Page 151 - Global Project Management Handbook

CHAPTER 7

PROGRAM MANAGEMENT

AND PROJECT PORTFOLIO
MANAGEMENT ∗

Roland Gareis
Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration,
Vienna, Austria

Roland Gareis holds an M.B.A. and a Ph.D. He was a Fullbright scholar
at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1976, professor for
construction management at the Georgia Institute of Technology,
Atlanta, and visiting professor at the Georgia State University, ETH
in Zürich, Switzerland, and the University of Quebec in Montreal,
Canada. Since 1983, he has been the director of the postgraduate
program “International Project Management” at the Vienna
University of Business Administration. For 15 years he was president
of Project Management Austria, the Austrian project management
association; he was project manager of the 10th Internet World
Congress on Project Management; and he was manager of the
research program “Crisis Management.” Currently, he is professor of
project management at the Vienna University of Economics and
Business Administration, manager of the global research program
“Project Orientation [international],” and owner of Roland Gareis
Consulting. He has published several books and papers on manage-
ment of the project-oriented company.

ABSTRACT

A program is a temporary organization for the fulfillment of a unique business process
of large scope. The projects that are part of a program serve to realize common program
objectives. Program management is a business process of the project-oriented company,
which includes the subprocesses program start, program coordination, program control,
possibly resolution of a program discontinuity, and program close-down.
The clustering of projects and programs into project portfolios, networks of projects,
and chains of projects can create synergies for management of a project-oriented company.
The assigning of a project or a program, the coordination of a project portfolio, and the
networking of projects are project portfolio management processes. Important methods
for fulfilling these business processes are the investment and the project proposal, the

∗
Parts of this chapter are based on selections from the book Happy Projects! by Roland Gareis (Vienna:
Manz, 2005).

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