Towards successful establishment of a project portfolio management system: business process management approach

Linking structures, processes and resources with corporate strategies is a key requirement of today’s organizations, bringing about integration toward achieving long-term objectives. Organizations can no longer rely on traditional practices since advanced systems and management approaches are being applied by their competitors. The project portfolio management (PPM) is a tool that plays a key role in collecting information from operational levels and consolidating them at the portfolio level for strategic decision-making. Establishment of this approach in organizations requires robust information systems, analytical software, decision-making structure, and governance framework to be in place. Primarily, a systematic perspective needs to be adopted to define, design and model all the necessary components of a PPM system. Business process management (BPM), as a systematic approach, can be effectively applied for this purpose. The aim of this study is to introduce one of the specific applications of the BPM approach in facilitating the systematic implementation of PPM in organizations. This theoretical study is exploratory in essence and tries to theorize the relationship between BPM and PPM to develop a conceptual framework highlighting the role of BPM in embedding all the necessary features of a PPM system. We found key functions of BPM that contribute to three aspects of PPM system namely; structure, infrastructure, and process. The findings introduce one of the important application of BPM in the management of project portfolios and also provide professionals with practical insight into how the BPM should be applied to facilitate the implementation of this system.