I woke up this morning, suddenly thinking of project management. Don't ask me why. Must be one of those weird days. I could not remember the differences between program and portfolio management all of a sudden. Started referring to some "old" notes.
What will make me remember in future ? In a gist (I'm leaving out most details and capturing the essence) :
Program management - a pool of INTERDEPENDENT projects, working towards a greater company objective or goal.
Portfolio management - a pool of projects, some of which may be INDEPENDENT to one another, towards a strategic objective of the company.
More specifically, if Company A has a business strategy - to develop Green Energy in the Road Map.
Then PROGRAM BIOFUEL can be broken down into smaller interdependent projects -
Project A - growing fuel-ready corn for ethanol production
Project B - using used vegetable oil for diesel
Project C - researching into cellulose - algae to breakdown biomass for energy production
Then I could also have PROJECT SOLAR that is independent from BIOFUEL (sort of) but together, all these projects forms a portfolio and works towards a common strategy of GREEN ENERGY.
Am I right or wrong ?
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Portfolio management vs Program management
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comments:
I think this is pretty much the jist of it. However - and I know you said 'sort of' - there probably is some level of interdependency among projects in the portfolio, also. However, I think you correctly described the program as some element of strategy, supported by a coordinated set of projects.
______________________
John Reiling, PMP
PMcrunch.com
Project Management Training Online
Post a Comment