Enterprise Project Management

Enterprise Project Management (EPM), in broad terms, is the field of organizational development that supports organizations in managing integrally and adapting themselves to the changes of a transformation.

In recent years, with general adoption of (IT) governance practices, Enterprise Project Management has become more specific: whereas in the 1990s focus was generally on the management of the single project, in the subsequent decade the focus lay more on the fact that a project is likely to not be the only one in the enterprise. The project co-exists with many other projects in the enterprise, or may be part of one or more programs. It may utilize (human) resources that are shared among other projects.

In order to facilitate governance, it has become essential to be able to manage, monitor, and assess the status of all projects (and other assets, of course) in the enterprise, through a set of (preferably uniform) Enterprise Project Management processes, methods and application packages. Typically, organizations that adopt an Enterprise Project Management way of working might set up a Project Management Office (PMO), might select and adopt a Project Management Methodology like PRINCE2 or PMBOK (or create a proprietary method), and might select and implement a software system to support Enterprise Project Management.

An even more recent evolution in Enterprise Project Management is to not only plan and track the "existing" set of projects, but to create a portfolio (per budget size, per calendar year, per budget year, per business line, etcetera) of existing and future (demand) projects. This is called Project Portfolio Management. Just like with a portfolio of shares, Project Portfolio Management is the activity of selecting which projects to keep in portfolio (because of their anticipated value) and which ones to discard (because of their obsoleteness or because they will not yield the value that was initially calculated). Project Portfolio Management includes the creation of various scenarios to decide which is the most optimal portfolio (for a certain year, business, budget, etcetera). Once the contents of the portfolio are agreed upon, it is key to constantly scrutinize how the individual projects are evolving in terms of quality, cost and schedule.

From an IT management perspective, Enterprise Management essentially means enterprise-wide network administration, which is becoming increasingly complex. The corporate network environment is no longer tied to a single vendor, let alone a single platform. More and more, corporate intranets are multidomain, multiprotocol, multiplatform systems. They contain hardware and operating systems from a number of different, competing vendors. This situation creates administrative overhead that can easily make the cost of owning such networks prohibitive for all but the largest and most profitable organizations.

Implementing an Enterprise Project Management toolset needs to be considered in light of the organization's Project Management Maturity and the methodologies, processes and governance structures that are currently in place. There are many organizations that can support these kind of implementations especially for the Microsoft [http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/projectserver/FX100739841033.aspx EPM Solution] (e.g., [http://www.cps.co.uk/ CPS] [http://www.programframework.com/ PF] . Among tools that support Enterprise Project Management is "iPlan" [http://www.iplanenterprise.com/] and [http://www.wrike.com/enterprise-project-management-software.jsp collaborative enterprise project management software] such as Wrike or [http://www.sciforma.com PSNext] .

ee also

*Strategic enterprise management