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Make Sense of Strategic Portfolio Management

Separate what’s new and valuable from bloated claims on the hype cycle.

  • As an IT leader, you’re responsible for steering the realization of business strategy through wise investments in and responsible stewardship of assets, applications, portfolios, programs, products, and projects.
  • You need a tool to help align goals and facilitate processes across business units. You’re aware of a tool space called Strategic Portfolio Management, and it looks like it could help, but you’re unsure of how it’s different from some of the existing tools you already pay for and don’t use to their full functionality.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

As a software space, strategic portfolio management lacks a unified definition. In the same way that it took many years for project portfolio management to stabilize as a concept distinct from traditional enterprise project management, strategic portfolio management is experiencing a similar period of formational uncertainty. Unpacking what’s truly new and valuable in helping to define strategy and drive strategic outcomes versus what’s just repackaged as SPM is an important first step, but it's not an easy undertaking.

Impact and Result

In this concise publication, we will cut through the marketing to unpack what strategic portfolio management is, and what makes it distinct from similar capabilities. We’ll help to situate you in the space and assess the extent to which your tooling needs can be met by a strategic portfolio management offering.


Make Sense of Strategic Portfolio Management Research & Tools

1. Make Sense of Strategic Portfolio Management Storyboard – A guide to help you drive strategic outcomes.

In this concise publication we introduce you to strategic portfolio management and consider the extent to which your organization can leverage an SPM application to help drive strategic outcomes.

2. Strategic Portfolio Management Needs Assessment Tool – Use this tool to determine if your organization can benefit from the features and functionality of an SPM approach.

Use this Excel workbook to determine if your organization can benefit from the features and functionality of an SPM approach or whether you need something more like a traditional project portfolio management tool.


Member Testimonials

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.

9.0/10


Overall Impact

$2,000


Average $ Saved

5


Average Days Saved

Client

Experience

Impact

$ Saved

Days Saved

National Research Council of Canada

Guided Implementation

9/10

$2,000

5

The analyst was very knowledgeable in the subject and was able to relay his knowledge in a simplistic way, easy to understand and comprehend.


Make Sense of Strategic Portfolio Management

Separate what's new and valuable from bloated claims on the hype cycle.

Analyst Perspective

Do you need strategic portfolio management, or do you need to do portfolio management more strategically?

Travis Duncan, Research Director, PPM and CIO Strategy

Travis Duncan
Research Director, PPM and CIO Strategy
Info-Tech Research Group

While the market is eager to get users into what they're calling "strategic portfolio management," there's a lot of uncertainty out there about what this market is and how it's different from other, more established portfolio disciplines – most significantly, project portfolio management.

Indeed, if you look at how the space is covered within the industry, you'll encounter a dog's breakfast of players, a comparison of apples and oranges: Jira in the same quadrants as Planisware, Smartsheets in the same profiles as Planview and ServiceNow. While each of the individual players is impressive, their areas of focus are unique and the extent to which they should be compared together under the category of strategic portfolio management is questionable.

It speaks to some of the grey area within the SPM space more generally, which is at a bit of a crossroads: Will it formally shed the guardrails of its antecedents to become its own space, or will it devolve into a bait and switch through which capabilities that struggled to gain much traction beyond IT settings seek to infiltrate the business and grow their market share under a different name?

Part of it is up to the rest of us as users and potential customers. Clarifying what we need before we jump into something simply because our prior attempts failed will help determine whether we need a unique space for strategic portfolio management or whether we simply need to do portfolio management more strategically.

Executive Summary

Your Challenge Common Obstacles Info-Tech's Approach
  • As an IT leader, you're responsible for steering the realization of business strategy through wise investments in/ and responsible stewardship of: assets, applications, portfolios, programs, products, and projects.
  • You need a tool to help align goals and facilitate processes and communications across business units. You're aware of a tool space called strategic portfolio management, and it looks like it could help, but you're unsure of how it's different from some of the existing tools you already license.
  • As a software space, strategic portfolio management lacks a unified definition. Unpacking what's truly new in helping to define strategy and drive strategic outcomes versus what's just repackaged as SPM is no small undertaking.
  • Because SPM can span different business units, ways of working, and roles, getting buy-in, alignment, and adoption can be even more precarious than it is when implementing other types of solutions.
  • In this concise publication, we will cut through the marketing to unpack what strategic portfolio management is and what makes it distinct from similar capabilities.
  • Assess the extent to which your tooling needs can be met by a strategic portfolio management offering or the extent to which you may need to look at other software categories.
  • With a better understanding of the space, we hope to help facilitate better internal discussions around the value of SPM for your business needs.

Info-Tech Insight
In the same way that it took many years for PPM to stabilize as a concept distinct from traditional enterprise project management, strategic portfolio management is experiencing a similar period of formational uncertainty. In a space that can be all things to all users, clarify your actual needs before jumping onto a bandwagon and ending up with something that you don't need, and that the organization can't adopt.

Strategic portfolio management is enterprise portfolio management

Evolved from various other capabilities and vendor solutions, strategic portfolio management (SPM) seeks to connect strategy to execution.

While the concept of 'strategic portfolio management' has been written about within project portfolio management circles for nearly 20 years, SPM, as a distinct organizational competence and software category, is a relatively new and largely vendor-driven capability.

First emerging in the discourse during the mid-to-late 2010s, SPM has evolved from its roots in traditional enterprise project portfolio management. Though, as we will discuss, it has other antecedents not limited to PPM.

In this publication, we'll unpack what SPM is, how it is distinct (and, in turn, how it is not distinct) from PPM and other capabilities, and we will consider the extent to which your organization can and should leverage an SPM application to help drive strategic outcomes.

–The increasing need to deliver value from digital initiatives is giving rise to strategic portfolio management, a digital investment management discipline that enables strategy realization in complex dynamic environments."
– OnePlan, "Is Strategic Portfolio Management the Future of PPM?"

Only 2% of business leaders are confident that they will achieve 80% to 100% of their strategic objectives.
Source: Smith, 2022

Put strategic portfolio management in context

SPM is a new stage in the history of project portfolio management more generally. While it's emerging as a distinct capability, and it borrows from capabilities beyond PPM, unpacking its distinctiveness is best done by first understanding its source.

Understand the recent triggers for strategic portfolio management

Triggers for the emergence of strategic portfolio management in the discourse include the pace of technology-introduced change, the waning of enterprise project management, and challenges around enterprise PPM tool adoption.

Spot the difference?

Scope, focus, and audience are just a few of the factors distinguishing what the market calls "SPM" from traditional PPM.

Project Portfolio Management Differentiator Strategic Portfolio Management
Work-Level (Tactical) Primary Orientation High-Level (Strategic)
CIO Accountable for Outcomes CxO
Project Manager Responsible for Outcomes Product Management Organization
Project Managers, PMO Staff Targeted Users Business Leaders, ePMO Staff
Project Portfolio(s) Essential Scope Multi-Portfolio (Project, Application, Product, Program, etc.)
IT Project Delivery and Business Results Delivery Core Focus Business Strategy and Change Delivery
Project Scope Change Impact Sensitivity Enterprise Scope
IT and/or Business Benefit Language of Value Value Stream
Project Timelines Main View Strategy Roadmaps
Resource Capacity Primary Currency Money
Work-Assignment Details Modalities of Planning Value Milestones & OKRs
Work Management Modalities of Execution Governance (Project, Product, Strategy, Program, etc.)
Project Completion Definitions of "Done" Business Capability Realization

Info-Tech Insight
The distinction between the two capabilities is not necessarily as black and white as the table above would have it (some "PPM" tools offer what we're identifying above as "SPM" capabilities), but it can be helpful to think in these binaries when trying to distinguish the two capabilities. At the very least, SPM broadens its scope to target more executive and business users, and functions best when it's speaking at a higher level, to a business audience.

Strategic portfolio management offers a more holistic view of the enterprise

At its best, strategic portfolio management can accommodate various paradigms of work management and incorporate different types of portfolio management.

Perhaps the biggest evolution from traditional PPM that strategic portfolio management promises is that it casts a wider net in terms of the types of work it tracks (and how it tracks that work) and the types of portfolios it accommodates.

Not bound to the concepts of "projects" and a "project portfolio" specifically, SPM broadens its scope to encompass capabilities like product and product portfolio management, enterprise architecture management, security and risk management, and more.

  • Where a PPM solution only shows one piece of the puzzle, SPM looks at the entire investment ecosystem, tracking strategic goals, the ideas generated to help achieve those goals, and all the various kinds of investments made in the service of those goals.
  • what's more, where traditional PPM tools required users to adhere to a certain way of working and managing tasks, SPM is more flexible, relying on integrations across various ways of working to provide higher-level insight on the progress of work and the achievement of goals.

Deliver business strategy and change effectively

Info-Tech's Strategic Portfolio Management Framework

"An SPM tool will capture business strategy, business capabilities, operating models, the enterprise architecture and the project portfolio with unmatched visibility into how they all relate. This will give...a robust understanding of the impact of a proposed IT change " and enable IT and business to act like cocreators driving innovation."
– Paula Ziehr

You might need a strategic portfolio management tool if–

If you find yourself facing any of these situations, it might be time to step away from your PPM tool and into an SPM approach:

  • Your organization is facing a large implementation that will cross multiple departmental units and requires alignment across senior leadership (e.g. a digital transformation initiative).
  • You currently have disparate systems tracking different portfolios (project, product, applications, etc.) and types of investments, but lack insight into the whole in terms of how work efforts and investments tie back to strategy realization.
  • You are an ePMO or a strategy realization office that doesn't manage work necessarily, but that rather ensures that the work, assets, and capabilities that are funded connect to strategy and drive the realization of strategy.

Sixty one percent of leaders acknowledge their companies struggle to bridge the gap between creating a strategy and executing on that strategy.
Source: StrategyBlocks, 2020

Make Sense of Strategic Portfolio Management preview picture

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.

MEMBER RATING

9.0/10
Overall Impact

$2,000
Average $ Saved

5
Average Days Saved

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve.

Read what our members are saying

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