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The Project Steps web blog has a good overview of the roles and responsibilities within a typical project team. For your convenience, we have listed these roles below.

However one role is missing - the role of the Project Portfolio Manager.

Project Portfolio Manager is responsible for spearheading PPM within the business and has one of the most important roles within the Project Portfolio Management Team (PPMT) alongside the executive sponsor. This person is focused on leading the management team behind PPM and has overall responsibility for managing delivery of the portfolio process and communicating its performance to both the businesses strategic and operational functions. Project Portfolio Manager is responsible for guiding and updating the value judgments and policy decisions needed to guide the team. In additon the Project Portfolio Manager should have the ability to influence decisions to suspend, at any time, further commitment of investment monies due to failure to make anticipated progress, changing economic climates or shifts in business objectives.

Roles and Responsibilities

1. Executive Steering Committee: Sets the strategic vision and objectives for a given program or project. The team leads efforts to build consensus through the organization to support the project or program’s objectives.

2. Governance Board: Formal team of executives from across the organization that ensure projects will meet/are meeting enterprise goals.

3. Project Sponsor: Provides clarity of the project vision, and directs the activities of the project team. Allocates funding and resources to the project. Provides executive authority necessary to overcome organizational obstacles and barriers. The guardian of the business case, and ultimately responsible for project success.

4. Performing Organization: The organization whose personnel are most directly involved in doing the work of the project. This organization usually provides sponsorship for the project.

5. Project Management Office: An organizational body or entity assigned various responsibilities related to the centralized and coordinated management of those programs/projects under its domain.

6. Project Stakeholders: Persons or organizations (customers, sponsors, performers, public) that are actively involved in the project or whose interests may be positively or negatively impacted by executing or implementation of the project.

7. Program Manager: Person responsible for the centralized, coordinated management of a program (group of related projects) to achieve the program’s strategic objectives and benefits.

8. Project Manager: The person assigned by the performing organization to achieve the project objectives. The project manager is responsible for coordinating and integrating activities across multiple functional lines, and managing stakeholder communications. The project manager accomplishes the above by managing project scope, time, cost, and quality. Finally, the project manager applies project management, general management and technical skills, as well as team management, negotiation, financial and business acumen, combined with an understanding of organizational politics to meet project objectives and to meet or exceed stakeholder expectations.

9. Project Team: All the project team members, including the project management team, the project manager, and for some projects, the project sponsor.

10. Functional Manager: On projects, the person responsible for ensuring agreed-upon project tasks are completed using pre-defined resources under the manager’s control within scope, time, budget and quality constraints.

11. Project Team Leader: Responsible for ensuring that agreed-upon project tasks and assignments are completed on time, on budget, and within quality standards for personnel under their realm of control or influence. The team leader should be knowledgeable of the principles and practices of project management and understand the business unit’s strategic and operational issues.

12. Technical Manager/Liaison: Responsible for the technical implementation of the project as measured against the project requirements, quality targets, and budgetary constraints, and timelines. Ensures technical deliverables are consistent with the overall technical strategy of the enterprise.

13. Business Analyst: Primary interface between projects and business partners. Responsible for understanding current and future processes, including processes for the entire enterprise. Documents business requirements, generate business cases, assists in defining project benefits/ costs, and participates in project reviews
To view the Project Steps posting click here

In the summer of 2006, Dr. Shan Rajegopal of Berkshire Consultancy Ltd. brought together a round table of senior managers from the FTSE 100 companies.

The roundtable followed three key themes:

1) Issues and challenges for companies seeking to implement PPM;

2) Ways of fine tuning PPM practices to make a lasting business impact;

3) PPM trends in the next 5 years.

To read the findings of the round table on the IT Toolbox click here

Dr. Shan Rajegopal is a practitioner, academic and consultant with over 20 years industrial experience in various sectors. He currently works for Berkshire Consultancy Ltd. conducting project portfolio assessments and implementation.

Three reasons for project managers to embrace PPM—Realism, Rationality, and VisibilityProject portfolio management (PPM) is HOT. On a recent morning, my inbox yielded five Gartner, Inc. announcements about major software players adding to their PPM capabilities. Books, articles, white papers, Web sites, and conferences on the topic proliferate. “So what?” you may ask. I understand; for the project managers and teams working “in the trenches” of projects day to day, the latest trend in project management theory or software often looks like “more work for me” or “more empty rhetoric from consultants and management.”

But here are three reasons why the rank-and-file of project management should not only welcome PPM initiatives, but actively work for them at the grassroots level.

1. PPM brings realism to an organization’s planning processes.

2. PPM brings rationality in the allocation of resources, both human and financial.

3. PPM brings visibility to project work and project people.

To read full posting from Developer.com click here

The implementation of Project Portfolio Management (PPM) brings more openness to the authorisation process and less ambiguity into the what, where, when and how of the project delivery process. If a PPM process is put in place typical political manipulation around pet projects becomes much more difficult. PPM also makes it difficult to hide mistakes and brings a level of detail that may create a fear factor amongst both senior and operational managers. However PPM is a change project and resistance to change will essentially become the norm.

What are the typical barriers to adoption?

1. - Internal politics and culture are by far the biggest barriers to adoption. PPM by its very nature will demand change within the business, and with change comes resistance – from both above and below.

2 - You will need to become an ‘evangelist’ for Project Portfolio Management, with an ‘executive sponsored guardian angel’. Resistance is inevitable; critics will most likely outnumber advocates, and you will need to continually preach the benefits and prove the value of PPM.

3 - Often management is aware of dissenters or non-conformists in the organisation, but mistakenly relies upon the introduction of the new system to improve these individuals’ productivity and performance, rather than tackling them head-on through direct communication before introducing the new system.

4 - Organisational capability and maturity in programme and project management governance and standards will impact PPM adoption. The more mature the organisation project management capability, the more ready will the business be to adopt PPM.

5 - Top management commitment to and understanding of the purpose and value of Project Portfolio Management is critical. Typically senior management either delegates it to lower ranks, or believes that it is the responsibility of the vendor to design and implement a complete process in isolation, and fails to appreciate that the organisation and its key personnel are a vital part of the adoption process.

6 - Inability of management to agree criteria for identifying projects within the organisation is an important barrier. For example, there will be resistance from programme and project teams to the adoption of a common approach to managing projects, reporting progress and constructing business cases.

7 - Unwillingness of business managers to see their ‘pet projects’ shifted in priority is also a barrier.

8 - Disagreement on the pace of adoption is a challenge. Whether rollout is incremental or rapid, it is inevitable that the business will demand that disruption and productivity loss be minimised.

9 - The willingness of the organisation to support the financial investment potentially needed for implementing a PPM software tool-set will be a major issue, and tool selection is often fraught with technical difficulties. ‘Rip-and-replace’ solutions come at a high price – cultural, technical and financial. The adoption of PPM will need to take into account the impact on existing processes and systems. Will they be replaced? If so, why, and at what cost to the business? Integration, flexibility and configurability will determine the successful choice of any PPM solution.

10 - It is simply human nature, that people will blame the tools and processes to hide their own lack of knowledge and understanding. All tools and processes are created with their own set of idiosyncrasies; it will therefore be important to provide continual support and training. However, you must be prepared to accept that no matter how much you train, hand-hold, and evangelise, some people will simply not understand PPM.

11 - In order for the executive levels to get bird’s-eye view of information on multiple projects, it is essential that the business be able to collect that information and to determine who is working on what. One of the most crucial but often overlooked barriers to PPM is the adoption of timesheet technology as a method of collecting baseline information. It is essential to manage the ‘Big Brother Syndrome’ – the suspicion that the business is only using timesheet technology to keep tabs on the staff. Instead, it is necessary to sell the benefits of increased employee visibility, utilisation and productivity.

More and more, we are seeing that PPM solutions live or die based upon the solution’s ability to gain user adoption. Like most front office systems, or any database application for that matter, if the users don’t use it, there’s no data and thus no information, and with no information there’s no value.

This is obvious, you might say. Don’t we already know this? If so, then why do organizations struggle with it?

For full article and posted comments (IT Tool Box) - click here