PPM

Project portfolio management (PPM) is a term used by project managers and project management (PM) organizations, or PMOs, to describe methods for analyzing and collectively managing a group of current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics. The fundamental objective of PPM is to determine the optimal mix and sequencing of proposed projects to best achieve the organization's overall goals - typically expressed in terms of hard economic measures, business strategy goals, or technical strategy goals - while honoring constraints imposed by management or external real-world factors. Typical attributes of projects being analyzed in a PPM process include each project's total expected cost, consumption of scarce resources (human or otherwise) expected timeline and schedule of investment, expected nature, magnitude and timing of benefits to be realized, and relationship or inter-dependencies with other projects in the portfolio.^[vague]

Some commercial vendors of PPM software emphasize their products' ability to treat projects as part of an overall investment portfolio. PPM advocates see it as a shift away from one-off, ad hoc approaches to project investment decision making. Most PPM tools and methods attempt to establish a set of values, techniques and technologies that enable visibility, standardization, measurement and process improvement. PPM tools attempt to enable organizations to manage the continuous flow of projects from concept to completion.

Treating a set of projects as a portfolio would be, in most cases, an improvement on the ad hoc, one-off analysis of individual project proposals. The relationship between PPM techniques and existing investment analysis methods is a matter of debate. While many are represented as "rigorous" and "quantitative", few PPM tools attempt to incorporate established financial portfolio optimization methods likemodern portfolio theory or applied information economics, which have been applied to project portfolios, including even non-financial issues.^[1][2][3][4]