TIP SHEET
What is Top Down Project
Portfolio Management?
Top down portfolio management is an approach to implementing project portfolio management (PPM) software that helps to minimize
organizational change and promote solution adoption. Opposed to the bottom up approach to PPM which focuses on improving individual
project execution through detailed task management, top down portfolio management focuses on improving the portfolio alignment and
prioritization process, improving project execution, and delivering more value via better project planning.
For organizations that are newer to portfolio management, top down is often the recommended approach to PPM by leading industry
analysts, project management office (PMO) consultants and thought-leaders.
Three Reasons Why a Top Down approach to Portfolio Management Promotes a Successful
PPM Implementation
Ensures Better Project Alignment
Top down portfolio management emphasizes defining a systematic process for how projects get prioritized
and selected. Improving the project review and selection process helps guarantee that your organization
stays focused on the highest value initiatives and improves the value delivered by the project portfolio
as a whole. Putting a process like this in place helps minimize one off work requests and ensures that
organizational resources stay focused on the right areas, in turn improving project delivery.
Minimizes Organizational Change
The top down approach to PPM minimizes organizational change by focusing initially on just capturing
project key performance indicators (KPIs) that are critical metrics for reporting and planning. Often
organizations implementing a top down portfolio approach will not capture any task level information and
just track high level project KPIs (tracking milestone or phase level task information is also common).
Tracking project information at a high level ensures that project resources can spend their time actually
doing project work and spending all of their time keeping the PPM tool updated!
Better Planning leads to Better Execution
Better planning leads to better execution, and one of the biggest reasons that projects fail is that those
projects were poorly planned and scheduled without consideration of the broader portfolio or organizational
priorities. Resource capacity and demand constraints are often the biggest impediment to completing
project work on time and on budget and often PMOs struggle to get visibility into how resources
are allocated across project and non-project work. The traditional, bottom-up approach to resource
management, which emphasizes scheduling individual resources on tasks, can be very time consuming and
often provides an unnecessary level of detail, especially when projects are in a pre-execution stage.
TIP SHEET
A top down approach to resource management focuses on assigning resources at the project level for a
percentage of that resource’s time, and is a much more efficient way for project and portfolio managers
to perform resource planning, especially those that are new to PPM. Adopting a top down approach to
resource management is an excellent way for newer organizations to improve visibility into resource
capacity and demand, without requiring an excessive amount of effort for data input. Creating a high level
resource capacity and demand view can dramatically improve portfolio planning thus facilitating project
scheduling, simplifying headcount forecasting, and improving overall project execution.
Innotas provides the full
stack from top-level Portfolio
Visibility to bottom-level
Project and Application
Management with integration
into existing systems.
Learn more at:
www.innotas.com/solutions
Want To Learn More? Check Out These Great Assets:
On-Demand Webinar:
Case Study:
Infographic:
Transform Your PMO: Add Value with Top
First Financial Bankshares: Building a PMO
Finding the Way: The Tao Approach to IT
Down Portfolio Management
from the Ground Up
Portfolio Management
Watch Webinar
Innotas
111 Sutter Street, Suite 300
San Francisco, CA 94104
Tel: +1.415.263.9800
Toll-free: 1.866.692.7362
www.innotas.com
info@innotas.com
Read Case Study
View Infographic
Innotas, the leading provider of Cloud Portfolio Management solutions, delivers a seamless way to
manage projects, resources and applications across the enterprise. Innotas solves the challenge
of visibility and tracking the portfolio of IT and Product Development projects. The solution aligns
effort and budgets to meet company goals, while enabling prioritization and agility for planning
resource capacity. The result is a standardization of work execution across silos of project
management teams. Innotas’ solutions include Project Portfolio Management (PPM), Application
Portfolio Management (APM), Resource Management, Agile Portfolio Management, and the
Innotas Integration Platform. Innotas is ranked a “Leader” in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for
Cloud-Based Project and Portfolio Management Services and a “Visionary” in the Gartner Magic
Quadrant for Integrated IT Portfolio Analysis. Founded in 2006, Innotas is headquartered in San
Francisco and has hundreds of customers nationwide, across healthcare, government, education
and other industries. For more information, visit www.innotas.com or call 866-692-7362.
Copyright ©2014, Innotas, Inc. All rights reserved. Innotas is a registered trademark of Innotas, Inc.
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