The IT Application Portfolio – Planning and managing the demand for new IT services 2011

What is to be done when the Business’s reach exceed its grasp, i.e. when the sum of identified IT opportunities, qualified projects, and existing system development efforts exceed the available IT resources required for their simultaneous pursuit? The best practice solution in this situation is the population, management and institutionalization of the Project Portfolio.
The Seminar provides practical, proven methods, tools and techniques for rigorously and methodically evaluating and ranking proposed and existing initiatives and arranging them into a practical, consensus-based, time-phased Project Portfolio.
The seminar features hands-on exercises where attendee results can be compared to the actual results developed by organizations that were faced with the planning dilemmas presented. While several different organizations’ prioritization and planning results are presented to demonstrate the diversity and variety of challenges and solutions possible, the two day seminar features a recurring case study of a single organization that was faced with having to prioritize over a hundred identified IT opportunities into a multi-year, consensus-based IT Project Portfolio. Attendees struggle with the issues that confronted this real-life organization and learn how each prioritization, planning, funding and process challenge was met and resolved.

What you will learn

• How to evaluate projects in a consistent manner that allows for comparison, ranking and scheduling in a multiple-project environment. Evaluation criteria considered include: return on investment, technological risk, Business impact and need
• Techniques and tools for evaluating projects against multiple criteria are explored, discussed and applied in practical exercises
• Important strategies for involving a broad cross-section of the organization in the process in order to achieve user consensus and management commitment to the resulting organization’s IT Project Portfolio. Methods for subsequently engineering projects into an IT long range project plan are described
• How to employ the same techniques used for initially evaluating and ranking projects to refresh and maintains the Portfolio’s viability in perpetuity

Main Topics

• Estimating the Impact of a Project on Business Strategy
• Using Return on Investment to Prioritize Projects in the Portfolio
• Other Criteria for Ranking Projects
• Multi-Criteria-Based Prioritization of the Project Portfolio
• Engineering the IT Project Portfolio
• Funding the Engineered Portfolio
• Maintaining the Dynamic IT Project Portfolio