Practices, Roles, and Responsibilities of Middle Managers in Program and Portfolio Management

Abstract

Practices for program and portfolio management, together with the associated roles and responsibilities of middle managers, were investigated. The results of the multi-method study show that high-performing organizations apply dedicated portfolio management processes and tools, plus use the associated roles of middle managers, to address the requirements stemming from the complexity of the organization's environment and the types of projects executed. This is not the case in low-performing organizations. The study takes a transaction costs economics perspective and develops a contingency model for program/portfolio management roles of middle managers. Managerial and theoretical implications are also discussed. This paper summarizes the highlights of research findings that can be found in the full report published by the Project Management Institute (PMI) (Blomquist & Müller, 2006).

The role of project portfolio management in fostering both deliberate and emergent strategy

“…the re-prioritization or termination of projects, re-allocation of resources, exploitation of synergies) (Blichfeldt and Eskerod, 2008;Blomquist and Müller, 2006;Unger et al, 2012). Through these processes, portfolio management implements the business strategy through coordinating decision-making about project investments, balancing risk and resources and maximizing the value of the project portfolio (Cooper et al, 2001;Jonas et al, 2013;Voss and Kock, 2013).…”

Shedding New Light on Project Portfolio Risk Management

“…The third construct (P3) described the phenomenon of problems with communication within the portfolio. It was assumed that this resulted from the disturbances of information flow and communication within the elements of the portfolio and from the lack of transfer of information and knowledge between the elements of the portfolio [33,60,68], as well as from ignoring risks taken by portfolio element managers [13,17,19,20]. The fourth construct (P4) described the phenomenon of the occurrence of Sustainability 2017, 9, 1798 7 of 19 interpersonal conflicts.…”

“…The fourth construct (P4) described the phenomenon of the occurrence of Sustainability 2017, 9, 1798 7 of 19 interpersonal conflicts. It was assumed that this latent variable resulted from the conflicts between the project and program managers within the portfolio and conflicts between portfolio and portfolio element managers [17,18,20,65]. The fifth construct (P5) assumed that improper portfolio structure resulted from an overly complicated hierarchical structure of portfolio management, a portfolio diversity range that was too wide from the point of view of the portfolio executors' applied capacity, and the mismatch between the portfolio structure and the parent organisation's strategy [30,66,67,71].…”

“…The identification of the risk characteristics of the project portfolio facilitated a response to the first research question (RQ1). During the literature review, a series of project portfolio phenomena were also selected [7,9,[16][17][18]20,23,30,33,40,41,56,[58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68]. These phenomena result from the occurrence of (one or more) risk(s) that may occur during the execution of the project portfolio.…”

The Programme Benefits of Improving Project Team Communication Through a Contact Centre

“…Likewise, programme management is aimed at exchanging timely and useful information between and among the stakeholders and project team. Bartlett [3], Blomquist & Müller [28], CCTA in Shehu & Akintoye [2], and Williams & Parr [6] concur that a lack of communication between team members is a major challenge to programme management. It is clear from the literature that a lack of communication between team members can lead to the late delivery of a project, which will in turn affect the timely delivery of a programme (OGC in [2]).…”