Introduction to Project Portfolio Management

By now, if you're a PM, you've probably seen a dozen or more sessions about how to run a successful project. You've jumped on the agile bandwagon. You know how to estimate exactly how much time your developers will spend surfing reddit each day when they're supposedly "committing" to Git. You know exactly how many hours are required to do everything in your project queue... and how many beers you're going to have to buy as favors to your dev team for having to work the weekend to meet a deadline.

You've nailed it... on-time delivery, on-budget projects, and a high utilization are a cinch - so what more can you do? Well, besides actually getting some sleep or maybe going outside...

Take a look at project portfolio management (PPM). Most web projects are relatively small (meaning less than a million bucks) so you typically will have several assigned to each PM in your organization. Also, most Drupal shops run 10 to 20 projects at a time. This means that even if the two or three (or seven?) projects assigned to you are doing well, there are others that may be struggling. Businesses in the Drupal space have to worry about managing a comparatively large and comparatively diverse portfolio of projects. To further beat the dead horse that is the analogy "building a house is like building a website": most companies that build houses don't have to worry about using the same resources to build a skyscraper, a suburban home, and a bike shed all at the same time.

Enter PPM - a system for getting a look at an entire group of projects at once. This can help you quickly assess their health and manage to any exceptions. PPM is a combination of tools like dashboards, burn downs, and the typical PM reports mashed together with some good processes between your PMs and project leads to make sure the whole organization is healthy, not just one project.

In this session I'll take you through some practical approaches to PPM. We'll take a look at some of the tools available, and how they can integrate with your existing toolsets. Most importantly, I'll share some advice for how to get PPM up and running at your organization without having to freeze your projects or dedicate a team to the process. I'll also briefly discuss the Project Management Organization (PMO) model, and how it can be adapted to your business needs.

Read more about PPM here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_portfolio_management