IT portfolio management is gaining importance as enterprise IT departments continue to grow in size and significance within their organizations. In addition to traditional responsibilities like managing networks, supporting user devices and maintaining websites, more and more IT departments are being tasked with developing new products and new workflows to help companies compete in the digital age. The expanding role of IT means that there are more projects underway at any given time, and there is more potential for conflict between project priorities and resource demands.
This is where IT portfolio management comes in. No enterprise can expect to coordinate its IT activities without a strategic perspective on its multitude of ongoing and planned projects. If you are an IT project manager who has recently taken on portfolio management responsibilities, you may be wondering where to start. The IT portfolio management best practices listed here will help you hit the ground running and keep your department’s work aligned with your company’s long-term goals.
Go One Step at a Time
If your organization isn’t taking a formal approach to IT portfolio management today, don’t try to go from zero to one hundred overnight. Take a staged or phased approach, and focus on implementing your portfolio management strategy in a single business unit or IT area before expanding through the rest of the department. This will help with change management, and will also let you work out any flaws in your process while you’re still at a small scale.
Measure Your Results
One of the keys to successful portfolio management is measuring the long-term benefits of the projects you have completed. This data (which may take months or even years to collect) should then be compared to expectations from the initial stages of each project. If you see discrepancies between what your projects were predicted to deliver and what they actually delivered, it’s time to re-think your project planning and approval process.
Use the Right Tools
It should go without saying that successful IT portfolio management is only possible when you use appropriate IT portfolio management software. Portfolio managers need the ability to track and report on a wide variety of activities, not just on a project by project basis, but across the entire enterprise. Cloud-based portfolio management solutions like Planview AdaptiveWork have become increasingly popular, not only because they’re easier and more cost-effective to implement, but because they include real-time reporting and collaboration tools that older solutions simply can’t match.
Want to learn more about strategies for IT portfolio management success? Take the time to explore Planview AdaptiveWork’s powerful, IT portfolio management software and find out how Planview AdaptiveWork can help you gain unprecedented visibility into task progress, resource allocations and more.
