Developing an Effective Project Portfolio Management

Developing an effective Project Portfolio Management (PMO) strategy is essential to nurturing an environment where collaborative decision making is made easier. Also, the the business realizes the full benefit and value of IT investments. IT Governance is also critical for capitalize on each IT project and investment through control and oversight. The IT Governance committee at my current company is comprised of executives and senior management. Since inception they have provided a very noticeable benefit with their oversight and direction on IT projects and the IT department. They’ve helped to provide closer partnerships with all business units and remote offices that has created a tighter alignment of IT investments with overall business objectives.  IT PMO is vital to ensuring the success and obtaining the fully realized benefits of all past, current and future IT investments. 

PMO helps to ensure that the business is given every capability to make best business decisions possible. An important component for decision making success is the data. Accurate, available and accessible data is imperative to ensure all strategic, operational and tactical decisions and all benefits are fully realized. A PMO strategy helps decision makers visualize how one project impacts the delivery of other projects and available resources. The decision maker can the re-prioritize and re-allocate staff and resources as necessary. PMO can help to examine multiple scenarios to ensure the return and benefit of IT investments will contribute to overall business mission and objectives.

One of the greatest benefits of a PMO strategy is assessing and minimizing the risks to the business for each IT investment and project. Risks include financial, governance, resource utilization and allocation and mismanaged efforts. PMO is critical in the IT investment evaluation process.  PMO should help calculate the rate of return and foresee the business value of each IT project. The PMO strategy should help to decide to accept or reject a project through compliance and architecture reviews of proposed investments and projects. I am part of two architecture and compliance review teams at my current company that are critical to the current and future state of the internal and external customer platforms. One is the Engineering Solution Architecture Team (eSAT) that reviews prioritized projects and architectures as recommended by Product Management, Engineering Management and the Chief Architect.  The second which ties into eSAT is the Cloud Operations team. Cloud Operations team architects, designs, implements, secures and otherwise manages cloud computing resources throughout the application development lifecycle.  The CloudOps team provides reliable, scalable, sustainable and cost effective infrastructure by creating a framework of policies and processes that guide EnerNOC's cloud usage.