IT Portfolio: Aligned and Agile Service Culture Innovation

IT Portfolio:   IT Portfolio offers a solution from volume of projects with lack of prioritization, insufficient resources, and that feeling that you are trying to do too much, too fast, with too little resources or focus to succeed in the war for project's competing charters.

The problem? It is not lack of desire that  causes us to fall short.  We struggle to improve project engagement, understand the requirements, timeline and competing resource prioritization? The impact of informal project onboarding criteria bring other efforts to a halt, or stall efforts due to insufficient planning, resource coordination, scheduling, and project requirements/deliverables.

A company's competitive advantage depends upon it's capacity to  innovate. Agile business demand IT's ability to assess, and change focus for investments, projects, and critical business activities. Innovation and changing business demands are  a constant in IT. Improperly managed initiatives are competing, and obstructing innovation, by conflicting demands.  

Portfolio management is a service oriented approach to viewing and improving a company's overall IT strategy.  CIO magazine's article, Portfolio Management Done Right, highlights a recent AMR survey suggesting some 75% of companies lack sufficient oversight to to their IT Projects, resulting in deploying or introducing chaotic planning processes, that did not deliver needed value. 

What it does:  Organizations will review and rebalance their IT Portfolio to identify and understand how initiatives align to, or compete with, company strategy.  The activity consists of an Inventory, Evaluation, and Prioritization identify and rank activities yielding highest value  and alignment to company objectives.  

Why are we doing this now?  The prioritization process of IT Portfolio delivers value and intention is to commit the right focus and priority to business related resourcing.  The result? 

Maximize value by focusing IT resources on those that produce highest ROI

• Deliver needed regulatory and critical business initiatives
• Improving communication and alignment between IT and business 
• Encourage accountable service team collaboration and responsibility instead of siloed project responsibility

Minimizing cost, time and resource impacts by enabling:

• IT to view, prioritize, communicate & schedule resources more efficiently
• Reduce complexity and volume of competing, redundant projects. By sequencing high value  related projects,  work out dependencies, and most importantly, making it easier to kill projects when business priority shifts

Use Cases: 

• Hallmark Cards extended use of IT Portfolio Management to run consumer product development for competitive advantage to identify project impacts that could delay delivery on schedule, impact to resources, or success of key projects
• McGraw-Hill use of  IT Portfolio Management improved project alignment, that delivered a 70% reduction in time required to initiate projects, improved development timeframes, improved ability to identify process improvements data requirements
• Merrill Lynch used IT Portfolio Management to realign business priorities when the Tech Bubble burst from dot com demand to fixed income business

  
FEEDBACK:  What were your challenges,  successes and results from implementing IT Portfolio Management?  What transformation driven business changes most required an agility and focus or reviewing and realigning priorities? 

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