What is project portfolio management (PPM)?

A marketing leader is weighing five competing initiatives this quarter. Each has potential—but only one can move forward. So how do they decide which deserves the team’s time, budget, and backing?

Hopefully, not with a coin flip. Project portfolio management (PPM) offers a structured, strategic way to evaluate initiatives based on business goals, available resources, and expected impact. It replaces gut decisions with clear-eyed, data-driven action.

Read on to discover how PPM helps you focus on high-impact work, optimize resource allocation, and ensure every project ladders up to your organization’s most important goals.

What is project portfolio management (PPM)?

Project portfolio management (PPM) is a strategic process for selecting, prioritizing, and managing a company’s projects to ensure they align with overarching business goals. It enables organizations to focus on high-impact work, minimize risk, and make the best use of limited resources. Unlike one-time planning, PPM is an ongoing discipline—portfolio managers continuously reassess priorities as business needs shift, resources change, and new opportunities arise.

Key concepts of project portfolio management

To implement PPM effectively, you need to master four foundational practices:

Why project portfolio management is important

The project portfolio management (PPM) market is projected to reach $13.7 billion globally by 2029—a signal of just how vital it’s become for businesses navigating complex priorities.

At any given moment, your organization may be weighing dozens of competing projects. PPM helps you cut through the noise. It gives you a structured way to evaluate ROI, align every initiative to strategic goals, and allocate resources where they’ll drive the most impact.

With PPM, you’re not just managing projects—you’re building a portfolio designed for results.

Benefits of project portfolio management

Project portfolio management  does more than keep your initiatives organized—it drives alignment, reduces bias, and helps your teams stay focused on what matters most. Here are five key benefits:

Keeps teams focused on what matters most

In PPM, strategic alignment comes first. Only projects that directly support top-level business goals move forward—everything else gets deprioritized. This ensures teams stay focused on high-impact work that drives measurable results.

Brings objectivity to project selection

Without a clear framework, project selection can be subjective. PPM introduces structure—using ROI models, risk scoring, and other quantitative methods to evaluate each initiative. This leads to more consistent, data-driven decisions.

Reduces risk across the portfolio

Too many high-risk projects can derail progress. PPM evaluates the risk-reward profile of each initiative and balances the mix—so you can pursue bold ideas without putting your entire portfolio at risk.

Optimizes resource planning

PPM ensures your budget, talent, and time are allocated to the projects with the highest return. It also surfaces resource conflicts early—helping prevent burnout, delays, and stalled initiatives.

Enables smarter, data-driven decisions

With PPM, decision-making is grounded in real-time data tied to business outcomes. Leaders can see what’s working, adjust in real time, and ensure the project mix continues to reflect evolving goals and capacity.

What industries benefit from project portfolio management?

PPM adds value in any industry—but for organizations managing high volumes of complex, cross-functional projects, it’s mission-critical. Here are a few of the industries that rely on it most:

Project portfolio management vs. project management 

Project portfolio management helps organizations decide what to work on and why—prioritizing initiatives that align with strategic goals and deliver the greatest value. It operates at a high level, evaluating project opportunities across the organization.

Project management, by contrast, focuses on how to execute those approved projects. It’s about defining the scope, assigning roles, managing timelines, and ensuring successful delivery.

Think of it this way: PPM sets the direction. Project management drives the execution. Both are essential—but they serve different purposes.

The five steps of the project portfolio management process

Whether you're leading operations or overseeing the PMO, these five steps will help you build and maintain a high-impact, strategically aligned project portfolio.

1. Establish strategic goals and define evaluation criteria

Start by working with leadership to set clear business objectives—like increasing revenue, improving efficiency, or entering new markets. These goals form the foundation of your entire portfolio strategy.

Next, translate those goals into evaluation criteria. This ensures every project is assessed based on how well it supports what matters most to the business. Common criteria include:

Pro tip: Build a weighted scoring model that reflects your priorities. For example, if strategic alignment is most important, give it the highest weight—so your scoring system always ties back to company goals.

2. Centralize project intake and categorize initiatives

Collect all proposed projects for your next planning cycle in one place—ideally using a single PPM tool for visibility across departments. Standardize your intake process with clear submission guidelines, intake owners, and evaluation-ready templates.Then, tag or group projects by attributes like strategic goal, risk level, resource needs, or business unit.

Pro tip: Use a project proposal form with fields like business case, expected impact, required resources, and strategic alignment—like a college application for your project ideas.

3. Score and prioritize your projects 

Evaluate each project against your defined criteria. Use a decision matrix or scoring model to calculate total scores.

Then, rank projects from highest to lowest priority to determine which to greenlight based on strategic fit and available resources.

Pro tip: Don’t just focus on top scorers—look at your full portfolio mix to ensure balance across innovation, core operations, and risk levels.

4. Allocate resources

Assign budget, time, tools, and people to your top-priority projects based on availability and fit.
Match not just capacity, but capability—ensuring the right people with the right skills are assigned to the right work. Visualize how resources are distributed over time to avoid conflicts and bottlenecks.

Pro tip: Use a resource allocation template to monitor team utilization and avoid overloading critical roles. Set limits so you can spot and address burnout risk early.

5. Monitor performance and adapt the portfolio

Track project outcomes and portfolio performance in real time. Use reporting tools and dashboards to surface underperforming initiatives early. Adjust your portfolio regularly based on shifting priorities, market changes, or capacity constraints to keep your investments aligned and effective.

Pro tip: Set a recurring monthly or quarterly portfolio review cadence. Be ready to reallocate, pause, or sunset projects to preserve value and stay agile.

Project portfolio management tools and techniques

No matter your industry, the right tools and techniques can help streamline your PPM process and support smarter decision-making. Here are some of the most effective options:

Key responsibilities of a project portfolio manager

A project portfolio manager oversees the full spectrum of an organization’s projects—not in isolation, but as part of an interconnected portfolio. Their role is to evaluate, prioritize, and coordinate initiatives to ensure alignment with strategic goals and maximize business value.

That includes assessing strategic fit, balancing risk across the portfolio, monitoring project performance, and allocating resources where they’ll have the most impact.

If a project manager is the lead violinist, focused on their section’s execution, the portfolio manager is the conductor—ensuring every part of the orchestra plays in sync to deliver results that earn a standing ovation from the executive team.

Project portfolio management example: IT PPM at JetBlue

JetBlue’s 400-person IT team was struggling to prioritize the right work—and move at the speed the business demanded. As IT Portfolio Manager Amanda Luna put it, the team “needs to move really, really quickly.” But disconnected project tracking made that nearly impossible.

Each manager maintained their own Excel file, with no centralized view of active initiatives. Information was scattered, reporting was manual, and decision-making dragged.

To solve this, the team turned to Airtable. They built a centralized roadmap that consolidated 400+ initiatives across four strategic pillars—giving everyone access to a single source of truth. What once took days now takes minutes, enabling faster prioritization, clearer visibility, and better alignment across the IT portfolio.

Read the full story. 

Why choose Airtable as your project portfolio management solution?

PPM helps you choose the right projects—but without the right tools, managing priorities, resources, and updates can quickly become overwhelming.

Airtable brings clarity and control to your entire portfolio.

Our flexible, connected platform gives you a single source of truth to manage everything from strategic planning to execution.

And with Airtable AI, you can auto-summarize project updates, surface risks, prioritize initiatives, and route key data—helping you manage complexity at scale and focus on what matters most.