Yesterday, Gartner analyst Matt Light offered some useful recommendations for portfolio managers who need to optimize their company’s IT investments. Light was giving a presentation called “The Optimal Portfolio: Balancing Project and Application Costs, Risks and Benefits.”

One early step is to do an inventory of current IT investments, then do a triage. Light said portfolio managers should use the “TIME” method to sort out investments:

· Tolerate: Keep old systems that still work pretty well, giving at least 80% of needed function.

· Integrate: Join key systems with the rest of environment to improve flexibility and effectiveness.

· Migrate: Move to newer, better technologies where there’s a business advantage.

· Eliminate: Get rid of applications that don't do much because you're paying a lot to maintain them.

Light cited one energy company that saved $10 million by reducing its IT portfolio. Because the company had fewer investments to manage, fewer projects got into trouble. The number of healthy IT projects rose 70%.

One of the attendees asked how you decide whether to kill a troubled project or try to fix it. Light cautioned against letting the money you already invested in the project to sway your decision about whether to keep going. He said if the project has deviated 30-50% from the original schedule and spending plan, revisit the business case and look at it with fresh eyes, without preconceptions.

Submit a Comment | Permalink

In his Tuesday morning presentation, “Overcoming the Five Major Hurdles of BPM Adoption,” Gartner Research Director Michael Melenovsky quoted some advice from Toyota that clients considering business process improvement (BPI) would do well to remember:

“We get brilliant results from average people managing brilliant processes. We observe that our competitors often get average (or worse) results from brilliant people managing broken processes.”

So how do you create those brilliant processes? Melenovsky offers five key barriers that organizations often encounter with BPM, and how to overcome them:

• The need for strategic alignment: Prioritize processes by linking them to the competitive landscape.


• Changing your corporate culture and providing leadership: Identify high-level executives and give them ownership of key processes.


• Changing people: Empower the employees who execute processes to take ownership of improving those processes.


• Establishing governance: Establish a governance system that can quickly resolve cross-functional difficulties.


• Creating new methods: Adopt a multilevel, iterative approach for continued process improvement.

Finally, Melenovsky said, IT needs to adopt business process management suite (BPMS) tools to get quick process results.

Submit a Comment | Permalink

Attendees in the Program and Portfolio Management (PPM) track got a chance to hear from experts in the field yesterday afternoon. Gartner analysts Matt Light and Ruth Steinberg hosted a panel discussion called “PPM in Practice.” Four experts shared their insights and answered questions from the audience:

• Michael Menke of HP
• San Retna of Transformaction
• Anand Sanwal of American Express
• Mark Stabler of AAA of Northern California, Utah and Nevada

Retna started things off by offering this definition: Portfolio management is about evaluating how investments can be made to achieve the company's strategic objectives. Retna then outlined a cyclical process for putting portfolio management into action:

1. Develop strategy
2. Translate strategy into something that can be put into action
3. Optimize portfolio
4. Deliver excellence through programs
5. Deliver excellence through projects
6. Realize benefits

The panel agreed that step #2, translating the strategy, is important but often overlooked. The tendency is for everyone who proposes a project is to link it to the nebulous statements with which companies explain their strategic goals. For example, almost every company makes “improving customer satisfaction” part of its strategy.

To deal with nebulous statements, one of the panelists said that his company’s portfolio management office holds quarterly or semiannual reviews of projects and investment ideas. Each business unit offers up for review the bottom 10% of projects in terms of performance, plus it makes proposals for new IT investments. Decision makers from the business units explain what’s going on with the current projects and why the proposed new projects would be valuable. The portfolio management office then recommends how to reallocate resources among all the current and proposed projects to maximize benefits to the business. The percentage of the overall IT budget that the portfolio management office reallocates is small, but it will increase as this approach shows results and gains support within the company.

3 Comments | Submit a Comment | Permalink

As an institution, the project management office (PMO) is undergoing change. The PMO will take on a wider span of responsibility within the enterprise, and that will require learning new business skills, which IT workers have not traditionally had or that they are actually uncomfortable with. That was a key theme of Gartner analyst Matt Light’s presentation yesterday on “The Emergent PMO: Projects, Programs and Portfolios.”

Light gave one example of how the PMO will have to change. In their relatively short existence, PMOs have sometimes gotten a reputation for slowing things. Rather than going right out and starting an IT project, business units and their IT supporters have to pass it by the PMO first. However, Light pointed out that the PMO can support agile decision making through the process of chartering projects.

The PMO needs to establish a consistent chartering procedure. The procedure needs to be flexible. One chartering process will not work for systematic, long-term projects and for fast projects to take advantage of opportunities that won’t exist for very long. The former needs a heavy-weight evaluation while the latter needs a speedy evaluation. But the basic process should be the same for every project so that people become familiar with it and it doesn’t seem to them that they have to wrestle with a whole new chartering procedure for every project.

By getting involved up front with chartering, the PMO helps ensure the rest of the project will go smoothly. In addition, the PMO can use its new, higher position within the enterprise to make faster decisions about projects. To initiate a worthwhile project more quickly, the PMO can use its closer relationship to executives (often through a governance board) to recommend faster approval. The PMO can also establish a process that will encourage the individual project manager to alert the company to problems. Thus, this process can lead to killing off bad projects more quickly. As Light says, sometimes you need to slow things down to speed them up.

Submit a Comment | Permalink

At Symposium, Gartner is presenting the analysts who do the PPM research, real world PPM practitioners from user organizations, and a community of peers to collaborate with. Now you get to hear from a Gartner practitioner, Ruth Steinberg, who leads our very successful Critical Program Management Consulting practice.
Gartner’s Critical Program Management Practice helps our clients in delivering their most critical initiatives successfully by applying the rigor and discipline of strong and independent program management practices that identify and manage risks, schedule and costs. In the session, “Guidelines for Complex Program Management”, Ruth will share proven practices and the tools and templates that has made this practice so successful.

Submit a Comment | Permalink

No one describes the interactions between them, which is key to whether any of the management activities we apply against the individual portfolio will do any good. In the session, “The Optimal Portfolio: Balancing Project and Application Costs, Risks & Benefits,” on Wednesday, October 11 at 9:30 a.m., Matt Light looks at the important links between the project/investment portfolio and the application portfolio. Too many IT organizations suffer the “death of a thousand cuts:” letting insatiable demand for application and infrastructure maintenance and support slash away at their resource capacity till little or nothing is left. “Keeping the lights on” is important, and aligned with basic needs of the business, but should be balanced with other – less basic, and usually riskier – opportunities to advance business goals with innovative and enhanced services and systems. This presentation gives guidance in how to consistently get, and keep, your portfolio balance.

Submit a Comment | Permalink

By this point, we all know our Myers-Briggs personality profile, be it ENTP, ISFJ or somewhere in between. But do you know what personality type best describes your organization? Ensuring success in enterprise initiatives requires a deep understanding of the "personality" of the business. The Gartner Enterprise Personality Profile (EPP) is a method for gaining insight into the relationship between strategic goals, specific initiatives and the cultural biases that enable or impinge the effectiveness of the organization.

We are presenting an interactive workshop (that means we are putting you to work) that will show how the EPP methodology is used on Sunday, October 8 at 2:30 p.m. The audience will break up into groups that will work through assigned scenarios using materials supplied by Gartner. The outcome of the workshop will be a better understanding of how EPP insight is used. The session is entitled, “Using Your Enterprise Personality Profile to Ensure Success in Your Projects and Programs.” Come work with the team that developed this great tool.

Submit a Comment | Permalink

We've got a panel of practitioners who don’t just attempt IT project portfolio management – they do it and succeed. They’re taking a break for their real jobs to share their insights with our Symposium PPM community.

Three sophisticated practitioners of IT project portfolio management share their experiences, contrast their approaches and analyze “best-fit” factors with Matt Light, a senior Gartner analyst covering PPM, and Ruth Steinberg, the leader of Gartner’s Critical Program Management consulting practice at a Symposium session called “PPM In Practice: A Panel”. So come and complement your Symposium experience with some real-life, real-time practices we think you'll find interesting and helpful in your own PPM endeavors.

Submit a Comment | Permalink

With all due respect to Ms. Stewart, is business-IT alignment a good thing? Or is it more like two rocks tied together going for a swim? Either way, Program and Portfolio Management leaders live very close to the “business-IT boundary.” Alignment is not an academic exercise, it’s a survival strategy. That’s why it’s important for you to attend the session entitled, “Customize Your IT Leadership Role to Achieve Maximum Business Impact” presented by Ellen Kitzis.

For many IT leaders, aligning IT with the business is a constant but elusive goal. Alignment is often viewed as the business and IT running in parallel worlds, maintaining a common direction but separated by distance. This view is self-defeating given that the goal of alignment is to bring business and IT together to optimize the effective use and contribution of IT. But, one size does not fit all. Ellen will arm you with our approach to customizing your role for maximum effectiveness.

1 Comment | Submit a Comment | Permalink

We held our pre-event audioconference yesterday for the Program & Portfolio Management Community, highlighting key agenda sessions, Gartner analysts attending, and various activities onsite. The call was hosted by Gartner Research VP & Gartner Fellow Emeritus Audrey Apfel.

If you weren't able to join us, we have the next best thing: an MP3 audio recording of the ATC. It serves as a great primer for Symposium/ITxpo, and will help you get the most out of the event as Community members responsible for program and portfolio management in your organization.

Call Highlights include:

- A discussion led by Research VP and Gartner Fellow Emeritus Audrey Apfel, about the challenges, issues and opportunities that sourcing, procurement and vendor relationship executives face today.

- A preview of some of the key, recommended conference sessions for Program & Portfolio Management Symposium Community members.

- A review of some of the key Gartner Analysts who will participate in Symposium/ITxpo and their areas of coverage.

- A look at the Community-specific experiences planned for Symposium/ITxpo, as well as some of the other program highlights for the week.

- Q&A from the audience regarding the above.

We look forward to welcoming our Program & Portfolio Management Symposium Community members to Symposium/ITxpo this year.

Submit a Comment | Permalink

As part of Gartner’s IT Leaders offerings, we have a focus on Program and Portfolio Management and leaders in those roles. In addition to the basic challenge of solid project execution, these leaders deal with coordination of multiple projects across a wide scope, being managed as a complex program, or governing, balancing and prioritizing competing projects and programs in an overall portfolio. In either case, it’s necessary to forge new ground within IT and the business, without a standard recipe book for these emerging disciplines. At Symposium, I'll present the Program and Portfolio Management Activity Cycle – the main activities those managing program and portfolio functions need to perform. I'll describe where you need to do more, where you need to do less and where innovation counts. The presentation, Trading Money and Time for Results,” is on Monday, October 9 at 2 p.m. See you there.

Submit a Comment | Permalink

Need to get out of Governance spaghetti? Overlapping councils, committees, decision rights, etc. Then head on over to “Finding the 'Sweet Spots' in IT Governance, Strategy and Value” presented by Ellen Kitzis on Thursday, October 12 at 9:30 a.m. We need a fresh approach with simple, practical advice and Ellen, a leading analyst and author, will deliver in this revealing session.

Submit a Comment | Permalink

Determining the business value of our IT investments is an ongoing issue. Recent research shows that 71 percent of CEOs and CIOs are demanding new ways to demonstrate business value of IT. Well, what more can be said here? We have two presentations with two very different perspectives: First, "IT Investment Decisions presented by George Mansour and Barb Gomolski will be held bright and early Wednesday, October 11 at 8 a.m. The session introduces decision-makers to an alternative approach for maximizing overall business value through the use of optimization and simulation techniques capable of enhancing the decision-making process at the executive level. And second, a presentation given by myself and Tina Nunno entitled "IT Has Value, But There Is No Value in Determining What It Is" on Thursday, October 12 at 1:45 p.m. It's part of the "Disruptions, Discontinuities and the Unexpected" track.

We use these sessions to present unconventional research positions outside of our mainstream positions and agendas that will make you think and rethink where you are and what you've been doing. The premise here is that despite all of the well-researched methodologies, models, frameworks and analysis, we seem to get no closer to answering the question on business value. Determining business value will remain very hard to do, and that attempting the activity at all is most assuredly a big waste of time. We will face the brutal reality of the box we’ve found ourselves in, and start to forge a way out, and the organization will be better off for it. Come hear all the perspectives and put them together for your best personal outcome.

Submit a Comment | Permalink

As the PMO becomes a widespread organizational approach, some IT organizations struggle with its role in IT governance. First question should be "Which "P" do I focus on? PMOs stretch across projects, programs and portfolios. They can be permanent or temporary. They often take on business and IT joint initiatives. Enterprises can have zero, one, or several PMOs and be successful. There are some critical success factors that span all the styles, and others that are distinct based on the particular scope of responsibility. Drop in Sunday, October 8 at 5:30 p.m. for Matt Light's great tutorial on The "The Emergent PMO: Projects, Programs and Portfolios."

Submit a Comment | Permalink