An Evaluation of Organisational State-Transition Approach in PPM: Results from five government cases

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) has recently become a major management strategy for many organisations. Organisations, in order to meet their goals, apply PPM concepts. It is helpful in that it provides a framework throughout the organisation. PPM attempts to govern the selection, prioritisation and management of organisations’ projects. As a domain of study, PPM is characterised by undisciplined diverse opinion as to its industry approach to management standards, business literature and software support. Recently, the Organisational State Transition Approach (OSTA) is discussed as a possible framework to bring a structure to the PPM domain. The adaptation of OSTA in PPM domain is presented in this paper. We validate the framework by analysing the data gathered through interviews and document reviews from five Australian Federal agencies. In this paper, with the use of OSTA we discuss the scope and issues involved in organisations, types of actions and methods they take to achieve goals, and organisations desired goals.