مدیریت پرتفولیو پروژه در عمل و در متن

Companies struggle with the sub-optimization and changes among their projects, even if various normative instructions and good practices have been introduced for project portfolio management. At the center of this paper is the need to understand project portfolio management in practice and in context. The purpose is to report a review on recent empirical research literature regarding project portfolio management, to draw attention to the limitations with viewing portfolio management as a rational decision process, and to develop new avenues for research regarding project portfolio management in practice and in context. As a result, this paper shows that, to respond to uncertainties and complexities in business environments, project portfolio management can be viewed as negotiation and bargaining and as structural reconfiguration, besides rational decision processes. These alternative perspectives offer new insight into the dilemmas identified in day-to-day project portfolio management and open up avenues for resolving them, thereby promoting success in project portfolio management.

Project portfolio management (PPM) deals with the coordination and control of multiple projects pursuing the same strategic goals and competing for the same resources, whereby managers prioritize among projects to achieve strategic benefits (Cooper et al., 1997a). Project portfolio management has received a stable and central position both in project management research, product development management research, and companies' management practices during the past decade. Project portfolio management has been developed into global standards (PMI, 2008) as well as practical toolbooks (Benko and McFarlan, 2003 and Cooper et al., 2001) that are expected to help companies organize and implement their own project portfolio management. Companies have adopted project portfolio management frameworks, including the use of project evaluation and decision criteria (e.g. Martinsuo and Poskela, 2011), project evaluation and control routines (e.g. Müller et al., 2008), and other means to formalize their project portfolio management (e.g. Teller et al., 2012). Despite the variety of instructions on how projects should be selected to the portfolio, how resources should be allocated across projects, how to align the entire portfolio with strategy, and how to assess the success of the portfolio, companies still struggle with the resource sharing problem across projects (Engwall and Jerbrant, 2003) as well as constant changes in their portfolios (Elonen and Artto, 2003). It appears that, despite the project portfolio management frameworks and their well-intended portfolio analyses and investment optimizations during portfolio planning, project portfolio management models are critiqued (Henriksen and Traynor, 1999), attention managers give to portfolio activities is inadequate (Elonen and Artto, 2003), and working with multiple projects overloads the employees (Zika-Viktorsson et al., 2006). Why? Among possible explanations is the lack of awareness of practice (i.e. what managers actually do) and context (i.e. what are the unique conditions in which the project portfolio is being managed). Recent empirical research indicates that many such kinds of issues may be extremely relevant to the success in project portfolio management. For instance the resource issue raises many viewpoints of PPM in practice. On the one hand, projects must share their resources and knowledge, to diffuse good practices and learn from each other (Nobeoka and Cusumano, 1995 and Nobeoka and Cusumano, 1997). Such sharing can clearly benefit the entire portfolio as capability and technology synergies can be exploited and capacity use be minimized. On the other hand, however, projects should try and enhance their autonomy (Martinsuo and Lehtonen, 2009), to optimize their resource use in pursuing their own performance and business goals. Centering resources for a single project can also benefit the entire portfolio as project execution speed may be maximized and new products can be brought to market rapidly. This dilemma in resource sharing is poorly understood and hardly solved in project portfolios and is just one among others. Many other deviations from the companies' PPM frameworks appear in the day-to-day practice (e.g. Blichfeldt and Eskerod, 2008), suggesting that the current frameworks do not cover all relevant factors. Also, the context and the micro-level dynamics of portfolios generate repeated concerns for project and portfolio managers. Even if risks and uncertainties are supposed to be covered as part of portfolio analyses (e.g. Archer and Ghasemzadeh, 1999b and Henriksen and Traynor, 1999), the mundane reality of new customer requests, added feature requirements, schedule and cost changes, and risk realization impact project portfolios more between portfolio analysis events than during them. This means that portfolio managers must pay attention to their context continuously and not just during portfolio selection or other pre-planned portfolio analysis events. Changes may be necessary for optimizing the portfolio and satisfying the customers, but at the same time they alter the logic of the project portfolio management system by displaying political and emotional decision processes instead of rational ones (e.g. Christiansen and Varnes, 2008). Implications of the context dependencies and micro-level dynamics of portfolios have not, yet, been sufficiently understood and explained at the portfolio level. The practice and context of PPM question the applicability of “traditional”, normative decision making centered project portfolio management, particularly in rapidly changing business environments. Although the popular press has suggested some dynamic solutions to portfolio management (Benko and McFarlan, 2003 and Brown and Eisenhardt, 1998), empirical research has not, yet, developed or adopted feasible solutions to project portfolio management that would sufficiently account for practice and context. 1.1. Research task and questions The purpose of this paper is to report a review on recent research literature regarding project portfolio management, to draw attention to the dilemmas identified in prior research and their underlying sources, and to develop alternative viewpoints to project portfolio management in practice and in context to frame future studies. The paper is focused on three research questions: RQ1. In what ways is current project portfolio management understanding limited? RQ2. How are the practice and context of project portfolio management accounted for in recent empirical research? RQ3. How should forthcoming research on project portfolio management be guided to enable better awareness of practice and context? The paper is conceptual in nature and, therefore, no new empirical evidence is reported. However, prior empirical research is broadly covered, and particular attention is paid to suggesting avenues for further research based on the review. The references used in this review are primarily from research in product development portfolios, due to extant research being focused on them. However, modern firms are increasingly involved in both delivery and development projects, and their portfolios may share the same resources. Therefore, this paper assumes that any types of projects may be included in project portfolios. Some particularities of project types are considered as part of future research avenues. Next, the dominating viewpoint of project portfolio management as a rational decision making process is introduced and its underlying features are analyzed (RQ1). Then, recent empirical literature is reviewed first regarding the PPM practice and then regarding PPM in context (RQ2). In the discussion section, two alternative perspectives are analyzed as possible complements to the rational decision making view (RQ3). Finally, conclusions are drawn and avenues for further research are suggested.

5.1. Contributions This study has offered a systematic review of recent empirical research on project portfolio management particularly accounting for the everyday practice and dynamic context of PPM. The dominating view of portfolio management assumes it as a rational decision process. Although such a viewpoint has its merits in systematizing big firms' product development processes and promoting their efficiency, also undesirable consequences have been identified. The assumptions underlying rational decision processes are poorly satisfied, when taking the practice and context of portfolio management into account. In conclusion of the literature review, two alternative perspectives are suggested to complement the rational decision process: viewing project portfolio management as negotiation and bargaining, and as structural reconfiguration. Possibilities with these two viewpoints have been briefly discussed, and more research is encouraged to theorize and verify each viewpoint thoroughly. The results contribute by revealing project portfolio management as a process for and between people, and for and between organizations, besides its service to strategy and products within one organization. Despite the quite obvious linkages between, e.g., project selection and managers' interaction, or project portfolios and project offices, the behavioral and organizational viewpoints have received far too little attention and may well explain some of the problems in achieving PPM success (e.g. Elonen and Artto, 2003, Engwall and Jerbrant, 2003 and Zika-Viktorsson et al., 2006). If previous frameworks have portrayed project portfolio management as a systemic solution to goals and environments that are assumed as static, future research could explore the behavioral and organizational viewpoints that embrace the dynamic and complex nature of practice and context (see also Geraldi, 2008). A fourth alternative is to look at the combination of reconfiguration and negotiation and see project portfolio management increasingly as a competitive mechanism on capability markets. As companies engage in collaborative product development (open innovation) at the same time as they optimize their resource use among various activities, project portfolio management could be seen as a way to compete for customers' attention by utilizing various practices of power and influence to reconfigure resource settings and, thereby, achieve competitive advantage. Such an externally oriented view to project portfolio management is currently lacking, even if the complex stakeholder environments of projects are being acknowledged at the single-project level (Artto et al., 2008a and Artto et al., 2008b). Although high-velocity industries already manage internal organizational complexities to respond to their customer needs (e.g. Brown and Eisenhardt, 1998), hardly any empirical research covers the customer linkages relevant to project portfolio management. Various institutional forces in companies' product development tend to favor technocratic (hierarchical) solutions to project portfolio management. 5.2. Further research towards context-specific project portfolio management in practice The review has shown that many topics in the practice of project portfolio management have been studied in qualitative settings, with selected case companies and portfolios as the source of data. However, also questionnaire-based hypothetic-deductive studies have been carried out. The contextuality of project portfolio management, in turn, is increasingly being studied either through demanding multi-method studies or through questionnaires. It is fairly apparent that many of the arguments in recent studies warrant further studies, both to test the findings and to expand the contextual settings to other types of firms and industries. Besides the ideas presented in the discussion section, five further broad areas are proposed, to encourage further research: 1. Negotiated strategies in and across project portfolios, with focus on the goal-driven, negotiated, and thereby emerging portfolios with cross-organizational linkages. 2. Interplay between practice and context and how managers' contextualized actions result in an unanticipated transformations in the portfolio. Also, how the chosen PPM frameworks are interpreted, enacted and altered, in the day-to-day context of managerial work. 3. Dynamics in project portfolios, with focus on the both the planned and unplanned changes in the portfolio and their systemic, behavioral and organizational influences. Project-level changes that will impact the portfolio, firm level changes that impact the context of the portfolio, changes among partners that will impact the resources of the portfolio's projects, and uncertainties in the broader environment. 4. Evolution of project portfolios and project portfolio management over time, with focus on transitions over time (i.e. project portfolio management as an organizational capability, e.g. Killen and Hunt, 2010) and interplay between the portfolios of a single firm or multiple firms. 5. Multi-project jobs, with focus on the individual's viewpoint to multi-project contexts, including managerial competences, tasks and roles, interface roles, tasks and competences, job designs, and solutions to increase well-being in such roles.