Enterprise Portfolio Project Management

Enterprise Portfolio Project Management (EPPM) is a methodology helping organizations manage their project portfolios in a more efficient and strategic manner — focused on aligning projects with organizational goals and objectives, and ensuring resources are allocated appropriately to achieve them. See Portfolio Management for this collection's general treatment of portfolio-level management concepts; EPPM names the same underlying discipline specifically at large-organization scale.

General steps

• Project identification and prioritization — identify all potential projects and evaluate them by strategic fit, potential ROI, and other relevant factors.
• Resource allocation — allocate resources to prioritized projects in a way that maximizes ROI and strategic alignment across the whole portfolio, not just within any one project.
• Risk management — identify and manage risk both at the individual- project level and at the level of the total portfolio (see Risks Actions Issues Decisions for a project-level tracking tool that feeds into this).
• Performance tracking — track and report on the performance of individual projects and the total portfolio, so stakeholders can monitor progress and make informed decisions.
• Continuous improvement — gather stakeholder feedback to refine the portfolio-management approach and improve outcomes over time.

When EPPM is the right scale

EPPM is particularly useful for large organizations managing complex project portfolios spanning many teams, budgets, and strategic priorities at once — a more strategic, structured approach than managing each project's resourcing and prioritization independently, and a natural companion to Enterprise Architecture's organization- wide structural view.

Common pitfalls

• Prioritizing projects without a clear strategic-fit criterion — without an explicit basis for comparison, prioritization decisions become arbitrary or purely political.
• Managing portfolio-level risk as just the sum of project-level risks — some risks only emerge at the portfolio level (competing resource demands, correlated dependencies across projects) and need their own explicit tracking.
• No feedback loop — treating the portfolio-management approach itself as fixed, rather than refining it based on what performance tracking and stakeholder feedback actually show.
• Applying EPPM's full weight to a small organization — the structure and overhead EPPM assumes is calibrated for large, complex portfolios; a small organization with a handful of projects may be better served by Portfolio Management's lighter-weight general treatment.

Learn more

• Portfolio Management for this collection's general treatment of portfolio management.
• Enterprise Architecture for the organization-wide structural view EPPM's prioritization decisions should align with.
• Project Management for managing an individual project once it's been prioritized into the portfolio.