Due to the growing importance of IT-based innovations contemporary firms face an excessive
number of proposals for IT projects. As typically only a fraction of these projects can be
implemented with the given capacity IT project portfolio management as a relatively new
discipline has received growing attention in research and practice in recent years. Thorsten
Frey demonstrates how companies are struggling to find the right balance between local autonomy
and central overview about all projects in the organization. In this context impacts of
different contextual factors on the design of governance arrangements for IT project portfolio
management are demonstrated. Moreover consequences of the use of different organizational
designs are analyzed. The author presents insights from a qualitative empirical study as well
as a simulative approach.
