What is the Difference between PPM and BPM?

PPM stands for program and portfolio management, but that alone is not clear enough. It’s much clearer to say that PPM is about managing projects and aggregations of projects generally leveraging a project management office (PMO). Basically PPM is all about projects, but more mature organizations extend beyond IT to business projects and manage application and project portfolios as well.

There is confusion because projects leverage processes in creating project deliverables, thus attaining project milestones. Some would go so far as to say that a project is a process. Others would still consider a process an asset that would fit in a portfolio that could be managed like projects. After all, don’t processes have dashboards similar to those found in a mature PMO?

Some say that the process center of excellence (PCE) views that process portfolio management is much different than project management, because projects are temporary and processes are institutional for supporting business on an ongoing basis. Still others would say that the management techniques for processes are very different than those for projects. BPM is all about business processes.

The PPM View: There is Process in my Projects

PPM practitioners believe that project management is a discipline aimed at meeting deadlines and budgets allocated to project efforts, and that it is performed more consistently in IT than in the business; but a few project managers see the applicability of BPM to projects. It is clear to them that PM is crucial to BPM efforts.

Processes can really help PPM in recognizing best practices in creating deliverables and making these best practices a repeatable process that is leveraged in many future projects that need to create the same deliverable.

In fact, there are a number of BPM-minded folks that believe a project can be imported into a BPM engine an executed like any other process.

The BPM View: Project Management is Just another Business Process

Some BPM folks would view project management as just another enterprise process that can be managed and tracked like other business outcomes, but business processes are more predictable and repeatable, whereas projects are more flexible by nature. There is, however, a stream of best practice processes that can be leveraged in producing project deliverables.

Project management can help BPM during the process building phase by leveraging scaled down project methods that are iterative in nature. These methods are likely to include the following:

• Common terminology for projects
• Project charter template
• Schedule template
• Formal client feedback procedure
• Defined project meeting formats
• Scope statement templates

Project managementstops once the process is built and another set of improvement techniques take hold. I like to use the analogy of the manufacturing line. PM can be used to build the manufacturing line, yet managing the running manufacturing line is not a project, but an ongoing effort. BPM provides for process measurement and improvement for correct and consistent products done in a timely fashion for the cheapest cost while leveraging resource utilization like a manufacturing line.

Bottom Line:

Both projects and processes need governance, and though there is common ground around building processes with great project management and running a good project with repeatable processes that are best practice towards accomplishing deliverables, the deliverables and skills are quite different In the future, I expect that processes will become more nimble as they learn to leverage process snippets dynamically to support knowledge workers, but most busines processes are quite repeatable today. As this evolves, the commonality between BPM & PPM will grow, but PPM is about projects and BPM is about processes.