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Key Benefits of Choosing Service Portfolio Management
Service Portfolio Management is the latest buzz in the IT industry. It is being looked upon as a strategic planning and executing tool that ensures that the IT strategies are in alignment with the business strategies. Service portfolio management regularly scrutinizes and reviews Information and Communications Technology or ICT services of a company to make sure that they are adding value to the projects at hand and the ones that are being planned. In simple ...
4 IT Portfolio Challenges that Keep CIOs Awake
Chief Information Officers in any organization have a wide range of responsibilities that must be handled expertly and simultaneously. They also have to ensure that sensitive information, databases and other forms of data in any company are kept safe. Frequent surveys reveal that there are a few problems and challenges that continue to plague a CIO. Security Experienced CIOs understand the importance of information security and taking all stops to facilitate better security. Multi-layered defense ...
Why a Spreadsheet Is No Longer Adequate For IT Application Portfolio Management
Spreadsheets have been a critical working tool for most business processes for almost three decades. While they proved useful in the 1980s, the case is much different today owing to the increasing emphasis on technology and accuracy. This boosted use of technology in today’s businesses has made the spreadsheet obsolete. If your company is still using spreadsheets to manage and monitor its IT application portfolio, here are some reasons to make the change. A recent ...
Application Portfolio Management and 10 Key Questions for Success
The concept of Application Portfolio Management first came into existence during the 1990s but it's benefits came into surface in the early 2000s. Organizations worldwide began their preparations as they started discovering that a large number of applications used by them would soon be redundant as well as expensive to maintain as they would hardly offer any business value. The applications in most of these organizations were not cataloged in an easy and search-friendly manner. ...
IT Architecture and Lifecycle Cost Management
IT architecture can be defined as a process where a designer creates a set of systems or individual phases. Several factors are considered when IT architecture is being planned and developed including the functions of the system, how they are linked to other IT systems, business processed involved in creating the system as well as other essential parameters. How to create result-driven IT architecture An experienced IT architect usually has a general overview of the ...
Project Portfolio Management Mistakes that You Should Avoid
As project managers, it is important to create plans that effectively cover all aspects of project lifecycles. Despite experience and knowledge in the field, some common mistake and errors may arise. Here are some of the most common mistakes made when managing IT portfolios. No tangible investment strategies It is a common practice in many IT companies, whether start-ups or larger corporations, to directly start with budgeting and funding. The projects scoring higher on the ...
Better Understanding of Interplay between IT Applications
Managing an IT application portfolio for your business is an essential step in maintaining business processes, and ensuring efficiency and quality. However, before you begin working on the management aspect of the portfolio, it is important to understand exactly how IT applications interact with databases and operating systems. As an established business, you may already know that programs, software, hardware and operating systems work in unison to bring results and execute functions. In the simplest ...
Utilizing IT Portfolio as a Common Language between Stakeholders
When it comes to incorporating IT portfolio management and communication with stakeholders, the term success can mean many things. Most managers and executives are looking for easy ways to manage active projects as well as their current progress. While many businesses make attempts to integrate and govern IT portfolio models, they are met with failure for a few simple reasons. Some of most common reasons for these failures included narrow or incomplete planning of the ...
How to Understand the Potential and Life Cycle of Existing IT Applications
If your business is handling multiple IT applications, it is important to find the best practices for optimum planning and management. Regardless of the development model you choose for your business’ IT applications, there are six stages or phases that help you organize and execute applications. At each phase, you are required to determine the deliverables that enable the next stage in the life cycle of an IT application. Every life cycle model consists of ...
IT Portfolio Management to Support Annual IT Budgeting
Annual budgeting for IT portfolio management is often mismanaged for one reason – lack of knowledge. In many organizations, IT departments do not understand budgeting while the finance and budgeting team does not understand the requirements of the IT department. This problem can be remedied by changing the budgeting approach and adopting a meaningful management process. This technique involves a lot more than adding numbers and working with spreadsheets and includes department heads and leaders ...
How to Turn Your IT Strategy into an IT Portfolio
Before you learn how to use IT application strategies to create your portfolio, it is important to form the right strategies. Today, many organizations build IT application strategies on a premise that is more often than not, flawed. Where to begin strategizing The premise of using single and integrated portfolios for IT applications is not the most ideal option as your organization needs more than a common timeline and set of criteria to manage this ...
Business Benefits of IT Portfolio Management
Management of IT portfolio is the process of rationalizing and organizing IT applications in your company to meet specific business needs. The main responsibilities of portfolio managers for IT projects include analysis of current and future applications as well as projects within the organization. With this analysis, managers then identify gaps and shortcomings, devising ways to make improvements in the IT portfolio. On a regular basis, the IT department or organization is allotted fixed funding ...
Aligning IT Projects and Strategies through Project Portfolio Management
Project portfolio management or PPM is a business process that allows and prepares companies to align a number of components like IT projects, application development, resources, and initiatives. Transforming companies to operate as project-oriented groups, project portfolio management allows you to treat IT as a financial asset. With project portfolio management, you can seamlessly integrate scope, pipeline, time, skills, cost, procurement, reporting, forecasting, communication, as well as risk management. Similar to managing a portfolio of ...