Project Portfolio Management: Ensuring Objective Comparisons for Portfolio Decision Making

To ensure alignment with organizational goals-be they revenue, market based, or organizational performance or improvement-the first step of creating a portfolio is a systematic review of all the potential projects. Furthermore, the start of any effective process is standardizing the inputs; in this case, that means establishing business cases that will provide decision makers with the information they need to determine the value of each project and make apples-to-apples comparisons for entry into the portfolio.

This article looks at common standardized inputs that organizations use to assess the value and risk of potential projects for entry into the portfolio as well as resource allocations and ongoing tracking.