Chapter Review


In this chapter, we've looked at how to leverage your company's investment in use case configuration management (CM) to provide metrics and reports to facilitate project portfolio management. To review:

  • Project portfolio management is the measured allocation of development resources according to some strategic plan, much like you measure your financial investment in stocks, bonds, and cash.

  • An important component of portfolio management is pipeline management: determining whether a set of projects in the portfolio can be executed by a company in a specified time, given finite development resources in the company.

  • Use cases provide a good basis for bottom-up measurement of the effort needed for projects. Metrics derived from the use case CM database, tied to the project portfolio database, allow a portfolio management team to:

    • Evaluate the mix of strategic project types in the portfolio

    • Evaluate whether projects are executable in the times specified by the portfolio

    • Track the status of large numbers of projects in the portfolio

  • While theories of portfolio management are concerned with answering What mix of project types is right? a good first start is to ask the question What mix do you already have? For some companies, putting the measurement framework into place to answer this question may be all the project portfolio management they ever need.

  • From a quality standpoint, not having a project portfolio management process means vital projects may drag on longer than they should because staff is spread thin. Vital projects suffer; staff suffers; quality suffers.



Succeeding with Use Cases. Working Smart to Deliver Quality
Succeeding with Use Cases: Working Smart to Deliver Quality
ISBN: 0321316436
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 109

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