IT Project Portfolio Management

“Consistent processes help increase IT effectiveness while driving clearer views of portfolio metrics. If an organization doesn’t have control of its key IT processes it will be unsuccessful in managing its business. A PPM solution provides IT leadership with better insight into all the factors – organizational, financial and resource-related and customer satisfaction levels – that affect the performance and value of the portfolio.”

– Lori Ellsworth, SVP and GM, Compuware Changepoint

Changepoint's portfolio and investment planning capability allows IT executives to accurately assess IT investment opportunities while collaborating with line-of-business colleagues. IT can make better funding decisions based on business priorities and resource availability, and balance risk and return while exploring multiple funding scenarios. The use of defined, repeatable criteria and business processes help drive better decision making.



With Changepoint’s IT Project Portfolio Management (PPM), companies now have the power to determine which strategic projects should be funded and added to the portfolio based on key business criteria and in accordance with governance processes. This collaborative environment enables informed decision making and offers transparency into the process with the ability to:

  • create and track top-down investment goals that are used to “fund” each investment
  • collect all demand items from the business through easy-to-use forms and implement defined business processes for the review and approval of each proposed investment
  • build detailed time-phased budgets for each potential investment, including resource requirements and any other related costs, without the rigor of building a detailed project plan
  • select and prioritize proposed candidates for IT investments that best support business priorities, balancing risk and value
  • analyze alternate portfolios with flexible “what if” scenario capabilities and save prospective portfolio scenarios for future reference.

Once a proposed investment has been approved, Changepoint helps you manage resource allocation and provides visibility into overall project health via its Project Portfolio Management (PPM) capabilities.

IT Project Portfolio Management

Portfolios can be established and monitored based on configured metrics or KPIs. Portfolios can consist of any number of projects, or of other portfolios. Projects can belong to any number of portfolios and have different KPIs in each.

Changepoint’s IT PPM software allows you to track overall performance from a portfolio perspective through:

  • an unlimited number of portfolios and categories
  • pre-defined or customer-defined metrics per portfolio
  • establishment of portfolio and project-specific metric targets and allowable variance
  • dashboard visibility into the performance of any or all portfolios
  • what-if analysis to assess and review the performance of a portfolio.

PPM for IT

PPM capabilities within Changepoint give you unprecedented views into project and portfolio health through graphical summaries, including portfolio health assessments, project scorecards and portal visibility. Changepoint enables you to assess portfolio health using key metrics related to schedule, budget, satisfaction and quality, as well as other configurable metrics.

In addition, the entire project lifecycle, from planning, staffing and all the way through work execution and ongoing assessment can be managed in Changepoint.

Changepoint’s IT PPM functionality allows your organization to:

  • build simple or detailed project plans using the Changepoint Project Worksheet 
  • use proven best practices to enforce a repeatable project methodology
  • track and manage project risks, issues and change requests
  • build detailed budgets for all project costs
  • track actual time spent and forecast remaining time
  • prevent redundant, overlapping or underperforming projects
  • evaluate the conditions of each portfolio through graphical summaries (project scorecards, bubble charts and portal visibility)
  • conduct “what if” analysis to determine the impact of reallocating or reducing resources and responding to changing business priorities
  • improve IT’s ability to deliver by tracking key performance metrics.

Delivering on commitments on time and on budget is a critical component of an IT PPM solution, but true portfolio management does not end when a project is completed. A completed project results in a new or upgraded application or asset, which now becomes the domain of the application portfolio.

Application Portfolio Management

IT is responsible for supporting and maintaining the applications within the organization. This portfolio of applications consumes a large portion of the overall IT resources. Therefore, it is important to manage this portfolio in a similar manner to managing the project portfolio. Changepoint’s IT Project Portfolio Management provides the ability to accurately assess metrics such as cost, risk, performance and user satisfaction of your application portfolio — information that goes a long way in helping you maximize business value across the entire lifecycle.

Using Changepoint’s IT PPM, you can monitor, manage and conduct ongoing assessments of all applications to drive decision making. Changepoint puts you in control of your application portfolio by allowing you to:

  • eliminate redundancy in application investments by cataloging all investments in a single repository
  • drill down to individual applications to understand cost drivers, user satisfaction, value and risk from portfolio health summaries
  • engage in lifecycle decision-making processes to invest in, maintain, replace or retire each application.

Ongoing monitoring and analysis of the application portfolio enables IT organizations to develop more accurate strategic roadmaps for each application across its lifecycle. Measurements for risk, cost and value of an application are assessed and taken into consideration when building business cases for future work.