Portfolio Management Resources

Portfolio Management Resources

What is a Portfolio?

A portfolio is a collection of projects, programmes, sub-portfolios, and other work packages, grouped for better financial and other resources control to facilitate effective management in achieving strategic objectives. The projects or programmes in the portfolio, also known as the portfolio components, may not necessarily depend on or relate to each other (PM² Portfolio Management Guide 1.5, 2022).

What is Portfolio Management?

PM² Portfolio Management (PM²-PfM) is about connecting the strategic layer to the implementation layer, through selecting the right mix of projects and programmes, prioritising them, ensuring adequate organisational capacity to execute them, and regularly collecting information to support portfolio decision-making and optimisation.

The Portfolio Management layer is where priorities are identified, project investments are authorised and resources are committed. Project Portfolio Management includes both the composition and management of the realisation of the portfolio goals, including portfolio communication and stakeholder management. Project Portfolio Management becomes an important enabler for both good project management and strategy implementation ((opens in a new window)European Commission Methodologies Office).

The implementation of portfolio management principles empowers organisations to:

• Link projects to strategic objectives.
• Better support the governance of investments.
• Build discipline into the project evaluation and selection process.
• Report portfolio performance and benefits to senior management for decision-making based on
  accurate and comparable data.

Portfolio Management Resources

• PM² Portfolio Management Guide - This publication provides guidelines for applying the PM² Project Portfolio Management methodology.