Portfolio and Investment Planning

Make more informed decisions and optimize your IT portfolio

If you can’t prioritize projects based on quantifiable business needs, how do you decide which projects to focus on? Portfolio and investment planning processes ensure you allocate your IT staff to produce the best possible outcomes: deliverables aligned with overall business goals that will have an impact on the business.

Changepoint - Portfolio and Investment Planning

Before adopting the discipline of comprehensive portfolio and investment planning, funding decisions were made with no clear measurement of contribution to the organization, no visibility into delivery cost or understanding of IT’s actual ability to deliver. While the importance of this fundamental information is now clearly understood, automation is required to truly provide the necessary insight into IT.

Better decision-making through portfolio planning

With Changepoint’s portfolio planning capabilities, IT executives and their line-of-business colleagues 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.

Changepoint’s portfolio planning capabilities help business and IT executives select and prioritize proposed candidates for IT investments that best support business priorities, balancing risk and value. The solution is adaptable to support your current approach, and will allow you to grow to new levels of portfolio management maturity. Executives can use a smaller sample of simple, repeatable criteria to evaluate portfolio decisions, or enable a sophisticated stage-gate methodology with detailed information on budgets and other key criteria.

Drive portfolio decisions

With Changepoint, organizations can define and collect the key business information needed to drive portfolio decisions. Before funding decisions are made, surveys can be created to gather information for Portfolio and Investment Planning from across IT. Subject matter experts can build out a detailed budget for each candidate, which includes resource requirements and any other related costs, without the rigor of building a project. Identification of the business objectives addressed ensures alignment. Other metrics needed for decision-making, such as detailed financial analyses of the ROI for each candidate, provide insight into what a completed project will accomplish financially in a specific timeframe. Changepoint surveys help foster better communication and collaboration, which assists in the use of consistent criteria.

The Changepoint solution automates the key business process to collect this critical information and ensures that key stakeholders have visibility into and participate in the process through configurable workflow capabilities.

Conduct "what if" analyses

Once the complete view of each candidate is obtained, organizations can drive to final decisions using comprehensive scenario capabilities to conduct "what if" analyses offering careful consideration of alternate portfolios. Graphical analysis allows comparison of alternatives against key business metrics, as well as resource demand capacity analysis. Potential work must be considered in the context of all other types of work (i.e. maintenance requests) already underway with IT, not just project work.

Changepoint’s comprehensive approach to portfolio planning ensures IT remains aligned with the business, provides the basis for evaluation of performance across the delivery life cycle, and sets the stage for a clear assessment of benefit realization after delivery to the business.