In parallel to the growing acceptance and utilization of the profession of project
management, the discipline of portfolio management is gaining favor as a means of helping
organizations focus not only on "doing work right," but also on "doing the
right work." Yet across all industry sectors, project management practitioners have
operated without a documented set of processes that represent generally recognized good
practices in portfolio management.
Now, with Project Management Institute's (PMI) introduction of The Standard for
Portfolio Management, portfolio managers have a resource to help them develop
professionally and achieve success for themselves and their Organizations. Within an
organization, a portfolio represents a collection of active programs, projects and other
work undertaken at a specific point in time to help the organization reach strategic
objectives. In essence, a portfolio reflects the priorities, investments and resource
allocations. Portfolio management, therefore, is the centralized management of one or more
portfolios in order to achieve specific strategic business objectives. As a process,
portfolio management enables organizations to identify, categorize, evaluate, select,
prioritize, authorize, terminate and review various portfolio components to ensure their
alignment with current and future business strategy and goals, which in turn helps
organization optimize limited resources.
Because portfolios address all aspects of an organization, reaching into organizational
functions such as finance, marketing, corporate communications and human resources, as
well as strategic objectives, portfolio management has become a key method used to create
and execute effective corporate governance frameworks. With this in mind, The Standard for
Portfolio Management is designed to provide a guide to those processes generally
recognized as good practices in portfolio management and focuses on portfolio management
as it relates to the disciplines of program and project management. The Standard is an
expansion on A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) - Third
Edition and the Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3), and provides
portfolio managers with the same quality of knowledge and practices outlined for project
managers in the PMBOK Guide.
79 pages, A4, paperback