Enterprise PPM: The blog site for PPM practitioners and stakeholders across the enterprise

Integrated Portfolio Analysis: A Vision for Strategic PPM [#pmot]

We’ve been talking about our vision of Enterprise PPM (the theme of this blog) for a while. We define Enterprise Project & Portfolio Management (EPPM) as the practice of taking a more integrated and top-down approach to managing all project-intensive work and resources across the enterprise. This contrasts with the more common approach of building separate functional and technology silos to manage a variety of "business function" portfolio types in an integrated way. These include IT PPM, new product development, process improvement and other enterprise initiatives, programs and project management offices (PMOs).

In addition to the expansion of the PPM solution space along this “Integrated Business Portfolio Analysis” axis (EPPM), there is another growth vector which Gartner calls “Integrated IT Portfolio Analysis (IIPA) which as its name suggestS is essentially EPPM for the CIO and IT department where the portfolio silos include not just projects, but assets, services, applications and investments or any other collection of stuff IT management wants to visualize in relation to itself and to other inter-dependent portfolios. Think vendors, infrastructure, data, resources, business processes, etc.

Instantis believes that the PPM market is expanding simultaneously along both the EPPM and IIPA dimensions and that the resulting solutions addressing this set of challenges and opportunities will be best and most simply described as Integrated Portfolio Analysis (IPA) solutions.

The goal of IIPA is congruent with EPPM which is to be more business and IT strategy driven, to better optimize resource utilization across portfolios and initiatives, to improve program execution which transcend organization barriers, enhance visibility and accountability and be better prepared from an information and data analytics perspective to anticipate and react to change. This includes, in turn, better understand benefits, costs and risks.

For solution providers, including PPM vendors evolving in this direction, the keys to success and leadership in this space include the ability to leverage relevant product strengths such as (a) strong top-down portfolio management (multi-initiative) DNA, (b) deep strategy execution and alignment functionality, (c) flexible dashboards and reporting, (d) just enough (“sweet spot”) resource and capacity management, and (e) robust financial/investment management functionality.

Second, IPA solutions will provide their respective owners with role-specific portfolio views and analytics tools needed to visualize inter-dependencies, react and enable coordinated actions and make more informed decisions that optimize investment and resource consumption and minimize risk.

Finally, leading-edge products will have a rational approach to leveraging native technology to support strategic and materially important processes while seamlessly integrating with external systems to access tactical information.