When you wing it without a project portfolio, management will overcommit resources, show poor resource prediction capability and end up with piecemeal information about projects. In addition, your managers will be incapable of making informed decisions to approve the "right" projects or shut down projects with no hope of success. They will also lack the ability to define specific alerts, such as misalignment with business strategy.

"We have been working over the last three years streamlining our global organization from over a dozen entities to effectively just one. Without a portfolio, our capability to make this happen would be nonexistent," says Steve Winstead, CIO of Kenwood USA Corp., a consumer audio electronics firm in Long Beach, Calif.