Companies need to work very hard to survive in the fierce business world. Everyday, companies look at their competitors to understand the future trends and take action beforehand. They constantly try to innovate by taking into account their budgets and the risks of their actions. At the same time, market conditions change fast, so companies need to adapt accordingly to stay one step ahead of competition. To reach their goals organizations need to analyze the market, then they need to define effective strategies.

To deploy strategies companies need to focus on their business processes in order to reach their goals and create value. The culture of a company is part of its processes as a result of its established values, behaviors, and beliefs. As organizational culture changes over time, companies need to consider it when they need to align their strategies. Improving strategy alignment can improve business performance and impact organizational culture through increased job satisfaction.

Some of the most successful companies in the world are able to create environments their employees love to go, and job seekers desire to work from. Identifying and developing a company culture that is healthy and productive can make a huge impact on an organization’s success. Organizational culture is the set of values, expectations, and practices that guide the actions of all people in the company. A great culture leads to improved performance, while an ineffective company culture can damage even the most successful organizations.

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) helps companies select the right projects that align with their strategies to achieve their objectives. Thanks to PPM, companies are able to allocate the resources to support those projects. Even if PPM is usually used to improve project success probability and to achieve success, companies need also to consider the connection between PPM and organizational culture. Alagaraja and Shuck (2015) argue that companies can improve organizational culture by improving stakeholder involvement and strategy alignment.

The definition of strategy is a long-term plan of action used to reach a specific goal or a set of objectives. To get the most out of their resources, companies should link strategy and new product resource allocation. In addition, depending on their strategies, companies need to decide whether to focus on specific markets, technologies, and products. In the same way, once the strategy has been set, the majority of projects and spending should be focused on those markets, products, and technologies.

Companies can maximize project benefits and minimize overall project risks by balancing project portfolios. Executives have to analyze and balance the portfolio to reach these goals. The objective is to fund worthy efforts in order to produce the highest payback from each investment. A project portfolio can be considered like an investment fund, where the fund manager tries to create the best investment portfolio by choosing the most appropriate stocks (high risk stocks and blue chip stocks) to reach the goal.

Companies today have a lot of projects they could be working on but a limited amount of resources. Instead of just trying to figure out how to get through as many of them as quickly as possible, organizations can use Project Portfolio Management (PPM) to prioritize those projects. There are many methods to achieve this goal, varying from financial models to scoring models. Each method has its strengths and weaknesses. All these methods produce a prioritized list of projects to execute.

Project selection is very important to effectively apply Project Portfolio Management (PPM) . For this reason, it is worth exploring the essential tools and techniques to choose the right projects for the portfolio. It is also useful to say that having an official process to set project priorities could not be enough for the success of a portfolio. Over the years, experts have identified the methods and tools for project portfolios selection. For instance, Taylor (2006) states that any model should have six attributes.

Organizations can benefit from using Project Portfolio Management practices. In fact, PPM allows companies to allocate resources, schedule, analyse, and manage projects and business. At the same time, companies also encounter problems when using PPM. What type of problems companies face in using PPM? One of the problems that companies face when using PPM is that Portfolio Managers see some portfolio evaluation techniques to be too difficult to use. They fail to recognize the connection between projects and the resources.

Project portfolio management is considered to be a logical decision process. To execute PPM effectively it is important to consider some other aspects. In fact, there are characteristics of PPM that have a great impact on its implementation. Let’s analyze some of the most important assumptions that can have a great influence on PPM execution. To achieve strategic objectives companies need first to develop the strategic plan. Afterwards, to fulfill the strategic plan objectives, they have to select and prioritize their projects.

In a world that is becoming more and more complex, companies can use Project Portfolio Management to manage the complexity of their portfolios. In fact, as projects increase in number and size, the complexities and management challenges rise exponentially. Everyday, new market and strategic opportunities can arise. As a result companies need to make fast decisions such as deciding which projects to include and which to exclude from the project portfolio. Complexity has different meanings and it depends from the context.

Strategic management helps companies to innovate their processes and products. Strategy allows organizations to determine the best configuration of systems, processes, products, and resources to reach their objectives. To implement their strategies companies can use Project Portfolio Management. In fact, they can use PPM to identify projects and portfolios that best align with their objectives. Strategic analysis starts from exploring the innovation space by identifying where innovation can take place and if it is worth doing so.