---
name: enterprise-portfolio-project-management
description: Use when asked to manage an organization's whole project portfolio strategically — identification/prioritization, resource allocation, portfolio-level risk management, performance tracking — as EPPM, a large-organization-scale application of portfolio-management's concepts.
---

# Enterprise Portfolio Project Management (EPPM)

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.