Engagement Options

Application Portfolio Game Plan

In today’s enterprises, misalignment between business goals and IT delivery is a common problem, but is not usually due to a lack of financial investment in IT. In many companies, IT spending represents greater than 70% of total capital spending. IT spending is often the single largest capital investment that businesses make. Despite its magnitude, business and IT managers often treat the IT budget less like an investment and more like an unmanaged operating expense.

For example, linear thinking in IT planning, whereby applications are deployed and then run forever, leads to an endless proliferation of IT systems that is not sustainable. The practice of adding new software applications without retiring old ones will eventually cause the entire IT budget to be consumed by the maintenance and operations burden of legacy applications. So how does an organization manage this large IT cost component and major source of IT value?

To assure that portfolio decisions are made based on business value, decision-makers require credible facts upon which to base important business decisions through an on-going process. Application portfolio management (APM) provides these facts via a set of processes for managing software applications and projects as assets. Using APM, these assets move through lifecycles during which they are consistently evaluated to assess the value they provide for the business.

APM is a proven methodology for managing IT applications as assets that are retired at the end of their useful lives. It also provides a feedback mechanism that mitigates linear IT planning by turning it into a closed loop that feeds metrics for application retirement back into the software acquisition process. But to be effective, APM must become an integral part of the IT demand management, project approval, and application lifecycle management processes.

So how does an organization begin to get a handle on these issues? How should the organization proceed to implement the management disciplines that this sizable IT investment deserves? What are the critical success factors and improvement goals for your APM initiative?

To answer these questions, Burton Group works with your team to create an Application Portfolio Game Plan. The game plan structures your approach to begin implementing or to improve the APM discipline. Game planning examines how to successfully engage the business, to assess application portfolio health, to identify cost reductions, to depict project portfolio dependencies and how to improve processes as part of your APM effort.

To create the game plan, Burton Group consultants examine the following with your leadership team over the course of three-days of onsite interviews and discussions:

• IT investment and project portfolio governance
• The potential set of application portfolio assessment participants (e.g. business units, departments) based on strategic needs, likelihood of success and other factors
• Review existing portfolio management parameters: health, risk, value, and alignment, balance, and constraints.
• Required application portfolio assessment activities, outcomes and program phases
• The measures required to improve decision-making

Following our onsite meeting, Burton Group will provide you with a 10 to 15 page written game plan report. The report will include a current state assessment of APM practices, the game plan, and samples that can be used for data collection or the display of analysis results aligned with the plan. The duration of the engagement is typically two weeks. To start an engagement, call Homan Farahmand at 905.952.0966.