ABSTRACT
Lean Project Management, as presented in this book, focuses primarily on the level of individual projects. In the reality of companies, however, it is not just individual projects that carried out, but often a multitude of projects at the same time. From the interaction of these projects – e.g. in the “battle” for scarce resources – further aspects of (higher-level) control arise, which project portfolio management (PPM) deals with.
With the observation that the process and control mechanisms in agile project approaches differ significantly from the plan-driven, often hierarchically structured ones, there are also implications at the multi-project level. The increasing dynamism of the corporate environment also leads to changed requirements, e.g. for the duration of projects and thus the time horizon of the composition of the project portfolio.
This motivates the outlook on the idea of Lean-Agile Project Portfolio Management, in which the principles and practices of agility and lean thinking are “lifted” to the multi-project level in a comparable way. This chapter outlines approaches to this, the details of which, however, go beyond the scope of this book.
Nevertheless, the central elements of these approaches, such as flexibility, customer orientation, value stream identification, flow and pull principles, etc., are initially transferred to the project portfolio level and applied – comparable to the procedure at the individual project level. Based on criticisms of the classic, stability-oriented PPM and empirical success factors for PPM, suggestions are given for operationalising lean-agile design principles for PPM. In addition, a methodical extension of the well-known RACI matrix is applied as an example for PPM, in which customer benefit orientation is recorded.
