Two offerings, not one product

The most common scoping error in this domain is treating Project Portfolio Management as a single product. It is two. Project Financial Management does costing, billing, revenue, budgets, forecasts and performance reporting; Finance buys it and its centre of gravity is the general ledger. Project Execution Management does project and task management, scheduling, resource pools and staffing; the PMO and delivery leadership buy it and its centre of gravity is the schedule and the people. The lesson resolves five customer profiles against the two columns and names the failure it prevents: you scope one, and three months later the other group asks where their half is.