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Linkedin Ken Martin, Enterprise PMO Consultant
Author background:
Ken’s long career in business, IT and PMO’s has spanned many dynamic and demanding blue
chip organisations in the UK & USA including HP, Apple, Microsoft, Coopers & Lybrand, American
Express, Symantec and numerous financial services companies.
BENEFITS OF PPM
1) Improved alignment with business strategy and objectives by assigning the right resources
to the right activities at the right time:
 Demand management
 Portfolio selection
 Capacity planning
 Portfolio reporting
2) Improved visibility and control within the organisation:
 Resource management
 Financial management
 Project reporting
 Project scheduling
 Project management
3) Improved organisation collaboration from working to the same agenda and priorities:
 Improved inter departmental collaboration
 Structured sharing of information to support knowledge sharing
 Change management
 Communication of schedule milestones
 Issues and risk management.
4) Improved Pipeline Management
The determination of which set of projects in the portfolio can be executed by a company with finite
development resources in a specified time. Fundamental to pipeline management is the ability to
align the decision-making process for estimating and selecting new capital investment projects
with the strategic plan.
5) Improved Resource Management

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The focus on efficient and effective deployment of an organisation’s resources where and when they
are needed. These can include financial resources, inventory, staff, technical skills, production and
design.
The continuous process of evaluating an organisation’s resources and performance to
determine its capacity for production of work.
Proactive capacity planning allows organisations to finalise a release roadmap that maximises
resource utilisation.
6) Improved Financial Management
Portfolio Management allows the finance department to improve their accuracy for estimating and
managing the financial resources of a project or group of projects.
In addition, the value of projects can be demonstrated with the strategic objectives and
priorities of the organisation through financial controls and to assess progress through earned
value and other project financial techniques.
7) Improved Risk Management
An analysis of the risk sensitivities residing within each project, as the basis for determining
confidence levels across the portfolio.
The integration of cost and schedule risk management with techniques for determining
contingency and risk response plans, enable organisations to gain an objective view of project
uncertainties and to develop a “risk adjusted schedule”.
SYMPTOMS OF A LACK OF PPM WITHIN AN ORGANISATION
Million-dollar projects, which may or may not match the company’s objectives, are awarded to
business units headed by the loudest executives:
 Weak IT governance structures mean that business executives don’t have clear ideas of what
they’re approving and why
 The organisation doesn’t build good business cases for IT projects
 Organisations attempting to do many more projects than they have the capacity to do
 Bad projects squeezing out good projects
 No visibility of what is being done throughout the organisation
 Excessive project delays due to “not enough resources”

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 High turnover due to “burn out” of key project contributors because they are working on too
many projects and spending too many overtime hours
 Frequent change of status of projects (i.e., moving from “active” to “on hold” to “top priority”
and back)
 Completion of projects that, when all is said and done, don’t really meet a strategic need
 Rather than cooperation among departments, intense competition, when staffing and funding
projects
KEY ACTIONS AND DECISIONS FOR IMPLEMENTING PPM
1. Gain stakeholder alignment on goals for PPM
2. Obtain senior management support for the PPM
3. Develop an implementation strategy for a PPM framework
4. Align with key stakeholders on criteria for decisions and prioritisation for projects within the
project portfolio
5. Decide what tools will be used to support the PPM meetings to record and report decisions
6. Determine the reporting requirements for different in stakeholders in terms of format,
frequency and medium
7. Decide on how the PPM framework will be monitored, measured and how it be continuously
improved
8. The PMO will facilitate the design of the PPM process with key stakeholders as part of the
deliverables of the project that will be signed off by the PPM steering committee
9. The PMO will communicate the PPM roles and responsibilities and the PPM process as well as
provide end user training for the PPM process and templates
10. The PMO will facilitate the testing of the PPM process, templates and tools with key
stakeholders as part of a pilot
THE PPM PROCESS
1) A good evaluation process can help organisations detect overlapping project proposals up front,
cut off projects with poor business cases earlier, and strengthen alignment between IS and business
senior managers.
2) After evaluating projects, most companies will still have more than they can fund. The strength of
portfolio management is that ultimately, the prioritisation process will allow an organisation to fund
and resource the projects that most closely align with your company’s strategic objectives.
3) Portfolio management begins with gathering a detailed inventory of all the existing and proposed
projects in your organisation, ideally in a single database, including name, length, estimated cost,
business objective, ROI and business benefits.
4) Consolidating all projects into a single central repository provides visibility and control to your
organisation’s entire workload.

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5) This is required for maintaining a single source of truth for work demand and for making informed
allocation decisions.
6) Put the inventory into a master project schedule, to gain an understanding of the resource
requirements of all the projects.
7) Create a standardised intake process for new project proposals.
8) Develop a standardised process for evaluating a portfolio of project requests, prioritising the
requests and approving or rejecting requests.
9) Standardisation allows for consistent methods in evaluation and decision-making.
10) Formalise definition of strategic goals and objectives to support portfolio prioritisation and
selection.
 Define the business driver and impact measures
 Prioritise business drivers
11) Assess the impact of new projects on the business drivers
12) Maximising portfolio return starts with optimising the selection of projects to pursue.
13) By comparing objective priority scores across projects, fact-based decision-making discussions
are made possible. Prioritise the projects against weighted criteria as:
 Financial valuation
 Strategic alignment
 Project priorities
 Resource availability
 Project complexity
 Organisational capability for change
14) Perform project portfolio selection and sift out the ones with questionable business value either
placed “above the line” (those projects that should be funded) or “below the line” (those that
shouldn’t).
15) Portfolio reporting supports portfolio selection discussions by providing a common and
consistent view of the entire project portfolio to decision-makers.
16) Schedule and assign resources for the entire project portfolio, supported by detailed project
planning.

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17) Regular portfolio monitoring to ensuring successful project delivery, ongoing project tracking
and reporting; and portfolio realignment