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Management starts off with certain constraints, such as a total available budget and a need to answer the question, "What can we and should we accomplish with this amount of money?" If the portfolio management process is sufficiently mature, this analysis might include not just new ideas but also existing projects. The principles ultimately affect everyone in the organization, but the process is of great interest to senior executives. People can mean a lot of different things by "portfolio management," but the most meaning common is probably project selection and prioritization. Portfolio Management - a top-down approach
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It's easy to see their similarities, but there are fundamental differences in the three perspectives. Let's take these three concepts one at a time. Linking all three of these should be natural then. I've got an ID field, a description field, and a start and end date in all three. If we look at data from Portfolio Management, Project Management, and Task Management, it might look very similar. Those of us who have worked in IT for many years tend to see things from a technical perspective and sometimes it doesn't serve us well. It's not a lack of definitions of these three concepts that causes confusion, it's their similarity. "We need project management… Ummm, I meant portfolio management… Ummm, I really mean task management… Oh heck, we need all of them," is a battle cry I hear often. To see more articles, see "From the Trenches" white papers.
Timecontrol project cost summary download#
To download the Word version of this article, see Top-down or bottom-up: white paper (Project Server 2010). It discusses project management, portfolio management, and task management, and it compares the top-down and bottom-up management practices related to them. This article is part of our "From the Trenches" collection.
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