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What is the difference between a portfolio and a project program?
One of the more common confusions in project management is the failure to distinguish between a portfolio and a project program properly. Therefore, it is worth spending a few sentences to show the practical differences between these terms.
Difference between a project portfolio and a project program
Let’s start with the concept of a project program. This is usually a set of projects designed to achieve a specific strategic goal of the company – for example, to expand operations in the Asian market. Such a program will potentially include projects, i.e., building a strategy to enter the Asian market, registering products, building sales structures, organizing the company’s location, providing technological infrastructure, etc. As you can see, these projects are different – legal, organizational, IT, and other projects. In this case, the entire program must fulfill a specific business objective, not individual projects (although selected projects may also have their business objectives).
For example, a CRM system project will only produce business results with product registration and launching sales structures. From a business point of view, these projects should be considered together. The individual projects are dependent on each other, and isolation disturbs the sense of their implementation. In addition, a program (just like a project) has a designated beginning and end of implementation. If it has been completed, it is closed. Unlike a program, a portfolio does not have an end date.
All the projects in the portfolio are similar, such as designing and launching new products. Portfolios are implemented continuously, which means that some projects in the portfolio end, others are discontinued, and new projects from the “ideas queue” take their place. Each project in the portfolio should have a defined business objective and the exact nature of the objective but correspondingly different parameters for its implementation. Projects, in principle, do not need to depend on each other, although such dependencies can exist between projects in various portfolios. You can manage them effectively with the project management software FlexiProject.
Projects in portfolios in the FlexiProject app
AUTHOR
Włodzimierz Makowski
CEO FlexiProject
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