Your company’s portfolio encompasses a collection of any type of project, investment, initiative, or any other business element. And if you need to keep track of all your business elements, you may lose sight of the bigger picture and miss out on a few important things.
Strategy IT portfolio management is a solution to prevent missing out on essential things.
Want to know more about the concept? We’re here to walk you through it.
In this write-up, we will discuss what exactly is strategic IT portfolio management and why it’s important for your business.
What Is Strategic IT Portfolio Management?
Strategic IT portfolio management refers to the process implemented by a company to determine the optimal utilization of the available resources within a portfolio to fulfill its strategic objectives.
Strategic IT project portfolio management involves making complex decisions to decide which projects should be pursued, which should be eliminated or paused, and which resources can be utilized or freed up to concentrate on projects that align better with your organization’s strategic goals.
Now you must be wondering what exactly is a portfolio. In easy words, a portfolio refers to a collection of projects or initiatives taken up by your organization to fulfill your business objective. Portfolios can be used for segmenting specific parts of the business. All these segmented portfolios determine the functioning and direction of your business.
Strategic IT portfolio management basically decides what’s the right thing to do for your company.
Why Strategic IT Portfolio Management Is Essential?
Strategic IT portfolio management offers huge benefits to your organization.
Helps You To Focus On Long-Term Goal
As discussed earlier, with Strategic IT portfolio management, you’ll not miss out on the important components of the project that drive your organization towards its business goal.
One of the biggest oversight your organization can have is losing track of your ultimate long-term strategy. Since most of your workforce spends significant time planning to achieve short-term goals and solving current problems, it is possible to get distracted.
With strategic IT project portfolio management implementation, you can ensure that all of the projects your organization is currently handling or planning to take up in the near future are always aligned with your long-term organizational goals.
That involves regular portfolio analysis and review to keep everyone in your company updated and on the same page.
Better Project Selection Process
Strategic IT portfolio management utilizes various qualitative and qualitative methods, including scoring models, ranking techniques, etc. (depending on your business requirements), to evaluate and select projects that can deliver the best value to your organization.
It focuses on picking the accurate set of projects that complies with business objectives, risk, availability of resources, and other elements.
With strategic IT project portfolio management, any business decision is based on practical, well-defined, and relevant criteria rather than ambiguous components.
Promotes Collaboration Rather Than Competition
In your organization, various project teams function with different goals. This creates competition among different business units while requesting financial and human resources. For example, one team may function on development while the other on the quality assurance of current projects.
Strategic IT project portfolio management mitigates this challenge. It uses meticulous, standardized techniques to evaluate requirements from different functioning units. It also eliminates project management redundancies and empowers project managers to leverage mutual teams for an effective collaborative workspace.
Improved Timely Project Delivery
PMI’s 2017 report revealed that prominent successful organizations have an average timely completion rate of 88% of their projects compared to underperforming enterprises, which can only manage a rate of 32%.
The report also discusses how successful enterprises complete 90% of their projects within the allocated budget while 75% of projects of the underperforming organizations go beyond the set budget for project completion.
One of the significant criteria attributed by the PMI report to the success rate of high-performing organizations is that they aim to narrow the gap between strategy formulation and execution, the fundamental principles of portfolio management.
Getting Started With Strategic IT Portfolio Management
The scope of strategic IT portfolio management is vast. It involves various approaches and methodologies. You need to identify the process and tactics that’s relevant for your business. Therefore, hiring professional IT portfolio solutions is one of the best ways to deploy portfolio management within your organization.
