Project Portfolio Management

PPM: what is it, and what can we offer?

The concepts behind Project Portfolio Management (PPM) have been around for some years, but in the last couple of years it has become accepted as a core discipline in the management of IT investment and spending. PPM is a confusing area, as the term has been hijacked by numerous software companies keen to jump onto the latest bandwagon. Even more confusingly, there is a lack of agreement as to whether the acronym 'PPM' stands for 'Project Portfolio Management' or 'Portfolio Project Management'. The result is that a lot of software products and service companies that fly the PPM flag do so in an incomplete and, sometimes, misleading way.

Axiot's team has been building PPM experience since 1998: in fact since before the term "Project Portfolio Management" became generally acknowledged. Axiot's view is that PPM has very little, if anything, to do with traditional 'Project Management'. It is a discipline in its own right, with its own sets of practices, techniques and tools. Some of these, such as risk management, do cross over with project management: but in general it is better to think of PPM as something completely separate. It is also important to realise that, like project management and programme management, PPM is a business activity, not an IT system.

PPM offers a clear and, if done properly, simple method to connect business users with IT service provision. In particular, PPM techniques are essential for an organisation that wishes to adopt the Capability Maturity Model and to move up the maturity scale. On a more general level, PPM is about applying some rigour and standard practices to the otherwise black art of of decision-making. The core aim of PPM is to provide you with more than just gut instinct when you, or your business users, have to make decisions about which projects to do, which to stop, how to prioritise competing projects, and, crucially, how to live within budgetary and resourcing constraints.

If your organisation does project-based work, as most IT departments do;
 – if you are constrained by budgetary and resource limitations;
  – if you struggle to match IT spend to changing corporate objectives;
   – if you struggle to justify the decisions you take about projects to commission or kill;
    – and you struggle to demonstrate the reasons behind those decisions ...
... then we can help you to add PPM to your armoury of business skills.

Contact us for more information.

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