Final Thoughts

Some portfolio management systems classify IT projects into four broad categories—Infrastructure, Utility, Enhancement, and Frontier. Although projects in each category may require a degree of innovation, clearly the frontier (out in the West where the arrows are flying) projects are those that create new products, new business services, and new business processes. These frontier projects are the ones that require the closest coordination with the customer team, have less well-defined requirements, are higher risk—and have potentially the biggest payback.

In many organizations, frontier projects comprise only 10–20% of the portfolio budget and few people think of measuring success differently on this small percentage of projects, even if they are the most critical ones to their future. For most of the other 80–90% of the projects, completing them at the lowest cost may be the goal. In the traditional “a project is a project is a project” environment, all projects are measured in the same way—with schedule and cost dominating.