Analysis and Design of a Project Portfolio Management System

Abstract

The paramount importance of project portfolios for business drives managers to search for highly efficient support tools to overcome complex challenges of their management. A major tradeoff is to acquire tools able to produce a convenient portfolio project prioritization process, on which business investments are decided. However, by using existing Project Portfolio Management Systems (PPMS), many concurrent projects in a portfolio are usually prioritized and planned in the upstream life-cycle phases according to financial criteria, and overlooking the portfolio alignment to enterprise strategies and the availability of resources, although their importance. In this paper, we propose a conceptual formalization of PPMS with respect to a double portfolio prioritization process that performs two levels of selections according to both: i.) Strategy alignment, including returns on investment, size, and total cost; and ii.) Execution capability, as the organization should be able to manage and deliver the selected projects' outcomes. The advantage of our PPMS framework is twofold. First, it is useful to be customized by designers to fit organization needs. Second it is built with respect to the double prioritization phase process, as an end-to-end process that guarantees optimal portfolios generation. Further, the proposed PPMS system and its identified functionalities are validated through an implementation of a prototype tool.