Implementing Enterprise Portfolio Services

Abstract

There’s more than a little confusion around the terms for the various offices supporting portfolios, programs and projects. Historically, the Project Office has been supporting projects for over 70 years (at least) with project offices being part of very large defence projects in UK, Europe and the US following World War 2. Their role was to support planning, resource management, project logistics, undertake quality management and reporting and to apply appropriate controls in supporting key, senior managers on the project. As organisation projects grew large and major organisation change and IT initiatives were run as programs, we saw the rise of the Program Management Office (PMO). In the late 1980s and early 1990s the PMO took on a whole-of-organisation role with oversight of all programs and projects running, and that model has lasted until this day with the whole-of-organisation PMO termed the Corporate or Enterprise PMO (‘EPMO’). We are now seeing the emergence of a group which has oversight of portfolios, and with that changing role comes a new name, the Enterprise Portfolio Services group (with the ‘office’ label being dropped).