To help organizations gain better control over their complex webs of internal activities,
four basic approaches (performance, process, project portfolio, and risk management)
have gone from being textbook references and divisional implementations
to full-on industries of software products, journals, conferences, trade groups, consultants,
books, standards, and laws. Operational risk management has become
such a concern to societies around the world that governments have been implementing
laws (e.g. Basel II, Sarbanes Oxley, Loi de la Sécurité Financière, etc.) to
force companies to implement it. Strategic performance management has become
so popular that a swath of frameworks (e.g. Balanced Scorecard, Performance
Prism, ENAPS, etc.) and software products have flooded the market. Project portfolio
management is now so pervasive that I have yet to find a mature company that
hasn’t implemented it to some degree. And the continual drive from the enterprise-
level to improve processes using such frameworks as Six Sigma, ITIL, Kaizen,
and SCOR is standard fare in today’s product and service delivery industries. As
will be shown, sufficient overlap exists in each of these disciplines to warrant some
consolidation of effort. The result will be to reduce such collateral inefficiencies as
redundant workloads, wasted executive involvement, and cultural frustration.
While strategic performance management, enterprise level process management,
project portfolio management, and enterprise level operational risk management
each strive to fine-tune the capabilities of an organization, they each, independently,
can introduce new layers of inefficiency.