Portfolio Management
Many organisations spend a lot of money, expecting significant business improvements and start a transformation journey to co-ordinate a variety of IT and business initiatives. Along the way, often they begin to stretch the organisation and loose track of the desired end state; clarity is often lost with respect to prioritisation; the nature of inter-dependencies across both IT and business communities is not fully understood, which can often result in a war of attrition, rather than delivering the right changes that deliver the most significant business benefit.
Searchlight work with our clients to establish a robust but agile portfolio management approach to business and IT transformation delivery to ensure:
Prioritisation: all delivery initiatives are important – be it the CEO’s, IT Directors Business Executives or Sales Teams. However, only too often, everything is a priority ‘1’ without any regard to business benefits or capacity within the business to deliver the desired changes.
Benefits Management: establishing the level of benefit sought in comparison to the cost and impact associated with delivering business and IT change initiatives is not rocket science - so why do we not focus on these aspects when trying to work out what ‘things’ we should do first. In addition how many companies launch a project after rigid benefits management activities, but never assess progress to the benefits case as they progress through delivery….often projects and programmes should be stopped, if the initial benefits sought can not be realised.
Blended Portfolio: establishing a blended delivery portfolio is key, to ensuring the success of both business and IT initiatives in terms of ability to deliver, rate of return of benefits and managing IT expenditure. We have worked with a number of organisations to establish a ‘channel approach to portfolio management that consists of:
- Business as usual tactical initiatives
- Strategic IT initiatives
- Strategic business change initiatives
- Operating model incremental investment
Feeding the Pipe: defining benefit cases, considering what initiatives should be delivered at a point in time and setting priorities are key, however many organisations do not invest in launching initiatives, creating a programme or project mandate that:
- Provides a summary of the benefits sought and costs
- Selects the appropriate internal and external resources and manages effective on-boarding
- Establishes risks, issues and dependencies that need to be considered throughout the initiatives life cycle
Searchlights approach enables our clients to create robust and agile delivery portfolios which are managed as a cohesive portfolio that can be effectively monitored and assessed throughout the delivery life cycle.
· Business as usual tactical initiatives
· Strategic IT initiatives
· Strategic business change initiatives
Operating model incremental investment
