a family of projects, incorporating constraints on resources shared between projects, enabling prioritisation and selection of projects, ensuring accountability and governance at the portfolio level, allowing for portfolio optimisation and providing support in the form of standardised processes and software tools. However, despite the relatively extensive literature on PPM (see Sections 2 and 3), evidence of its value has been rather anecdotal. It is unclear whether there are specific PPM elements that add more value than others or indeed, whether they add value at all. It is for these reasons that we decided to investigate the potential for increasing business value through the application of PPM techniques to IT projects. The first contribution of this paper is the development of a classification scheme for the adoption level of PPM across a diversity of organizations. Secondly, we identify the impact of the PPM adoption level on project performance by investigating the correspondence between the adoption level and reported project-related problems on the one hand and observed positive elements in projects on the other. Finally, we suggest a phased implementation process for the adoption of PPM and describe the challenges that organisations might face in each phase. The paper is organized as follows. Sections 2 and 3 contain a literature review of the theories, models and processes presented for PPM, reviewed according to a historic and a thematic perspective. The historic perspective provides a view of how the field has developed over time, while the thematic perspective summarizes the main themes identified in the literature. Section 4 describes the objectives and hypotheses of this study, as well as the methodology used, with the general results presented in Section 5. In Section 6, we present a classification for adoption levels of PPM and in Section 7 we investigate the impact of PPM and project performance, highlighting the managerial implications of this analysis. In Section 8, we provide a phased implementation plan. Section 9 contains a summary and our conclusions.

Based on a survey of 34 medium-to large-size companies from the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, we developed a framework for the adoption of Project Portfolio Management (PPM) processes at organisations. Using a cluster analysis, we identified three stages of PPM adoption, and investigated which of the elements of PPM are typically present in the organisations at the different adoption levels, including a centralised view of projects, financial analysis, risk analysis, managing interdependencies, incorporating constraints, enabling an overall analysis at portfolio level, project prioritisation and selection, and the use of specialized software tools. We correlated the PPM adoption level to the benefits the organisations perceived and to the level of problems they face in managing their projects, and showed that an increased PPM adoption level has a significant positive impact on the return on the projects in the portfolio, and a significant negative impact on the number of project-related problems reported. We also provide a phased implementation plan for organisations to evolve through three stages of PPM adoption: from Portfolio Inventory through Portfolio Administration to Portfolio Optimisation with increasing positive impact, both reducing the organisational problems associated with projects and enhancing return on investment. However, we have also shown that organisations do not have to implement all the elements of PPM to create benefits. Even organisations at stage I benefited from the few PPM elements they had implemented. According to our results, value could be enhanced by properly choosing the right elements to adopt. For example, our results showed that implementing specialised project portfolio management software will not add any value unless all other major processes have also been adopted, and therefore only make sense for organisations at stage III of PPM adoption.