Project, Program, and Portfolio Management

An organization is a complex, living system traversing a competitive environment. To survive day-to-day, it must breathe, pump blood, and convert fuel into energy—these are the repetitive, sustaining rhythms of the business. But to evolve, to adapt to a shifting environment or outpace competitors, the organism must consciously change its form. It must build a new capability, enter a new market, or overhaul a failing system. In the precise lexicon of organizational management, the heartbeat is operations, and the evolutionary leaps are projects. Understanding how an enterprise separates the repetitive from the unique, and how it aligns both to a grand strategy, is the fundamental starting point for any practitioner of project management.