The dashboard is the one place where you can visualize what’s going on in all of your project investments in such a way that you can actually make decisions about what needs to happen. 

It is your computer interface with the PPM database. It pulls data in real time and it makes information available to everyone who has access to it. The dashboard can help you instill the culture of transparency in your organization.

You can see everything as a business leader, and so can your staff. It’s not about “I gotcha.” It’s just about “We’re all looking at the same data.” So they can start fixing stuff that is showing up and not working. You don’t even have to tell them.

The PMO is the organizational component of Project Portfolio Management. PMO is not an actual office, even though it’s called the project management office. It’s the people in the organizational chart who are responsible for the portfolio performance.

There are different kinds of PMOs. They have different kinds of charters.

There‘s the air traffic control where they have really complete control over what comes in and how it lands. There’s the weather station that just kind of tells you what’s going on but they don’t really control what comes in and what goes. Then there’s the third one which is more just operational performance.

Your functional champion usually runs the PMO.

Project Portfolio Management is the normalization and standardization of processing data around all of your project investments. 

It's the discipline of controlling all of the money you spend on projects, understanding that projects typically represent the mechanism by which you create your future state. Organizations move from where they are to where they want to be by investing in projects.  

A project is a vehicle for investing resources in a set of goals. Project management is the discipline of trying to manage that in a structured way. Project portfolio management is looking at the entire collection of projects as a whole. It’s a collective set of activities that should be taking me in a certain direction based on the organization's strategic plan and goals.