What to look for in an IT Portfolio Management solution?

Many organizations looking to adopt a system to enable Portfolio Management disciplines have come to focus attention on the process of prioritizing investments in the Project Portfolio. To maximize the value of the IT Portfolio, organizations require a broader view and solutions that support the ongoing alignment and management of all IT investments including projects, applications and infrastructure. (For more information on why Project Portfolio Management is not enough, see How does IT Portfolio Management differ from Project Portfolio Management? )

"By 2004/05, we believe failure to classify and manage IT investments within a portfolio will put 15% of all enterprises at risk in terms of viability."

Louis Boyle, META Group

Organizations looking to maximize IT value require integrated business systems that manage the end to end business processes associated with portfolio management from capturing all demand for services through prioritization and selection of portfolios to the ongoing monitoring of health of projects, applications and infrastructure by managing all the work of IT, offer key benefits including:

Alignment of all IT investments with business objectives
Effective deployment and manage resources
Reduced redundancy and cost control
Measurement and communication of the value of investments
Visibility into client needs and satisfaction with services and applications.

These solutions should not be simply sophisticated reporting tools that require redundant data entry and custom integrations to a number of applications to gather information to perform is basic functions. Applications that rely primarily on other data sources greatly increase the cost of portfolio management systems to the business and provide out-dated and often inaccurate, incomplete information for decision-making. Excel-based solutions offer even greater challenges by significantly limiting visibility into the work of IT and access to the key information that drives these decisions. This is further compounded by the costly, error-prone manual handling of data required to support excel reporting and analysis.

Organizations evaluating IT Portfolio Management software need to search for solutions that ensure:

Consolidated views into all the demand for IT services
Consideration for applications and infrastructure as well as projects in the IT Portfolio Management process
Accurate, meaningful and timely information is supporting portfolio decision and performance management processes
Unique decision making processes and criteria such as risk, ROI are accommodated
Consideration for resource requirements during the planning process
An ability to capture the true cost of IT services and gain visibility into operations for effective resource allocation and financial management
Visibility into workflow around resource assignments in response to new project initiation, approved request distribution
Line of business clients are included in the process
Flexible reporting and notification to provide necessary visibility into ongoing performance

Compuware Changepoint optimizes an IT department's ability to govern and maximize the value of the entire IT portfolio of investments including projects, applications and infrastructure. To learn more about how Compuware can enable your organization to maximize IT value, contact us.