Key takeaways:
- What is enterprise project portfolio management (EPPM)? EPPM centralizes the management of multiple projects, aligning them with business strategy and ensuring feasibility.
- What are the three fundamentals of EPPM? An enterprise strategy, dedicated governance (EPMO), and powerful EPPM software are crucial for effective project portfolio management.
- What are the five steps to EPPM? Managers should develop their strategy by extracting goals, capturing project ideas, assessing and prioritizing projects, validating the portfolio, and monitoring progress continuously.
- Why is Wrike a valuable tool for EPPM? Wrike offers unmatched visibility, robust reporting, and automation features, making it ideal for managing complex project portfolios.
When you’re grappling with the vast scale and variety of projects at an enterprise level, standard project management methodologies just won’t cut it. Large companies are much better served by scalable, secure, and strategic enterprise project portfolio management (EPPM).
But what exactly does EPPM involve? And where can companies start to develop and implement these overarching strategies?
In this guide, we break down:
- The key differences between EPPM and small-scale project portfolio management (PPM)
- The three fundamentals of EPPM, which act as the foundation of your decisions on everything from governance to the software tools you choose.
- Five steps to take as you approach EPPM for the first time
- Real-world examples of the difference a solid EPPM strategy can make
- Our EPPM tool, Wrike, and the key ways our software can centralize and support enterprise-level work.
What is enterprise project portfolio management?
Enterprise project portfolio management (EPPM) is a centralized approach to selecting, prioritizing, and overseeing every project an organization runs.
Rather than managing projects in isolation (for example, within separate teams or departments), EPPM brings them together into a single, coordinated system. This gives leadership the enterprise-wide visibility to ensure that all their active initiatives are aligned with their strategic goals, adequately resourced, and delivering measurable business value.
How does EPPM differ from PPM?
Standard project portfolio management (PPM) typically operates within a single department or function — for example, imagine one manager responsible for a defined set of projects that share resources and a quarterly budget. EPPM operates at a higher level, spanning the whole organization and connecting departments like IT, marketing, operations, and R&D in one unified view.
Crucially, this overview is then used by the professionals in the organization’s enterprise portfolio management office (PMO) to inform the decisions they make about the company’s long-term organizational goals, their strategy for reaching those goals, and the projects they choose to take on.
The key differences between EPPM and PPM come down to:
- Scope: PPM manages one portfolio within one area of the business. EPPM manages all portfolios across the entire enterprise simultaneously.
- Governance: PPM is typically overseen by a departmental project management office. EPPM requires a dedicated EPMO (enterprise project management office) with organization-wide authority.
- Decision-making: PPM prioritizes projects within a defined budget and team. EPPM makes strategic trade-offs across departments, balancing competing demands for shared resources at the executive level.
- Strategic alignment: PPM ensures that a portfolio delivers on departmental goals. EPPM ensures that the entire body of work reflects the organization’s overarching strategy.
In short, PPM keeps individual portfolios on track, while EPPM ensures that the right portfolios exist in the first place.
Signs your company needs an EPPM strategy
EPPM becomes essential when the scale and complexity of the work your teams are managing start to create conflicts that individual managers can’t resolve — for example, because too many projects have started to overlap, and multiple teams require the same resources and assets.
If your leadership team is struggling to coordinate, or if they’re asking basic questions like, “What are we working on?” or “Do we have the capacity to deliver this project?”, it’s likely time to implement new strategies that do more to centralize your EPPM.
The more common indicators include:
- Teams working in silos with limited visibility into each other’s workloads
- High-priority initiatives stalling because finances or people are committed to lower-value work
- Budget decisions being made project-by-project rather than across the portfolio as a whole
- No standardized process for evaluating or prioritizing incoming project requests
- No real-time view of portfolio performance, or an over-reliance on manual reporting to get one
- A portfolio where the company’s strategic goals and business objectives are poorly reflected in the mix of actual active projects.
If these sound familiar, it’s time to start building a more cohesive strategy, training your project managers, and considering enterprise-level PPM tools.
The 3 fundamentals of enterprise project portfolio management
Enterprise project portfolio management is designed to give you a strategic perspective on the projects you’re managing. It joins the dots between individual projects and aligns them with your goals and objectives as an enterprise.
This means EPPM is not just about getting projects completed on time. It’s also about ensuring that the projects you’re working on are the right ones for your enterprise in general, and that they’re feasible alongside all your other projects.
This means that, before you even think about approaching project portfolio management, three things need to be in place:
- An enterprise strategy: This includes your goals, objectives, and your roadmap to achieve your strategy. Smaller businesses may not need to select projects based on strategic planning considerations, but as an enterprise, having a strategy that guides the selection, priority, and implementation of individual projects is critical to project success.
- Dedicated governance: Individual project managers will continue to manage the individual projects. However, to coordinate the entire portfolio, an additional role might be needed within your organization. Typically, it’s the responsibility of the enterprise project management office (EPMO), which acts as an intermediary between strategy and implementation. Their role is to oversee your enterprise’s project portfolios and ensure that they’re running efficiently.
- Powerful EPPM software: You won’t get very far with portfolio management if you’re relying on basic, limited project management software. EPPM tools (like our platform, Wrike) act as the central command center for portfolios of projects by providing progress tracking, reporting, resource planning, collaboration features, and more. They also let you automate key project management processes with AI-powered dashboards, workflows, and reports — which is key when you’re managing thousands of tasks and datapoints in a large portfolio.
These are the basic building blocks of project portfolio management. But you now need to translate your strategy into a portfolio of projects.
5 steps to approach enterprise project portfolio management
Project portfolio management involves choosing the right projects for your strategic objectives and continually monitoring their performance, budget, and efficiency.
Here’s how to get started:
1. Extract your goals from the wider enterprise strategy
What’s your company’s quarterly, annual, or longer-term focus? What are the associated objectives, and how can you track success in the context of the wider goals? This is where enterprise PPM is different from basic project management, which is rarely interested in questions of business strategy. Project portfolio management pushes you toward bigger goals. These goals should be centrally documented, and when you use a tool like Wrike, you can use forecasting and analytics tools to make informed decisions as you plan your EPPM strategy.
2. Capture and manage project requests and ideas
Now the projects come in. Enterprise organizations field ideas and requests from everywhere — internal teams, clients, and other stakeholders. Capturing these ideas demands a systematic approach. An enterprise project management office may use a spreadsheet or dedicated inbox to manage these ideas, while a specific department may have its own intake forms, too.
In Wrike, you can manage incoming work with dynamic request forms that standardize incoming requests, capture the essential details, and route the work automatically to a team with the skills and capacity to complete it, no matter where in the company it’s coming from.
3. Build a system to assess and prioritize projects
This step helps you put your strategy into practice, by establishing a standardized process that evaluates each project in a rigorous, objective way. When considering each project, ask yourself:
- Does this project really align with our goals?
- How much will it cost?
- How long will it take?
- Are the resources available?
- What’s the expected ROI?
- What are the potential risks?
This way, you’ll understand the feasibility of any given project, including the amount of resources it will require as well as the potential returns.
During this stage, Wrike’s capacity planning and resource management tools come into their own, as they help you pinpoint the answers to these questions quickly, reliably, and based on real-time insights.
4. Validate your project portfolio
In the final stage of planning your portfolio, you need to determine whether your projects are feasible together.
- Do you and your team have the capacity to run the planned projects at the same time?
- Are the same resources or assets required by two separate projects?
- Will a delay in one project affect your ability to deliver another?
- Can you afford to handle all these projects?
- Will these chosen projects be sufficient to meet your strategic goals?
Once you’ve confirmed your portfolio’s feasibility, you can sign up project managers for each project. When you work in Wrike, delegating and assigning tasks is often as simple as a drag-and-drop process.
5. Manage and monitor your portfolio of projects
The monitoring and optimization of projects is an ongoing part of each project’s lifecycle. It generally involves:
- Monitoring project performance to ensure that it’s running on time
- Tracking budget, resources, and capacity
- Measuring progress toward your goals through key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics
- Managing any conflicts between projects
- Aligning with stakeholders both within and outside of your enterprise
- Ensuring every project team has everything they need
- Identifying opportunities for efficiencies, savings, or automations
There’s also a certain amount of change management involved, as you work to ensure new processes aren’t disrupting your flow, and all your team members have received the correct training to work with the new system.
When you’re responsible for project execution in your enterprise, it’s a lot to handle all by yourself. That’s why successful project portfolio managers in large organizations tend to rely on specialist project portfolio management software.
3 Real-world examples of EPPM software in action
With the theory out of the way, let’s look at some practical applications of EPPM. Before diving in, note that all three companies below used Wrike for various project management needs.
How Walmart Canada uses Wrike for project portfolio management
Walmart is the largest retailer in the world, with over 11,500 retail units in 27 countries. The enterprise uses Wrike in its Canadian operations to manage project portfolios in the Continuous Improvement team.
One of Walmart Canada’s priorities when using Wrike was to become more strategic about the projects it initiated, as Nicole Fakhri, Manager of Continuous Improvement, explains: “We’re able to select the right projects, align them to our strategy, and ensure all the right resources are in place to execute them.
“Wrike allows management to answer some key questions. What are we already working on? Does it align with our corporate pillars? Does it align with what we’re trying to achieve within our strategy this year? Does this align with our corporate structure? Do we have the bandwidth and resources to attempt this? Does it actually get us where we need to go in five years?”
These are exactly the sorts of questions managers should be asking during enterprise project portfolio management. By simplifying the processes behind the tasks, proving each project’s impact, and improving visibility of every area of the business, Wrike provides the answers that move the team toward their strategic goals.
Having that visibility within Wrike of the entire pipeline in one place, with real-time data that’s consistently there, is one of the biggest benefits and something we’ve never had before.
Carolyn Lum, Senior Manager of Continuous Improvement
How Sony Pictures Television uses Wrike to manage global creative operations
Sony Pictures Television is one of the world’s leading content providers, producing and distributing programming across every genre and platform. With creative teams spread across the US, Latin America, and Europe — all working differently and collaborating across hundreds of assets — their challenge wasn’t just managing projects, but managing them consistently at a global scale.
After deploying Wrike across its Creative Centers, Sony Pictures Television gained a unified view of all creative work in progress. This enables teams to track overlapping projects, calendars, and timelines, consolidate client feedback, and report on the value their work delivered to the wider business. These tools helped remove a lot of friction from their processes, and the company has since reduced project delivery times by 40% and cut internal update emails by 90%.
“It’s the skeleton to the production madness that keeps everyone organized and accountable,” says Nicki Batelli, the VP of Operations and Production. “It takes a lot of the guesswork out of what needs to be done, who is talking to whom, and how that communication flow is expected to work — all the protocols set by our Wrike workflow allow our creatives to actually spend their time being creative.”
The different views are super helpful. We use the Gantt chart to understand all of our overlapping projects and timelines. It’s really valuable to understand the full scope of work happening against a calendar view.
Nicki Batelli, Vice President of Operations & Production
How Aerotek cut weeks from its planning cycle with Wrike
Aerotek is the largest staffing and recruiting company in the US, with 14,000 employees serving more than 18,000 clients every year. When its marketing department restructured to create a new campaigns team — one that required coordinating across six separate marketing functions, including communications, PR, content, creative, and design — it quickly became clear that its existing approach couldn’t support that level of cross-team, enterprise-level complexity.
“Some projects that only lasted four or five weeks had hundreds of emails, which is excessive,” says Matt Andrews, Marketing Campaign Manager at Aerotek. The team needed a centralized hub that could manage timelines, handle approvals, and bring all communication into one place.
After deploying Wrike, Aerotek standardized its project intake with dynamic request forms that automatically create and assign new projects the moment a request comes in. Communication shifted from email to task-level collaboration, cutting email volume by 85–90%. What’s more, the company shaved about a week and a half off its typical planning cycle, simply by making communication more effective.
For each of these companies, robust EPPM software was the foundation that made it possible to implement an overarching management strategy — and measure the results.
In the next section of this post, we’ll take a closer look at how Wrike’s enterprise features support every stage of that process.
Why Wrike is an essential tool for enterprise project portfolio management
The best software for portfolio management provides a single source of truth to identify, track, and report on efficiencies within your project portfolios.
Typically, standard project management tools — and even standard PPM software — won’t be up to the task of managing an enterprise portfolio. That’s because these tools struggle to scale. They can get seriously cluttered when you have multiple projects on the go, plus they don’t tend to provide the visibility and adaptability it takes to manage cross-functional projects.
Our work management platform, Wrike, is different. We built it with enterprises in mind, and it’s now used by the likes of Siemens Smart Infrastructure, Electrolux, and The Estée Lauder Companies.
Here are three reasons why Wrike is a valuable companion when you’re managing a portfolio of projects:
1. Wrike provides unmatched visibility over all your projects
One of the most important things you need when managing project portfolios is clear visibility over those projects.
While it sounds like it should be a pretty basic feature, many tools will be disappointing on this front. Besides getting cluttered at scale, most tools aren’t built to track dependencies between projects, or to give you an up-to-date view of your KPIs as your projects progress. Others are heavily reliant on templates, so they’re not customizable enough to fit your enterprise and give your EPMO the overview they need.
Instead, we built Wrike to make it easy to see how projects, tasks, and team members fit together, in a way that can be completely tailored to the structure of your enterprise.
- Customize your project structures to fit the way you work. While most project management systems force you into a different way of working, Wrike helps you work in the way you want by creating custom item types, including tasks and projects with versatile workflow automations.
- Get clarity on how different tasks and projects relate with cross-tagging. This unique feature enables you to track dependencies and tasks across multiple teams, without duplicating items, and provides the clarity you need at scale.
- Empower team members with customizable team and personal dashboards, which continually display real-time data when project statuses change. With Wrike’s dashboards, every colleague has a unique view of your enterprise’s projects. They can see the tasks and dependencies that affect them at every stage of every project lifecycle, including through Kanban boards, Gantt charts, or other custom views.
We can confidently say that Wrike is the most customizable enterprise project management software on the market. This way, it fits the way you work, at the scale at which you’re working.
2. Wrike offers robust reporting into project goals, progress, and resources
As a project portfolio manager, you’ll always need an eye on costs. In your enterprise, different projects will often be competing for the same limited budget, so it’s crucial that you stay on track.
Wrike makes it easy to monitor, manage, and optimize resources at scale to deliver on your business goals. Our project planning and reporting tools are some of the most robust on the market, and they can continually help you to:
- Track your enterprise goals. Set goals and monitor your progress toward them at every level of your organization. This makes it easy to align your portfolio with your key objectives.
- Plan, prioritize, and allocate resources effortlessly. Wrike lets you quickly estimate resource needs for specific projects. For instance, you can accurately determine project budgets with resource estimation tools. Plus, you can make sure that high-priority projects have the coverage they need with clear visibility over resource allocation and project scheduling.
- Track team performance and time spent on projects. Maximize team performance with insights into time spent per project and colleague-specific timesheets. You can also use workload charts to easily reassign tasks to individuals with more capacity if you need to. This helps you stay on track and on budget and ensure profitability.
- Dig into deep analytics that scale across all projects. Many project management tools limit reporting to individual projects, and this just isn’t useful at the portfolio level. With Wrike, you can track and benchmark performance with advanced analytics and business intelligence.
3. Wrike leverages AI for efficiency across your enterprise
In our experience, enterprises are often looking to work more efficiently as they run, oversee, and implement projects. But without the right enterprise project portfolio management tools, it can be difficult to identify where efficiency can be improved.
Wrike’s automation features enable you to quickly take advantage of opportunities within your portfolio management processes. They let you save time, resources, and energy on the repetitive tasks that are specific to your organization.
- Automate project intake with dynamic request forms. As soon as a project is requested, Wrike can automatically set up the desired workflow, from start to finish. Plus, you can customize your request form with specific queries, so that you have all the information you need from the get-go.
- Integrate workflows across different tools. With Wrike, you can automate workflows in real time across other tools that you use, including Slack, Outlook, QuickBooks, and more. It helps you save additional time and centralize all your processes within your single portfolio software.
- Identify opportunities for automation with AI. Wrike’s Work Intelligence® solution uses AI to track commonly repeated tasks across your enterprise’s projects. Then, it suggests new opportunities for automation that you may have otherwise missed.
Choose Wrike to support your enterprise project portfolio management
In this guide, we’ve explored the steps you need to get started with project portfolio management, from strategy to implementation. But as you’ve seen, effective EPPM is impossible without a tool that can manage the complexity of your portfolios at scale.
Wrike will do exactly that. With its unmatched customization, in-depth reporting, and suite of automation features, Wrike enables enterprises to deliver projects more efficiently, while making it easier for portfolio managers, too.
Try Wrike for free to see how it can work for you.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about enterprise project portfolio management
What is the difference between PPM and EPPM?
Project portfolio management (PPM) typically refers to managing a defined set of projects within a single department or function. Enterprise project portfolio management (EPPM) operates at a higher level, bringing together projects from across the organization into one coordinated system. This gives senior leadership a single view of all the company’s ongoing initiatives, informing the strategic decisions they take for the organization as a whole.
What are the biggest benefits of enterprise project portfolio management?
The most significant benefit is strategic alignment, because EPPM ensures that the projects your organization is investing in are the ones most likely to advance its strategic goals. Beyond alignment, EPPM reduces resource conflicts between projects, improves financial visibility, and enables faster course-correction when a project goes off track.
What does an EPMO do in enterprise project portfolio management?
The enterprise project management office (EPMO) acts as the bridge between the organization’s strategy and the individual projects being executed on the ground. It is responsible for setting governance standards, overseeing portfolio prioritization, and ensuring that resources are allocated clearly and effectively. Without a functioning EPMO, EPPM tends to break down at the point where decisions need to be escalated above individual project teams.
How is AI changing enterprise project portfolio management?
AI is shifting EPPM from a largely reactive discipline — where managers respond to problems after they surface — into a more predictive one. Modern EPPM platforms can now analyze patterns across portfolios to flag at-risk projects before they go off track, recommend resource reallocation based on workload data, and identify automation opportunities across repeated project workflows. For enterprises managing large, complex portfolios, this moves portfolio management from periodic reporting into continuous, intelligent oversight.
