Chapter 8. Leveraging Your Investment in Use Case CM in Project Portfolio Management

Project portfolio management is the measured allocation of development resources according to some strategic plan.^[1],[2] Think of it as basically the same thing as portfolio management of your stocks, bonds, cash, and so on applied to projects your company is undertaking, or is thinking about undertaking. Project portfolio management can be viewed as the top-level management of business requirements for a company. It seeks to understand the business requirements of the company and what portfolio of projects should be undertaken to achieve them.

^[1] For a Unified Software Development Process slant, refer to Scott Ambler's Enterprise Unified Process, an extension to the Unified Software Development Process that includes project portfolio management as a core discipline.

^[2] Project Management Institute's PMBOK Guide 2000 edition defines project portfolio management as the "selection and support of projects or program investments. These investments in project and programs are guided by the organization's strategic plan and available resources."

It is through portfolio management that each individual project should receive its allotted business requirements, which in turn drive the specific use cases that are planned for delivery by each project. It is without portfolio management that a company can find itself squandering precious time, staff, and resources on the wrong projects, while burning out staff in the process of trying to complete more projects than is reasonable for available resources.

Without some formal project portfolio management process in place, it becomes difficult to tell if the suite of projects underway is really balanced resource-wise to the corporate strategy as the company grows. Additionally, the industry trend is that most companies have more projects going and planned than they can actually accomplish. The result is similar to operating systems where running too many processes for a given amount of memory leads to thrashing: the CPU seems to be working really hard, but not a lot seems to be getting completed. This is why I say that balancing your portfolio of projects (i.e., sorting the vital few projects from the trivial many) could well be the single most far-reaching process improvement possible in your company, removing the pressure that prevents staff from doing the right job, the right way.^[3] As Peter Drucker has said, there is nothing so inefficient as making more efficient that which shouldn't be done at all!

^[3] (Demarco 2001) is a good read if you are interested in how "too much work, too little time" affects software development projects and the quality of what they produce (see, for example, his chapter 7, "The Cost of Pressure").