A PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS OF PROJECT PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT PRACTICES
A PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS OF PROJECT PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT PRACTICES

Summary/Abstract: In a turbulent business environment organizations are exposed to new opportunities but also various threats, e.g. financial, market, ecological, technological, politicalal, etc. In such highly competitive conditions the optimal utilization of resources emerges as a critical aspect of project management and its implementation in modern organizations. Nowadays project portfolio solutions are frequently indroduced in business practices. Deploying project portfolio management can facilitate the balance between effectiveness and efficiency. In the recent decades this approach has proliferated as a contemporary practice targeted to support the realization of the organizational strategy. The understanding of project portfolio management within the current study considers it as a centralized and balanced approach to the management of a set of projects constituting a portfolio, in order to achieve the strategic goals of the organization. This is accomplished by targeted processes – evaluation, selection,execution, prioritization, assessment, monitoring, and control of projects or programs – taking into account their alignment to the organizational strategy and contribution to the achievement of their objectives. The goal of the paper is to explore the major factors that favourably affect project portfolio management practices in Bulgarian project-oriented organizations using survey data from 184 respondents. Using an original research instrument,data about the implementation of project portfolio management were collected through purposive sampling of organizations that apply such an approach in their operations. Selected empirical results from a questionnaire survey of the factors of effective project portfolio management are presented regarding the practices in the studied organizations. A set of specific items concerning the project portfolio management practice are grouped into five major factors using principal component analysis. Each of these latent factors reflects a particular cluster of internal capabilities of the organizations to successfully implement project portfolio management in dynamic and complex business environment.

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