Social Project Management is about engaging the team in collaboration around its project and project schedule. But what about disparate teams working on multiple projects on a program, or even multiple projects that are related only at a strategic-initiative level?
Program and Portfolio Management tools have attempted to address this issue but are, in general driven by top down, hierarchical planning. So, what would a “social” approach to Program and Portfolio management look like?
Social is about getting people the tools they need to create and manage their own “reality”. Portfolios at the organization level are different than portfolios at the person level. Whereas an organization’s portfolio has a certain structure, at each level of the organization, a person’s “portfolio” has a much different structure. An individual program manager, a manager of projects, or a project team member may each have a portfolio of projects to “manage”.
In many cases, these “alternative” portfolios are not organized in the same manner as the hierarchical structure of the organization’s portfolio. So, a social approach to program or portfolio management should allow both the organization’s view and multiple, alternative views of project structures to be represented and executed – simultaneously.
Over the next week, we will present several posts about this idea. But to get you thinking, here is a video about ProjExec 6, which attempts to bring top-down and bottom-up social program and portfolio management together in a single, social product.
