Grassroots PPM: 4 Best Practices

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Grassroots PPM: 4 Best Practices
Peter Schmidt (July 21, 2008)

When small and mid-sized companies determine a need for project portfolio management capability, they must take care with four particular areas of potential risk, including trying to implement it in one phase; ignoring current business and resource realities; valuing automating over knowledge; and glossing over the importance of training.

Project portfolio management (PPM) is no longer considered an extreme leading-edge concept for many companies, and can be a valuable approach for small and medium-sized enterprises. However, they must first examine their overall potential portfolio to determine the applicability of a PPM approach for their needs. The potential complexity of designing a portfolio for capital investment may render it unsuitable for smaller or younger organizations. An obvious reason is that a small number of projects do not make for much of a portfolio selection. Other barriers include the cost of doing PPM, which includes data collection, analysis, documentation, education and change to decision-making processes.

Nonetheless, small and medium-sized companies may readily find that PPM is needed in their enterprise. Some indications that the enterprise needs PPM include: frequent difficulty finding enough people to put together a solid project team; excessive project delays due to a lack of resources; high turnover due to burnout of key contributors working on too many projects; frequent change of status of projects (i.e., moving from “active” to “on hold” to “top priority” and back); completion of projects that no longer meet a strategic need; and intense competition, rather than cooperation, among departments when staffing and funding projects.

Implementation of PPM is a change management process that requires senior executives to champion the effort.

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