What is project portfolio management (PPM)?

Portfolio, programme and project

• Project: temporary work to create a specific result, with its own scope, schedule and budget.
• Programme: a group of related projects managed together because their benefits depend on each other.
• Portfolio: all the projects and programmes an organisation (or a business unit) funds, grouped so leadership can compare and balance them. Projects in a portfolio need not be related.

Portfolio management sits above both. It does not plan tasks. It decides which work starts, which continues, which pauses and which stops, and checks that the mix supports strategy.

Portfolio management vs project management

The two depend on each other. Portfolio decisions are only as good as the project data underneath them. If schedules have no baseline and costs are not tracked, the portfolio view shows green until the moment it turns red. Good portfolio management therefore starts with a minimum standard for every project: a baseline, a monthly update and a short risk list.

To get started without a big programme, list every active project on one page, agree three to five scoring criteria with leadership, score current and proposed projects once, and hold a first monthly review. You will learn more from that first review than from any amount of design.

The project portfolio management cycle

1. Collect demand. Gather project ideas and requests in one place with a short, consistent proposal: problem, expected benefit, rough cost, rough duration, people needed.
2. Evaluate and score. Rate each proposal against agreed criteria such as strategic fit, value, risk and urgency.
3. Select and balance. Fund the best set within the budget and the people available, and check the balance: short and long term, run and change, low and high risk.
4. Authorise. Start approved projects with a charter and an owner; put the rest on hold or reject them with a reason.
5. Monitor. Review the portfolio on a regular cycle, often monthly, using the same few measures for every project: schedule, cost, risk and forecast benefits.
6. Rebalance. When priorities or performance change, move money and people, pause or stop projects, and admit new ones.

Worked example: funding within a budget cap

A business unit has $1,000,000 to fund new projects this year. Four proposals have been scored out of 10 using agreed criteria.

Funding in rank order gives A and C ($700,000). B would take the total to $1,050,000, over the cap, so it is deferred. D fits in the remaining $300,000, leaving $50,000 unallocated. This is where judgement comes in: leadership might prefer to cut B's scope to fit, or hold D back and keep $300,000 for B next quarter. The scoring makes the trade-off visible; it does not make the decision. The same check applies to people: if A and C both need the same two engineers in the same months, the portfolio is over capacity even though the money fits.

What to track at portfolio level

• Status by project: a consistent red, amber, green rating with a one-line reason.
• Schedule: milestones due and missed, forecast finish versus baseline; SPI where earned value is used.
• Cost: budget, actual, forecast; CPI and EAC where earned value is used.
• Risk: top risks across the portfolio and total exposure.
• Capacity: workload by person or team across all projects.
• Benefits: whether the reason for funding still holds.

Keep the set small and identical across projects, so leadership compares like with like.

A one-page portfolio summary usually works best: a table with one row per project and columns for status, forecast finish, forecast cost, top risk and the decision needed, if any. Anything that needs no decision can be read in advance, so the review meeting spends its time on the few projects that do.

Common mistakes

• Saying yes to everything. Starting more projects than people can staff makes all of them slower. Fewer active projects usually finish sooner.
• Never stopping projects. A portfolio without cancellations is a list, not a portfolio. Stopping a project whose case has gone is a success of the process.
• Different reports per project. Without common measures, comparisons are guesses.
• Scoring without capacity. Money is only one constraint; people and key skills are often tighter.
• Annual-only decisions. Review and rebalance through the year.
• Hiding small projects. Work below an approval threshold still uses the same people. Count it in the capacity view, even if it skips the scoring.

How to do this in Critova

In Critova, portfolios group projects, and eleven dashboards (executive, portfolio, cost, schedule, risk and more) show them with the same measures. A timeline of all projects, a calendar and a resources workload view help you see clashes, and every register exports to Excel or CSV for further analysis. Note that resource leveling is planned, not live, so capacity balancing is a judgement made from the workload view. See the portfolio features, and the earned value management guide for the CPI and SPI measures that make projects comparable.