What Is Strategic Portfolio Management?

Gartner provides evidence that:

• By 2025, 70% of digital investments will fail to deliver the expected business outcomes due to the absence of a strategic portfolio management approach
• By 2024, 80% of digital businesses will integrate SPM and execution technologies, and adopt new frameworks and standards to achieve valued business outcomes

Strategic portfolio management is the process an organization uses to select, prioritize, and control resources within its portfolio of programs, projects, and initiatives used to meet strategic goals and objectives. While each company has its own customized objectives, ultimately any organization’s goal is to balance implementing change, maintain current initiatives, and optimize return on investment. Strategic portfolio management helps companies successfully oversee and implement all of those tasks from strategy to execution.

Strategic portfolio management is useful because it:

• ensures accurate, holistic communication and allows executives to garner deep insights
• allows different groups within a company to communicate timelines, dependencies, and budgets effectively until completion
• uses real-time organizational data on projects to deliver focused business intelligence data
• guides the company in shifting portfolio funding and priorities, driving outcomes, and communicating to stakeholders how each initiative contributes to the company’s goals

If the question, “what is strategic portfolio management?” still remains, here are the top ways companies see the benefits.

Strategic portfolio management reprioritizes tasks and continuously adapts and optimizes the values of projects, programs, assets, and/or product investments to align with strategic objectives. By employing Agile, intelligent systems that adapt to changing data, companies can tap into powerful strategic insights to guide programs and initiatives.

There are some major benefits to strategic portfolio management if used effectively. Here is a more comprehensive view of some of the benefits. They include:

Responding to disruptions quickly and effectively.

The last few years have been an intensive bootcamp for businesses on the art of disruption. What we’ve learned along the way is that disruptions are not only inevitable and always lurking around the corner. So how do companies prepare for these disruptions? “Companies that adopt bold offensive strategies in the face of industry disruption will come out the winners,” write Jacques Bughin and Nicolas van Zeebroeck in MIT Sloan Management Review.

Strategic portfolio management creates an offensive strategy with technology that continuously garners insights and adapts to changes to mitigate risks. That way, when disruptions do occur, organizations’ management systems can adapt quickly to reprioritize tasks in alignment with real-time data.

Faster time to market

Strategic portfolio management delivers deeper, quicker insights than analog processes by transforming single analysis tracks to tackle many at once. By analyzing all data in parallel, SPM delivers insights to a single, unified platform. This allows stakeholders to focus on analyzing progress and identifying trends quickly.

The speed and ease enable quicker strategy delivery and faster initiative completion. The quicker the decision-making process, the faster the idea will move through the innovation funnel and the quicker it will reach the market. Gaining this speed of delivery places companies at a competitive advantage and drastically minimizes expense.

Better strategy-execution alignment

McKinsey global research shows that successful strategy execution is more of an exception than a rule. In a longitudinal study of companies that underwent an organizational change, less than one-third of respondents said that their companies had executed transformation successfully. While these numbers are alarming, they aren’t uncommon.

McKinsey found that companies that do succeed do so by undergoing comprehensive, fact-based assessments to identify opportunities and then adapt goals for employees at all levels. Strategic portfolio management enables companies to thoroughly evaluate and prioritize tasks so that limited resources are allocated consistently and objectively based on each proposed project. With visualized dependencies between business capabilities, applications, products, services, organizations connected to strategies, investments, and value metrics, everyone on your team can see what’s next and create custom plans to reach shared goals.

Maximize ROI

Speaking of resources – we know that they are limited. By having an objective, data-driven approach for your strategic portfolio, prioritized tasks change as the business environment evolves.

As resources and funding change, reallocation of resources and funding is visualized, allowing executives to leverage flexible funding approaches to reflect changing circumstances. Attaching metrics and financials to all initiatives allows executives to control and reallocate resources based on data-driven models. Transparency and real-time metrics eliminate wasted time and ultimately create significant bottom-line savings.

With a clear plan in place, executives can lead transformational change, monitor performance, and measure progress to accelerate strategy delivery. See how organizations use strategic portfolio management across the business.

Capital planning

Capital planning is about investing today to be ready for tomorrow’s business environment. Without a way to prioritize capital investment requests and gain visibility to drive informed strategic decisions, organizations can miss opportunities, fall behind their competitors, or worse, become irrelevant in their market.

Planview’s strategic portfolio management solution helps leaders, Finance, and capital planning teams to make better decisions for future business needs. A single source of truth across all capital portfolios, programs, projects, resources, and financials empowers organizations to quickly shift priorities, re-allocate capital, and monitor performance.

Real-time visibility into capital budgets and investments

On-demand reporting with dashboards equip executives with the data they need.

Build capital plans that maximize ROI

With investment and capacity planning, ensure capital is best allocated considering financial metrics such as NPV, IRR, and payback period.

Optimize the capital portfolio

Manage capital forecasts with actuals, model various prioritization scenarios, and depreciate capital into future periods, enabling trade-off decisions for reallocation of funds to drive outcomes.

Strategic portfolio management from Planview helps capital planning teams make capital decisions faster, with more data and insights, to adapt plans, reallocate funding and resources faster, and quickly shift priorities to optimize costs and maximize outcomes.

Dynamic planning

Priorities can change overnight. Many companies already struggle with strategic planning, failing to translate strategic objectives into measurable goals, operational roadmaps, and coordinated delivery across the organization. When strategies change, it becomes even harder to reallocate funding, rapidly reprioritize, and realign teams.

Conventional strategic planning tools (usually spreadsheets) provide executives and managers with limited visibility into understanding how plans are progressing.

When disruption strikes, lack of actionable information can hinder effective decision making. Planview’s dynamic planning offering enables executives, finance, and EPMOs to work together to quickly shift strategies, priorities, funding, and resources.

Revisit strategic direction

Reassess strategic initiatives and their relative levels of priority and associated funding. Rapidly model the impact of changes and balance tradeoffs.

Reallocate funding

Visualize the reallocation of resources and funding over different timeline. Leverage flexible funding approaches to easily reallocate as circumstances change.

Reprioritize investments

Set new portfolio priorities. Balance work that needs to be done immediately, and over the next month, quarter, and year.

Realign teams and work

Quickly redeploy resources. Maintain alignment with strategic goals, financial constraints, and resource capacity.

Review performance

Engage stakeholders. Measure results and adapt dynamically as required.

Enterprise program and portfolio management

Enterprise portfolio management offices focus primarily on ensuring strategy execution alignment, portfolio governance, change management, and visibility for strategic decision making. Strategic portfolio management technology lets you plan and manage cross-departmental programs and products essential to achieving strategic objectives.

With Planview strategic portfolio management solutions, you gain access to comprehensive portfolio analysis and reporting, dashboards, and “what-if” scenario planning to ensure you both fund the best investments for delivering business outcomes and measure progress so you can adjust along the way.

Take a continuous planning approach so you can reprioritize and realign resources when business priorities and strategies shift or change.

Bring strategic programs to life

Define top-down timeframes, financials, and roadmaps; adjust based on progress and forecasts.

Create capacity for innovation and transformation

Balance capacity against demand; compare scenarios to evaluate alternative staffing and funding approaches for achieving outcomes, and effectively focus resources for on-strategy delivery.

Automate phase-gated processes

Gain visibility into gate deliverables and status; visualize trends with configurable gate status fields and dashboards.

Mitigate risk with improved visibility

Analyze impacts and manage dependencies while building technology plans and roadmaps to achieve strategic objectives.

Share progress through executive dashboards

Provide leaders clear visibility into strategic progress across the organization.

IT strategic planning

For today’s digital business, technology investments underpin the company’s strategic objectives. The IT strategic plan must span current and future business objectives while remaining adaptable when priorities change.

Planview’s strategic portfolio management software offers CIOs, enterprise architects, portfolio managers, and Finance an integrated portfolio that connects strategy to delivery, enabling the organization to realize strategic objectives for growth, innovation, and operational efficiency.

Accelerate innovation and transformation

Prioritize investments within initiatives that will best deliver strategic objectives, while understanding the impact of trade-offs and decisions.

Manage an integrated IT portfolio

Map outcomes to strategic objectives, spanning investment, project, program, product, service, application, and technology portfolios.

Mitigate risk

Create multiple investment and change scenarios; compare impact to costs, capacity, interdependencies to identify the least disruptive options.

Visualize the relationships between strategy, technology, and outcomes

Break down organizational silos with visibility, showing interdependencies among strategies, portfolios, and programs to drive strategic initiatives.

Address dependencies

Use visualizations to understand and explore the connections between strategies, objectives, business capabilities, products, applications, technology, and work. Understand how relationships can help or hinder progress so you can build the right plan for transformation.

Modernize your application portfolio

Reveal actions to reduce risk and technical debt by consolidating legacy software and infrastructure. Expedite deployment of new enabling technology for strategic outcomes.

Connectivity to your ecosystem

Integrate a variety of affiliated data sources to bring information into a single system of record to visualize interrelationships and monitor performance. Sources include work management, agile development tools, CMDB, and financial systems.

Strategy execution management

An organization’s inability to bridge strategy execution gaps is the primary reason for the failure of new growth initiatives. Translating strategy to delivery is derailed by conflicting priorities, overloaded resources, and confusion about direction.

Planview strategic portfolio management offers a system where executives, strategists, EPMOs, and Finance can work together to achieve objectives by managing strategy execution and adapting for uncertainty.

Gain executive line of sight

Visibility milestones, financials, and KPIs of strategic programs.

Mitigate delivery risk

Manage performance with a KPI dashboard highlighting issues to address.

Map strategy to outcomes

Visualize dependencies between business capabilities, applications, products, services, and organizations connected to strategies, investments, and value metrics.

Define desired outcomes

Set objectives and the target results, focus portfolio funding decisions on objectives and business value.

Collaborate on portfolio decisions

Engage leaders and stakeholders with workflows, dashboards, Kanban visualization.

Access real-time, accurate data

Roll-up progress status and financial data from teams throughout the organization.

Streamline gated processes

Fail fast, deliver faster with improved efficiency and consistent, informed go/no-go decisions.

If your company has a large portfolio and is trying to keep up with your strategy execution process on spreadsheets and static program tracking tools, there’s a better way. The right strategic portfolio management solution will enable you to continuously monitor the risks and rewards of opportunities and decisions so that all projects in your portfolio are prioritized, contributing to your goals, and positively impacting your bottom line.

Planview’s Strategic Portfolio Management solution enables executives to garner immediate insights and enact informed solutions including:

• Creating a single line of sight into value and alignment
• Visualizing and prioritizing with Kanban roadmaps
• Identifying opportunities and balancing tradeoffs with scenario planning
• Connecting enterprise business and technical architecture

We hope that you’ve received answers to your question, “what is strategic portfolio management?” But if you’re craving more, Planview’s solution provides an on-demand demo experience of how strategic portfolio management capabilities can transform your business portfolio.