While teaching a management class recently, one participant came up to me at a break, and said, “Why are you teaching us project management with this portfolio stuff? This is supposed to be a management workshop.”
Portfolio management, determining which projects to fund and when, is management work. The best managers actively manage the portfolio, saying yes, no, and when to projects.
When project managers try to do portfolio management, many of them feel torn when they try to balance when to start each project. They can see the reasons for each project, and may not have enough information to be able to actually determine the strategy behind what the portfolio should be.
If you're a project manager, it's possible you have to define the portfolio of projects, just to keep your sanity. (That's why there's a chapter about portfolio management in Manage It!) But it's not project management. Your managers need to make those strategic decisions about what to do and when.
Labels: Manage It, portfolio management, project management