My name is Klas Skogmar and I’m going to talk a little bit about how project portfolio management relates to product portfolio management.
First I am going to talk about what a single project is. A single project takes the strategy and it converts it to a product, service or another result. If you have multiple projects, you have a product portfolio. And project portfolio management is taking ideas and concepts and qualifying those ideas into your project portfolio and ensuring you maximize the return of the organization’s project portfolio.
So how does a project portfolio relate to a product portfolio?
A product has a life cycle where you may have many projects. You might have a project to initiate or launch a product; you might have a project to update the product; you might have a project to discontinue the product. So during the lifetime of a product, you may have many projects. In a few cases where a single project may result in multiple products as well, so there are relationships between the two.
So if you control your organization based on the products
– if the products are the central thing in the organization or service
– then they dictate how your project portfolio will look like.
On the other hand, if your projects are reactive and you may deliver products for a client for example, then your project portfolio is the central thing and you focus more on your project portfolio.
Even in a situation where you focus on your product portfolio, you still need to maximize your project portfolio through good project portfolio management, to ensure you do the right changes to the right products. You should also remember that there are other portfolios such as a customer portfolio or customer agreement portfolios. And in some cases and organizations, you might need to manage all of these and then the customer portfolio might influence or dictate how you work with your customer agreement portfolio. That in its turn my dictate how you work with your product portfolio and that might dictate how you work with the project portfolio.
So you need to be aware of these different portfolios
– how they relate to each other and also which one of these portfolios is most central to your own organization
– to be able to succeed in project and product portfolio management.
Thank you very much.
Dr. Deasún Ó Conchúir (pronounce) is a Collaboration Consultant at Scatterwork, which supports Project Solutions for Virtual Teams.
Email: deasun@gd.scatterwork.com
Tel: +41 79 692 4735 Talk to me
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