Portfolio Management follows a simple metaphor borrowed from financial management – the ability to view or illustrate the “health” of something using a dashboard based upon a number of key indicators. Those indicators are typically focused upon or around cost, schedule and risks. Unfortunately, those indicators are generally somewhat subjective perhaps with the exception of the budgets which are being tracked. Schedules often don’t reflect the real work going on or can be completely rebaselined to make them look better / more successful. Risks and other project or program issues can be interpreted in just about any fashion, so if one is depending on stoplight charts generally the only indicator worth following is the one tracking the financial burn rate.
Portfolio Management if viewed from its traditional investment origins was never meant to provide substantial insights into the why behind financial trends – it is merely a mechanism to illustrate general movement or trends. IT Portfolio Management is used as a way to roll up multiple projects into a set of unified stoplight indicators to show how entire organizations or programs may be performing. Even though there are tools that are considered combinations of project and portfolio management even these seldom do more than provide drill down on resource and tasking issues (focusing on the primary schemas of most Project Management software products).
Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.
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