Strategic Portfolio Management

Align decision-making to strategic objectives across portfolios and achieve full business agility.

What is Strategic Portfolio Management?

Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) is an overarching set of capabilities and processes an organization leverages to decide how to focus available resources and funding across portfolios to meet its strategic objectives. Goal setting, ideation, and demand planning are key sub-processes. Gartner defines SPM as “a set of business capabilities, processes, and supporting portfolio management technology.” SPM enables alignment and transparency across the business and allows for organizations to pivot due to economic changes or competing priorities. 

Benefits of Strategic Portfolio Management

  • Broaden the spectrum of decision-making criteria available and allow business leaders and portfolio managers to make fully informed decisions faster.
  • Manage and minimize the risks of programs with increased audit and control points.
  • Maximize value creation across traditional projects and persistent Agile programs.
  • Fully optimize the allocation of budgets and resources, then dynamically readjust allocations in response to changing requirements.
  • Collaborate across complex projects and programs with a single, visual source of truth and keep teams aligned on topmost priorities.

Challenges for Today’s Businesses: Visibility, Agility, & Alignment

In addition to shrewdly allocating budgets and resources, strategic portfolios and portfolio managers play a key role in translating strategic objectives into successful execution through the prioritization of initiatives and programs. As business organizations must now move faster than ever before, making decisions with greater risks and impacts on a regular basis, SPM has now become a differentiating capability for enterprises.

Visibility

Visibility has been a long-running challenge for portfolio managers due to the difficulty inherent in uniting disparate, often-siloed tools. Visibility issues may additionally be exacerbated due to the aggressive scaling of Agile practices. These practices can create blind spots for both portfolio and financial planners, and require different approaches to plan, manage, and monitor. If they are not well managed, the resulting lack of visibility can create significant risks, including constrained capacity planning and misallocation of scarce budgets.

Agility & Alignment

Additionally, the disconnected systems of record that track budgets, resources, and work assignments make it difficult to dynamically respond to changing market conditions. As teams across the business work with greater degrees of autonomy and make decisions faster than ever, it’s even more important to maintain continuous alignment. Here again, the lack of a single source of truth makes it incredibly challenging to ensure consistent alignment, especially in modern, highly dynamic market environments.

The good news is there is now a growing set of mature practices for Strategic Portfolio Management. Achieving their full benefit requires a platform capable of delivering a single, visual source of truth that addresses the challenges of increased agility and that supports portfolio managers in applying best practices.

“Having all of that information in there, making sure that everybody is on the same page, making it transparent, making it visible, and then also tying it to our strategic themes and our corporate strategy has given people a sense of how their work is contributing to the success of the company.”

Quickly Unlock the Full Potential of Strategic Portfolio Management with Apptio Targetprocess

Apptio Targetprocess is a trusted platform for Strategic Portfolio Management. It provides a single, visual source of truth to easily track and dynamically adjust the investments, products, portfolios, and work aligned to the strategy and priorities of the business.

Designate, organize, and manage portfolios

  • Evaluate lean portfolio of products, new solutions and features, then prioritize based on your company’s vision and goals.
  • Track the progress of initiatives, automatically make forecasts based on completed work, and allocate lean budgets for planned activities.
  • Create portfolio, solution, PI, and team-level roadmaps to visualize progress and keep work aligned with business goals and changing demands.
  • Obtain clear visibility and determine which work items represent critical dependencies for important milestones, to stop potential delays before they can happen.
  • Manage team allocations and capacity to maximize productivity.

Leverage a full range of Portfolio Management Solutions

  • Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) – Increase agility, deliver products or solutions faster, and prioritize what brings the greatest business value. 
  • Hybrid Project Management Office (PMO) & Aggregation of Waterfall & Agile Programs to Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) – Mature into your Agile transformation at your own organization’s pace.
  • Portfolio Management – Implement the company vision, visualize company portfolios, and easily communicate both vision and strategy to teams.
  • Annual and Incremental Planning – Plan and align budgets, resources, and work with initiatives.
  • Portfolio Budgeting – Plan, group, prioritize, and track investments based on strategic value, impact, return on investment, or market direction.

Apptio Targetprocess is a leading solution for strategic portfolio management (SPM) and enterprise agile planning (EAP) that allows business and technology planners at all levels to dynamically manage work, budgets, resources, agile programs, and portfolios while ensuring all are continuously aligned to the enterprise strategy. The combination of flexible data model, Solutions Library, and partner community make it the most agile SPM platform in the market. Targetprocess is the only SPM platform that integrates directly with the industry-leading ApptioOne financial management platform, enabling organizations to model true product TCO and more holistically manage the value of technology investments and innovation.