Stage-Gate and Portfolio Management

More of our clients are paying more attention to Portfolio Management. Those who have well established Project Management Offices want to address the "doing the right things" question. The others have heard about the Project Portfolio Management approach and want to know how it applies in their business area.

One of the sources of confusion is the apparent overlap of project Go/Kill decisions between a Stage-Gate® process and a portfolio process. For many organisations the question is dodged as neither process is particularly rigorous. Too often Gate Meetings are project review meetings with no attempt to make a Go/Kill decision and Portfolio Reviews are simply a way of adjusting priorities and making short term resource reallocations. The problem is that without an explicit process, organisations find it very difficult to distinguish between the right and wrong projects. The result is that resources are spread too thinly across all projects, regardless of their strategic value. Some of the problems that arise are described here.