Lars Kristian Hansen

Transforming local government by project portfolio management: Identifying and overcoming control problems

Purpose – As public organizations strive for higher e‐government maturity, information technology (IT) Project Portfolio Management (IT PPM) has become a high priority issue. Assuming control is central in IT PPM, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how a Danish local government conducts control in IT PPM. The authors identify control problems and formulate recommendations to address these.Design/methodology/approach – Adopting principles from Engaged Scholarship, the authors have conducted a case study using a wide variety of data collection methods, including 29 interviews, one workshop, and analyses of documents.Findings – It is found that the local government relies vastly on informal control mechanisms and five control problems are identified: weak accountability processes between the political and administrative level; weak accountability between the director level and the IT executives; IT projects established on the basis of incomplete information about internal resources; lack of operatio...