Product based project portfolio and information sharing

The granularity of the information for sharing is one of the essential aspects in project learning. The utilization of information technology has maximised the benefit and extended the scope of sharing at horizontal and vertical aspects, e.g. sharing information between multiple concurrent projects and sharing historic data to new projects. Horizontal information sharing enables the use of common resources in planning and executing projects contained in programmes and portfolio management systems. Vertical information sharing enables a systematic information deposition and dissemination of lessons learned for the knowledge of project management. Information collected throughout a project lifecycle contributes to the project portfolio. Good practises or lessons learnt should be used to guide new projects. Project learning repositories are designed to collect the lesson learnt information and share the information with new projects to better manage them and improve their performance. Current main stream project management methods are process or activity based; making the project portfolio collected and the lesson learnt information granularity process based. Information sharing between projects only happens at the process (activity) level and project level. However, the vast amount of information in between which contains the best practices of producing project's "simple products" (deliverables) are not collected. Portfolios, on the other hand, at each activity level are not easily sharable due to the fact that new technologies, process reengineering and personnel preferences may all affect the chosen activities.