TABLE OF CONTENTS Consequently, a new project management mentality materialized within Your Company, Inc. The Company has found that work is best managed as a portfolio of projects and programs, rather than as a set of tasks arranged around a hierarchy of departments which has become ineffective in overseeing cross-company strategic initiatives as the worker population grows more diverse and transient.
In the previous chapters, we learned that success in the Best Practices Era requires businesses to adopt a new set of approaches for developing both strategic and information technology plans. The methods presented in those chapters outlined the need to organize work into a series of projects and programs.
The fact that Best Practices Enterprises will be inhabited by a broadly diverse and potentially transient workforce adds a level of complexity to the proposition of managing strategic initiatives as a portfolio of projects and programs. Certainly, inherent communication challenges and the threat of personnel turnover can hurt a firm s ability to execute.
In this chapter, we will explore ways to hedge such risks and manage projects and programs in a well-ordered and purposeful way through portfolio-based project management. It is an important foundational element of the Best Practices Enterprise (see Figure 5.1).
