Project Portfolio Management For IT Organizations
IT organizations are under increasing pressure to deliver more with less, and are challenged to improve alignment with evolving business objectives. IT’s performance is constantly being evaluated and, with compliance regulations, there is even greater demand for accountability.
IT executives need to establish effective governance over both strategy and execution. The key is increasing visibility and improving decision-making techniques while enabling a dynamic budgeting process to make it easier to realign expenditures.
Sustaining And Extending IT’s Strategies And Objectives
Solving these issues involves a top-down and bottom-up portfolio management approach. More IT departments are turning to technology platforms that can deliver enterprise functionality without the risk, cost or complexity of most enterprise applications. The capabilities of these solutions often include functions that support:
- IT Investment Selection
- Budgeting and Cost Control
- Program and Project Management
- Resource Allocation
- Staff Time Tracking and analysis
- Application Asset Management
IT organizations have often addressed some of these areas, but are still failing to realize the benefits of a more complete Project Portfolio Management (PPM) solution.
IT Benefits Equals Business Benefits!
Successful IT organizations combine best practice corporate processes and enterprise software tool suites that are engineered to solve these challenges. The results of a successful deployment can deliver impressive and tangible benefits including:
- Promoting intelligent cost reduction by identifying IT investments and assets that bring the highest value.
- Sharing the visibility and assuring strong alignment of IT investments and assets with an evolving business strategy.
- Establishing and using dynamic budgeting practices to align investment planning and execution and ensuring higher benefits realization and better capital utilization.
- Encouraging common ownership of the investments between the business and IT to better defend costs.
- Increasing communication capabilities to simplify and accelerate decision cycles.
Deploying these portfolio, project and resource management capabilities across an IT organization can reap enormous benefits. Conversely, not addressing these challenges can put an IT organization at a distinct competitive disadvantage!
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