Taking an effective portfolio and program management approach can unite an organization?s efforts at every level. Comparable to financial portfolio management, PPM is a completely different way of seeing, assessing and planning the business.
PPM provides information that links business needs with business technology activities, enabling a converged viewpoint that?s focused on business outcomes, rather than advancing the interests of one group versus another. With a portfolio viewpoint, you can evaluate the payback of a project within the context of many projects that are contributing to the achievement of a business goal. In forward-thinking companies, business technology and technology portfolios become inseparable from other portfolios; they become simply another component of a business initiative.
To provide an enterprisewide perspective for executives and managers and to ensure that the organization is deploying the resources needed to meet its business objectives, you should develop a portfolio of assets and activities that includes the following:
? Technology asset portfolios include business applications and tools, data and infrastructure (hardware, operating systems and systems software).
? Nonfinancial asset portfolios include an organization?s personnel resources, the business processes it performs and the intellectual property it owns.
? Project-level portfolios include planned undertakings of related activities?which have a beginning and an end?to reach an objective. Having an enterprise portfolio of projects that are available to executives and managers enables better monitoring and exception-based management by allowing issues to float to the top.
? Enterprise project portfolios help with a variety of activities?such as decision making?by identifying synergies and redundancies in projects; by enabling knowledge asset reuse through the identification of opportunities to reuse intellectual property assets; and by providing accurate, timely information on project-related demand through resource and demand management.
? Program-level portfolios include groups of related projects that all need to be completed in order to reach a certain level of benefits. They are managed in a coordinated way to obtain a level of benefits and control that is not available by managing them individually.
? Service delivery portfolios include the operational nonproject-related efforts that are required to support business operations. This is a critical piece when analyzing how well the organization is performing, and whether the company is working on the right things based on business objectives.
Diana Mirakaj is the senior vice president of corporate development at BTM Corporation. BTM Corporation innovates new business models and enhances financial performance by converging business and technology with its products and intellectual property. ? 2009 BTM Corporation | info@btmcorporation.com
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