Within the context of an organization, projects have traditionally been conceived as isolated efforts. Projects appear and disappear almost at random, and they operate both within, and beyond, the visibility of senior management. They are created as a result of conversations, meetings, customer requests, management demands, and many other means. How projects are approved varies depending on the unique individuals who are in the room at the time of approval. Projects are spawned by other projects, and projects often stop because they are ignored or lost.
Projects encompass an enormous array of activities within an organization, ranging from a product development effort, to an infrastructure upgrade, to a research effort, to maintenance tasks, and on and on. A project could describe almost any set of activities, and could require the efforts of one part-time person or hundreds of people from multiple organizations working full-time.
How projects relate to one another has been a secondary consideration, and how the project supports an overall vision or strategy is a question that often goes unasked. In some cases, the project and the strategy are synonymous, and in other cases, the project runs counter to the strategy.
Some organizations run hundreds, maybe thousands, of projects, and these projects form a continuous, flowing network of activities. The flow represents a steady stream of demand on available resources, and the demand often goes unregulated. Decision-making is often localized to departments and individuals, and the degree to which the projects reflect the direction of the organization is totally dependent on the individual making the decision. Cross-departmental project management remains a case-by-case operation.
The traditional discipline of Project Management is intended to improve the ability of individuals to create successful projects, one at a time. Individual project managers are trained in the art of project management. The discipline of Project Management lacks, moreover, the tools and techniques to ensure that all projects perform relative to one another, and to the goals and capabilities of the organization. The market will no longer tolerate the inability of organizations to optimize the portfolio of project investments.
A new discipline is forming now, which enables organizations to manage projects as a portfolio. This new discipline is called Project Portfolio Management (PPM). The focus of PPM is to improve both the performance and alignment of project investments (See Apples to Apples and Yes or No for further reading on PPM performance). PPM will subsume and eclipse the discipline of Project Management.
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