Project Portfolio Management: A Model for Improved Decision Making

The focus of this book is aimed at providing a mechanism to determine the individual and cumulative contribution of portfolio components to strategic objectives so that the right decisions can be made regarding those components.

Project portfolio management (PfM) is a critically important discipline, which organizations must embrace in order to extract the maximum value from their project investments. Essentially, PfM can be defined as the translation of strategy and organizational objectives into projects, programs, and operations (portfolio components); the allocation of resources to portfolio components according to organizational priorities; alignment of components to one or more organizational objectives and the management and control of these components in order to achieve organizational objectives and benefits.

The interest and contribution to the body of knowledge in project portfolio management has been growing significantly in recent years, however, a particular area of concern is the decision-making, during the management of the portfolio, regarding which portfolio components to accelerate, suspend, or terminate. Failing to determine how the individual and cumulative components of a portfolio contribute to an organization’s strategic objectives leads to poorly informed decisions that negate the positive effect that a sound understanding of project portfolio management could have in an organization.

Dr. Clive N. Enoch has been a practitioner of project, program, and portfolio management, as well as a manager of project and portfolio management offices over the past 20 years and has worked across multiple industries during this time. Clive holds a master of commerce degree in information systems manage-ment from the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS) in Johannesburg and a PhD in computer science from the University of South Africa (UNISA). His PhD thesis resulted in a model for decision making in project portfolio management. Clive also PMP(R) and PfMP(R) certified. Clive is passionate about project portfolio management and has contributed to the PMI's The Standard for Portfolio Management, third edition, as a core committee member.