نقش مدیریت تک پروژه ای در دستیابی به اثربخشی مدیریت پرتفولیو

This paper examines how single-project management contributes to project portfolio management efficiency. Earlier research has suggested that single-project management may be related to project portfolio-level success, but empirical evidence has been scarce. A questionnaire survey with 279 firms verifies the hypothesized role of information availability, goal setting and systematic decision making in achieving portfolio management efficiency. The results reveal a mediating and direct role of project management efficiency but reject the hypothesized link between reaching project goals and portfolio management efficiency. The results imply that understanding of portfolio-level issues needs to be considered as part of project managers’ capabilities and not only a top management concern.

Not only one but several, even dozens or hundreds of projects are typically going on at the same time within a firm. This multi-project setting has been examined in a fairly independent stream of literature, often titled as “project portfolio management” [1], [2] and [3]. Project portfolio is a group of projects that share and compete for the same resources and are carried out under the sponsorship or management of an organization [1] and [4]. Project portfolio management can be considered a dynamic decision process, where a list of active projects is constantly updated and revised [5]. Project portfolio management literature encourages evaluating, prioritizing, and selecting projects based on strategy [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11] and [29]. According to portfolio management principles, organizational resources should be allocated to projects in line with strategy [12] and [13]. Development processes should take into account the existence of different types of projects and their different requirements [14], [15], [16] and [17]. Furthermore, portfolio (or multi-project) management requires sharing of resources, components or platforms across a multitude of projects during project implementation [18], [19], [20] and [21]. A majority of portfolio management studies are prospective in nature, i.e. they suggest good practices for project portfolio management. The actual efficiency of project portfolio management has, so far, been a rare topic of study. Holistic, strategy-based portfolio management methodologies and practices suggest that portfolio-level decisions should be enacted at single-project level or through development process [1], [5], [22], [23] and [24]. How do these single-project level actions eventually contribute to portfolio management efficiency? Fricke and Shenhar [25] have identified factors in the single-project–multi-project interface, relevant to efficiency at both levels. Cooper et al. [5], [22], [23], [26] and [27] have conducted survey-based studies linking the single-project and portfolio management practices to company level performance indicators. Some other studies link project portfolio management with single-project level outcomes [28]. These different studies provide initial evidence on the potential linkage between single-project management and portfolio management efficiency. This paper focuses on that linkage. Our research question is: how is single-project management related to project portfolio management efficiency. Our interest is to identify how project managers, at the single-project level, can contribute towards wider business benefits in the entire project portfolio.

Our study verified the importance of the selected few single-project management factors that are related to the efficiency of project portfolio management. According to our results, single-project management is associated with portfolio management efficiency directly in the form of information availability and project management efficiency, and indirectly in the form of information availability, goal setting and decision making. Project management efficiency was found as a significant mediating factor between single-project factors and portfolio management efficiency, whereas reaching of project goals mediated single-project factors and project management efficiency. The results give support to earlier studies [2], [21], [22], [24], [25], [26] and [27] and show, in a more diverse sample of multi-project settings, how crucial and, yet, insufficient single-project management is with regards to portfolio management efficiency. Our results show that still almost a half of variance in portfolio management requires other explaining factors which may include standardization and other project-level factors, strategic benefit goals of projects, the practices of portfolio management, portfolio type, and so on. The results concerning the selected single-project factors and the explanatory power of our model may be optimistic, knowing that the sample represents people responsible for development activities in their organizations. An obvious limitation of the survey was this restricted viewpoint, as well as the use of the same data source both for single project level variables and portfolio-level variables. However, our findings suggests that project managers need to be concerned with business interests beyond the single-project level. We purposefully excluded portfolio management practices in this study in an attempt to keep the topic focused, but they should be part of the future research agenda. An important topic for study is whether portfolio management practices will explain the remaining variance in portfolio management efficiency, whether also individual and firm level factors should be included in further studies, and which other single-project practices contribute at the portfolio level. As another continuation for our study, we suggest systematic larger-scale studies of the other project management factors identified in the literature review, including but not limited to top management support, project management standardization, metrics, resource sharing, and project ownership. Our findings also indicate that the linkage between project management maturity and portfolio management efficiency should be studied to understand whether and how single-project management can be utilized for seeking portfolio-level impacts. In general, more extensive studies are needed on different contingency factors relevant to portfolio management efficiency, with more elaborate measures on e.g. organizational complexity. Furthermore, future studies could focus more strictly and thoroughly in specifying through what kind of actions and routes strategic goal setting, information codification, and context of decision making contribute to expected or unexpected outcomes for the project portfolio. In all, the results encourage developing project managers’ role in business management beyond the single project. The single-project factors tested in this study provide project managers a point of influence towards the entire portfolio and its efficiency. At the same time, we may raise the question of whether project managers are aware of their responsibility towards the entire portfolio, and whether their competences are sufficient. Company management should pay more attention to how they build linkages between single-project management capabilities and portfolio management efficiency in practice. While some companies may plan and organize separate systems for portfolio management, some other companies may benefit from implementing such readiness into single-project management. Another managerial implication of our study is the identification of practical single-project level factors that companies can analyze and perhaps modify to cover portfolio-level interests, in their attempt to improve portfolio management efficiency.