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Integrate Portfolios to Create Exceptional Customer Value

Bring your project, product, and application portfolios together; bring your teams together.

  • Through growth, both organic and acquisition, you have a significant footprint of projects and applications.
  • Projects and applications have little in common with one another, all with their own history and pedigree.
  • You need to look across your portfolio of applications and projects to see if they will collectively help the organization achieve its goals.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Stakeholders don’t care about the minutia and activities involved in project and application portfolio management.
  • Timely delivery of effective and important applications that deliver value throughout their life are the most important factors driving business satisfaction with IT.

Impact and Result

  • Define an organizing principle that will structure your projects and applications in a way that matters to your stakeholders.
  • Bridge application and project portfolio data using the organizing principle that matters to communicate with stakeholders across the organization.
  • Create a dashboard that brings together the benefits of both project and application portfolio management to improve visibility and decision making.

Integrate Portfolios to Create Exceptional Customer Value Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should integrate your application and project portfolios, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the three ways we can support you in completing this project.

Integrate Portfolios to Create Exceptional Customer Value – Executive Brief
Integrate Portfolios to Create Exceptional Customer Value – Phases 1-3

1. Define the principle that organizes your portfolios, objectives, and stakeholders

To bring your portfolios together, you need to start with learning about your objectives, principles, and stakeholders.

Integrate Portfolios to Create Exceptional Customer Value – Phase 1: Define the Principle That Organizes Your Portfolios, Objectives, and Stakeholders
Integrated Portfolio Dashboard Tool
Integrated Portfolio Dashboard Tool – Example

2. Take stock of what brings you closer to your goals

Get a deeper understanding of what makes up your organizing principle before learning about your applications and projects that are aligned with your principles.

Integrate Portfolios to Create Exceptional Customer Value – Phase 2: Take Stock of What Brings You Closer to Your Goals

3. Bring it all together

Bound by your organizing principles, bring your projects and applications together under a single dashboard. Once defined, determine the rollout and communication plan that suits your organization.

Integrate Portfolios to Create Exceptional Customer Value – Phase 3: Bring It All Together
Integrated Portfolio Communication and Roadmap Plan

Workshop: Integrate Portfolios to Create Exceptional Customer Value

Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

Module 1: Looking at Your Principles

The Purpose

  • Determine your organizational objectives and organizing principle.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • A clear understanding of where you need to go as an organization.
  • A clear way to enable all parts of your portfolio to come together.

Activities

Outputs

1.1

Determine your organization’s objectives.

1.2

Determine your key stakeholders.

1.3

Define your organizing principle.

  • Determined organizing principle for your applications and projects
1.4

Decompose your organizing principle into its core components.

Module 2: Understanding Your Applications

The Purpose

Get a clear view of the applications that contribute to your organization’s objectives.

Key Benefits Achieved

A key element of IT value delivery is its applications. Gaining awareness allows you to evaluate if the right value is being provided.

Activities

Outputs

2.1

Determine your complete list of applications.

  • List of applications
2.2

Determine the health of your applications.

  • Application list with health statistics filled in
2.3

Link your applications to the organization’s core components.

  • List of applications with health metrics bound to the organization’s core components

Module 3: Understanding Your Projects

The Purpose

Get a clear view of your project portfolio and how it relates to your applications and their organizing principle.

Key Benefits Achieved

An understanding of your project portfolio.

Activities

Outputs

3.1

List all in-flight projects and vital health statistics.

  • List of projects
3.2

Map out the key programs and projects in your portfolio to the application’s core components.

  • List of projects mapped to applications they impact

Module 4: Rolling Out the New Dashboard

The Purpose

  • Bring together your application and project portfolios in a new, easy-to-use dashboard with a full rollout plan.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • Dashboard available for use
  • Roadmap and communication plan to make dashboard implementable and tangible

Activities

Outputs

4.1

Test the dashboard.

  • Validated dashboards
4.2

Define your refresh cadence.

4.3

Plan your implementation.

4.4

Develop your communication plan.

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About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst

Get the help you need in this 3-phase advisory process. You'll receive 8 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.

Guided Implementation 1: Define the principle that organizes your portfolios, objectives, and stakeholders
  • Call 1: Discuss Info-Tech’s perspective and kick-off this initiative.
  • Call 2: Review your organization’s objectives, stakeholders, and preferred organizing principle.

Guided Implementation 2: Take stock of what brings you closer to your goals
  • Call 1: Articulate the elements that make up your organizing principles.
  • Call 2: Review your application’s health metrics and how they align to your organization’s core organizing principle and components.
  • Call 3: Align your list of projects and their statuses to the organization’s core organizing principle and components.

Guided Implementation 3: Bring it all together
  • Call 1: Review how your project portfolio links to your application portfolios and finalize the dashboard view.
  • Call 2: Define a plan to test your dashboard.
  • Call 3: Define your implementation roadmap, refresh cadence, and communication plan.

Authors

Cole Cioran

Ari Glaizel

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