The importance of governance structures in IT project portfolio management

Although recently a lot of attention has been devoted to IT project portfolio management in theory as well as in practice, research in this area is particularly focused on approaches for project selection. Related tasks and especially the organizational environment in which IT project portfolio management is embedded are often excluded. This paper relates existing findings from the field of IT governance to the field of IT project portfolio management. Based on a qualitative study, different fields of activities in IT project portfolio management are identified. Furthermore, governance issues in IT project portfolio management are illustrated and a category schema for the assessment of governance structures in the different fields of activities is introduced. In contrast to existing publications in this field of research, which usually employ a maturity level perspective, the paper focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of centralized, decentralized and federal structures in different fields of activities of IT project portfolio management. The paper is intended to highlight why different degrees of centralization in IT project portfolio management can be observed in practice.