What are they?
In this post I'd like to elaborate on
something I slightly touched upon in my previous post about project management;
and that was, that there are more than just projects that an organisation may
want to manage.
If you remember well, we defined what a
project was and , you should now be able to say that a project is
a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product, service
or result.
Now keeping that in mind, and focusing
on our post title, I'd like you to guess where we are heading.
Yes, you are right if you said that we
need to understand what the differences are between Projects, programs and
portfolios.
I firstly would like to define what a
'program' and a 'portfolio' is this is because I have found that when you
want to learn any form of new knowledge it's best to familiarise yourself
with lexicon from the actual study itself; and where else is best to refer
back to than the PMBOK Guide itself.
Through my readings I was able to
distinguish between these 3 aspects to project management and I would like to
highlight my findings to you here; so lets delve into the definitions of
each:
What is a Program?
According to the PMBOK a program is:
A
group of related projects, subsidiary programs managed together in a
coordinated manner to obtain benefits not available from managing them
individually.
What is a Portfolio?
According to the PMBOK a portfolio is:
A
portfolio is a collection of projects, programs, subsidiary portfolios,
and operations managed as a group to achieve strategic objectives.
Now the question we need to ask is:
Do they relate to each
other?
The figure below taken from PMBOK
page 12, illustrates a good example of how projects, programs and portfolios
relate to each other.
As you can see, a portfolio
is the top level of management and may have under it one or more programs
running. Programs on the other hand are second level and may have one or more
projects grouped under them. The Projects as you can see are
individual endeavours that the company may undertake
Do they differ?
As you can see that they have their
relationship but from their definitions, projects, programs, and portfolios
indeed differ. If you were just reading the definitions alone, you would get an
idea of what each ones' focus is and how they are managed.
However, you will need to further
understand that programs and portfolio management differ from project management in many
aspects. These differences include the actual objectives and activities of each
one as well as the focus, life cycles and benefits of each.
We will discuss these different
aspects in another post.
Please feel free to add any comments or suggestions as usual
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