IT Glossary

DEFINING THE IT INDUSTRY

Program And Portfolio Management (PPM)

Program and portfolio management (PPM) applications address business processes with functions across multiple domains, which include:

  • Planning and scheduling
  • Tracking time and progress
  • Program management
  • Resource profiling and allocation
  • Portfolio analysis and prioritization

The PPM market deals with a hierarchy of functions, roles and standards that range from the planning and execution of projects through their interaction with the enterprise’s strategic goals.

PPM applications address such foundational project management areas as those described in the Project Management Institute’s Project Management Body of Knowledge:

  • Time management, resource management and cost management
  • Scope management, procurement management and communications management
  • Risk management and quality management

PPM applications also support an integrated view across the portfolio of project work as well as nonproject work. This integrated view is a key input to portfolio prioritization.

PPM applications can deal further with collections of projects assembled into large-scale programs, with functions to support the integrated planning of multiple, dependent projects, with a view of cross-project dependencies, program-level budgets, costs, schedules and resource plans. Flexible reporting of program data to various organizational levels is also supported.

A PPM application is often used by a business-unit level project/program management office (PMO) and/or an enterprise-level PMO to define, capture, maintain, analyze and report on data about initiatives’ current state, costs and progress, as well as variances from plans and expectations. Organizational resource information can be grouped into taxonomies of roles, functions and skill sets, thus allowing for better tracking of resource assignment and utilization.

At a strategic level, portfolio management features support decision making that aligns initiative investments with business goals. Functions provide BI on project or service delivery and dashboard views of initiative alignment, status, resource capacity, service levels and more. Integration with other enterprise applications can leverage data from various segments of the business to help users manage their pipelines, report and forecast initiatives’ progress, analyze portfolio alternatives, and prioritize.