If you are responsible for managing portfolios of technology programs and projects, your success in maximizing business outcomes with finite resources is vital to your company’s future in a digital world. New management techniques can help you break the mold.
Project portfolio management is not a new concept. As technology executives, we all do it; and chances are that we are good at it based on traditional norms. This article is to redefine the art of the possible for project portfolio executives during digital transformation, and offer them a few new techniques.
Project portfolio management is the art and science of making decisions about investment mix, operational constraints, resource allocation, project priority and schedule. It is about understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the portfolio, predicting opportunities and threats, matching investments to objectives, and optimizing trade offs encountered in the attempt to maximize return, i.e., outcomes over investments, at a given appetite for risk, i.e., uncertainty about return.
Prior to digital transformation, the primary goal of portfolio executives was to maximize the delivery of technology outputs within budget and schedule. This IT-centric mandate emphasized output over outcome, and risk over return. Furthermore, the traditional IT financial framework was essentially a cost-recovery model that wasn’t suitable for portfolio executives to articulate how to maximize business outcomes on technology investments. Consequently, portfolio management was marginalized to a bureaucratic overhead and a nice-to-have extension of the program management function.
Read More: Advancements in project portfolio management of technology investments