20% of Project Portfolio Management Is Sufficient
Keep It Simple! This concept is often applied to design, but it also applies to the project portfolio management process. The more complicated, elaborate and academic the project portfolio management process is, the more likely it is doomed to fail. Less bureaucracy and effort, on the other hand, accelerates the process and increases its acceptance.
There is only a small core of activities that need to be done in PPM. You guessed it – only about 20% of the activities that you could include are actually necessary. Therefore, you need a strategy for the evaluation and prioritization of your projects (Strategize). You must collect project proposals in a structured way (Collect). Then you can decide which projects are to be accomplished and when (Decide). The results are communicated, and approved projects are controlled (Execute).
In each step, only a handful of different people are involved – broken down by roles.
Reducing the PPM process to only the absolutely necessary steps obeys the basic principle of Lean Production. Greater value creates less waste. This is why this approach is called "Lean PPM™".