Achieving balance
IT Portfolio Management
Enabling enterprise transformation


Day 1 Understanding IT Portfolio Management

1. Transformation. Enabling strategic alignment.
• Why evolutionary change is no longer sufficient
• Accountability, governance, and compliance drivers
• Moving beyond compliance: Strategic vs. reactive    transformation
• The enterprise context for organizational
    transformation
  - Strategy, Governance, Architecture & Business     Solutions
• Raising the bar on the role of IT: From cost control to value and innovation

2. Portfolio. Understanding what the enterprise invests in.
• What is an IT portfolio?
• Recognizing the organization's existing IT portfolio
• How many projects are chasing how many resources?
• The business case for IT portfolio management
• IT Portfolio Management processes
  - Selection and retirement of assets
  - Analysis of investments
  - Control and review of performance
  - Evaluation against objectives and goals
• Criteria for a successfully managed portfolio

3. Decision. What’s important for your organization?
• Establishing criteria for IT investment decisions
• Recognizing strategic drivers for your organization
• Risk, reward and other dimensions of decision criteria
• Identifying architecture principles that provide tactical direction
• Supporting decisions with leadership

4. Architecture. Implications for IT Portfolio Management.
• Understanding IT architecture in a portfolio context
• Planning the enterprise's migration from "as-is" to "to-be"
• Recognizing transformation drivers and constraints
• How much architecture is just enough?
• Achieving capabilities, not just systems
• Adaptive Enterprise Architecture: Setting transformation blueprints

5. Strategic IT investment.
    Portfolio management for assessing investments.
• Understanding IT decisions in a portfolio context
• Bringing transparency into the IT investment decision process
• Return-on-investment (ROI) and justification for proposed investments
• How to evaluate very different projects
• What kinds of information do executives most need?

6. Effectiveness. Getting the most value for the governance effort.
• Revisiting IT portfolio objectives
• Active executive leadership -- Being able to say "No" and "Enough!"
• Achieving visibility and consistency in IT investment decisions
• Balancing a portfolio
• Understanding the limitations of IT Portfolio Management
• Managing cultural change

Day 2: Implementing IT Portfolio Management

7. Baseline. Understanding the enterprise's current portfolio.
• IT inventories: Where they succeed and where they fail
• What constitutes value for an existing program or system?
• Recognizing business capabilities in projects, programs, and systems
• Assessing the current portfolio's strengths and weaknesses
• Identifying legacy, transitional, and target systems

8. Assessment. Justifying projects and programs in a portfolio context.
• Establishing and running an assessment framework
  - The role of architecture and decision dimensions
  - Key performance parameters (KPPs)
  - Workbook mechanics
• Lessons learned in establishing a scoring process
• The investment review process
• Overcoming gaming strategies -- Managing the integrity of the process

9. Reengineering. Strategies for legacy assets in the IT Portfolio.
• Recognizing when to replace, refresh, or reengineer
• Recovering lost value from existing assets
• Analyzing the gap between requirements and system capabilities
• Assessing the sunk cost vs. new investment trade-off

10. Holistic control.
      Reviewing both individual projects and the entire portfolio.
• The importance of a regular, consistent review process
• Techniques for review of investments
  - The in-progress review
  - The annual review
  - Legacy systems in operation
• Risk management
• Pitfalls of control and review processes

11. Visibility. Presenting understandable analysis to senior management.
• What do executives need to make the best decisions?
• The Dashboard -- making trends and issues clear and evident
• The role of the investment review board

12. Achieving balance.
      Managing alignment between IT and enterprise strategies.
• Supporting transformation in the enterprise
  - People and processes
  - Active executive leadership
  - Challenges for the IT organization
• Restraining potential gatekeepers and bureaucrats
• Recap of key lessons learned in the trenches

Copyright 2008 Intervista Inc.


(Intervista is now offering DAMA & EAIG members a 10% discount on all of our courses)



Group discounts do not apply for customized courses. Educational sessions scheduled outside continental United States and Canada are subject to a 20% surcharge on tuition fees.

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Professional Accreditation
Certain professional associations may recognize Intervista courses for credit to satisfy your continuous education requirement. Present the course outline to your board for confirmation. These courses provide approximately 14 hours of advanced instruction.

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© 2008 Intervista Inc.

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