Portfolio Management ─ A Strategic Approach

"Preface While portfolio management has been applied in the financial industry since the early 1950s, it is only within the past two to three decades that academic research plus guidelines for practitioners have been conducted and made available. Although some organizations used portfolio management techniques to select and prioritize programs and projects to pursue since the 1960s, these organizations rarely discussed its use recognizing it was a competitive advantage for them to do so. In the late 1970s and 1980s, software to assist in prioritizing programs and projects and to allocate resources became available, and there was increased interest in organizations to adopt the software and then recognition that tools alone were insufficient to manage a portfolio. Portfolio management requires a culture change, with processes and procedures in place that are consistently followed at all levels to support organizational strategies and promote organizational success. It requires strategic goals to ensure the work being done, whether a program, project, or an operational activity, supports these goals; having an inventory of existing work in progress available to determine if it supports organizational strategy and should be continued; and business cases, which are prepared and approved for proposed work to undertake. Such a culture change takes time and dedication to implement, but increasingly, organizational leaders are doing so recognizing its necessity especially in terms of the complexity of work underway and the often lack of qualified and available resources to do this work effectively. "--

Dr. Ginger Levin is a Senior Consultant and Educator in project management. Her specialty areas are portfolio management, program management, the Project Management Office, metrics, and maturity assessments. She is certified as a PMP, PgMP and as an OPM3 Certified Professional. She was the second person in the world to receive the PgMP. As an OPM3 Certified Professional, she has conducted over 25 maturity assessments using the OPM3 Product Suite tool.

In addition, Dr. Levin is an Adjunct Professor for the University of Wisconsin-Platteville where she teaches in its M.S. in Project Management Program, for SKEMA (formerly Esc Lille) University, France, and RMIT in Melbourne, Australia in their doctoral programs in project management.

In consulting, she has served as Project Manager in numerous efforts for Fortune 500 and public sector clients, including Genentech, Cargill, Abbott Vascular, UPS, Citibank, the Food and Drug Administration, General Electric, SAP, EADS, John Deere, Schreiber Foods, TRW, New York City Transit Authority, the U.S. Joint Forces Command, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Prior to her work in consulting, she held positions of increasing responsibility with the U.S. Government, including the Federal Aviation Administration, Office of Personnel Management, and the General Accounting Office.