Predicting Project Portfolio Success by Measuring Management Quality—A Longitudinal Study

Abstract

Many firms struggle with managing a portfolio of multiple interdependent projects. Therefore, practitioners and researchers are eager to learn which factors affect project portfolio success and how it can be increased. However, it takes some time for changes in management practices to reveal their potential. Thus, it is interesting to know how portfolio success can be predicted and what the possible indicators of this eventual success will look like. For this purpose, we propose the concept of management quality, which allows the anticipation of project portfolio success much earlier than the time at which established success criteria become measurable. We conceptualize and empirically validate management quality as a multidimensional construct consisting of information quality, allocation quality, and cooperation quality. We demonstrate the prognostic relevance of management quality to project portfolio success on a longitudinal sample of project portfolios with multiple informants over a time period of two years. Our results show a strong positive influence and thus support the notion of a causal link between management quality and portfolio success.