مدیریت پرتفولیو پروژه - بیشتر از آنچه که مصوبات مدیریت وجود دارد

Although companies manage project portfolios concordantly with project portfolio theory, they may experience problems in the form of delayed projects, resource struggles, stress, and a lack of overview. Based on a research project compromised of 128 in-depth interviews in 30 companies, we propose that a key reason why companies do not do well in relation to project portfolio management (PPM) is that PPM often only covers a subset of on-going projects, while projects that are not subject to PPM tie up resources that initially were dedicated to PPM projects. We address and discuss the dilemma of wanting to include all projects in PPM, and aiming at keeping the resource and cognitive burden of doing PPM at a reasonable level.

At any given point in time, most companies engage in many projects. Some of these projects may relate to product development and marketing, others relate to changes in work processes and production flows, while yet others relate to competency development, strategic turns, the implementation of new IT systems, environmental issues, etc. A key managerial task is to dedicate resources across all of these projects (as well as do daily work) and consequently, management across projects (project portfolio management (PPM)) is critical to company performance. This paper is based on a large-scale qualitative study, which shows that many project-oriented companies do not perform well when it comes to PPM. This relates to the inability to accomplish projects that are initiated. In particular, we identify the following problems: (1) Projects are not completed according to plan (or they even peter out during their project life cycle); (2) Management and employees feel they lack a broad overview of on-going projects (especially when the number of on-going projects increases as more and more projects are not completed according to plan); and (3) People experience stress as resources are continuously reallocated across projects in order to make ends meet. These observations are especially interesting because the companies were included in the research project because they were supposed to be especially experienced in PPM, and because they actually engage in PPM according to the extant body of literature on PPM. For example, part of the companies’ PPM included an effort to pick the best projects on the basis of explicit or implicit criteria, and an effort to allocate sufficient resources to these projects. However, despite efforts to practice ‘good’ PPM, these companies experience severe problems in relation to PPM – especially in letting enough resources go into the ‘right’ projects. The purpose of this paper is to confront PPM as advocated by normative theories with actual PPM practices. Hence, the purpose is to confront PPM theories with PPM as perceived by managers and other employees for whom PPM is part of, or affects, their work conditions. However, in this paper, we are more interested in PPM as enacted by companies than in universally true perceptions. Hence, we adhere to Weick’s [1], [2] and [3] notion of enactment as the preconceptions that are used to set aside a portion of the field of experience for further attention. In regard to PPM, enacted projects are thus the ones management sets aside for further attention (i.e. PPM). As such, we focus especially on ways actors define or enact projects [4] and make sense of how to manage the sum of the projects. Drawing on this perspective, we account for findings that suggest why companies that do engage in PPM still experience problems.

The main conclusion is that as long as some projects are un-enacted, companies may experience a drain on resources that reduces the time and resources actually devoted to projects subject to PPM. Hence, each individual company should decide whether or not all projects should be part of PPM and if the end result of such a decision is not to make comprehensive project lists (i.e. lists that include all minor projects), then management should decide how many resources should be set aside for the plethora of small projects that do not appear on the project list. One way in which the crunch in resources can be reduced is by ensuring that smaller projects do not take up a critical portion of the resources that are – officially – set aside for the completion of projects subject to PPM. However, due to the exploratory nature of the study accounted for in this paper, our findings relate far more to what companies actually do (positive theory in Hunt’s [23] terms), rather than to what they ought to do (normative theory in Hunt’s [23] terms). Although generating positive theory is indeed a crucial first step – especially in relation to the future of PPM theory – positive theory cannot, and should not, stand alone. Hence, the key challenges for PPM theory in the future are to produce normative theory that offers sound suggestions as to how companies can improve their PPM. Another limitation of our study is that the empirical part was carried out in a Danish context as the 30 companies involved are located in Denmark, which may not be sufficiently representative for companies worldwide because Denmark has, to a larger extent, a bottom-up culture. Therefore, the portion of smaller un-enacted projects may be bigger here than in companies in other countries. We hope that our study will inspire other researchers to carry our similar studies in other countries.