Prioritizing the IT Project Portfolio

Prioritizing the IT Project Portfolio

It is the function of an IT Project Portfolio to manage the various projects of a company in a better and in a more effective way. The result of a good project plan would be that all IT projects would be completed on time, it would be cost effective, and it would save on valuable time and resources, bringing in profit for the company where it is implemented. An effective and an efficient IT Portfolio would be of great benefit for the company where it has been introduced, and when it was introduced in John Deere Health Plan, it has resulted in bringing in success to the company, which can now manage al its projects in a much more efficient manner than before, with projects being completed well on time, and lesser projects being rejected by the management. If all companies were to manage their IT portfolios in a similarly effective manner, then there would be less loss and more profit everywhere.

Analysis:

In general, a Project Portfolio Management organizes a series or a number of projects that a company may be involved in, into a single portfolio that may consist of reports that state the company's various objectives, costs involved, all its various accomplishments to date, various timelines, its resources, its manifold risks, and many other critically important factors necessary for running the business successfully. The executives of the organization can then sit down and review the entire portfolio, and also, thereafter, spread their resources efficiently and properly, as based on the reports, and adjust their various projects so that they would be able to produce the highest possible returns for their company. This means in effect that diversification is today a very important part of a company's portfolio. It must be mentioned here that diversification is in fact not at all a new concept as far as the business, and especially the financial world is concerned. (Project portfolio Management)

The concept of IT portfolio management has been tossed around in various business circles for many years now, and as everyone knows, IT portfolio management did not make an entry into the IT departments of n organization until recently. An IT portfolio management would group various projects of the company so that they would be more easily manageable, as in the form of a portfolio or file, much in the same way as an investor would manage all his investments by putting his stocks, bonds, and mutual funds into one cluster, or grouping them together in one section. As early as in the 1950's, it was recognized, as in the opinion of University of Chicago economist Harry Markowitz, that a portfolio of diverse investments would be more likely than individual investments, to minimize risks to a significant level, and also create a higher rate of return, in the long run. As far as the IT world is concerned, the advantages and benefits of project portfolio management is that executives of the company are given a bird's eye view of the projects, and this would mean that they would be able to spot any sort of redundancies or discrepancies much more easily, and also spread the available resources more appropriately, and keep a close view on the progress of the various projects of the organization. (Project portfolio Management)

Today, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management is one company that is running its workforce in a much better way than before, and is also garnering more profits, because of its IT portfolio management. (Primavera Systems Inc.: Project and portfolio Management) This has meant that building a comprehensive and complete IT portfolio which would also co-ordinate the organizations' efforts with its overall business strategies is said to have been successful, although it was difficult at the outset. (Strategic planning for IT)

Take the case of John Deere Health for example. In the words of a Michael McCollum, a business analyst for the John Deere Health Plan Inc., they were drowning in the usual IT rut, with absolutely no formalized IT management portfolio effort, and with the resulting difficulty to accurately determine which projects would have a bigger and a better impact on the organization. As must be mentioned here at this point, John Deere was a company that had been founded as a one man blacksmith shop started in the year 1868, and it has grown form that time into one of the world's largest corporations today, doing business in more than 160 countries everywhere, and with about 46,000 employees. The John Deere Health Pan was conceived of to provide quality health care at reasonable costs for its many employees, and also for its non-employees in Deere and Company in the states of Illinois and Iowa and Tennessee and Virginia. (McCollum, John Deere Health cultivates successful IT Project Management)

What Michael McCollum felt was that his IT department was like the IT Department at many other corporations, with many more projects than appropriate resources for them, and no practical and effective method with which to prioritize them, and to make a definitive analysis of which project would have a greater impact on the company, and which the least. In the same way, the organization lacked the means by which a particular project could be assigned with appropriate resources to the appropriate person, and more often than not, priority was decided on the requestor's persistent efforts, or on his management skills to get his job done first. The words one would hear most often were 'Why can't it get done?' This was when the management decided to get an IT management portfolio done, and therefore, a cross functional team of four IT people for each line of the business were assigned, and it was their task thereafter to decide on the various requirements for a prioritization process, among them the primary object being to create a framework around the goals of the company. (McCollum, John Deere Health cultivates successful IT Project Management)

In general, whenever a new project is submitted to the company the requestor for the project is expected to answer a series of questions, like for example, the customer benefit expected, the number of benefits required, and the resources required for the purpose, so that the prioritization would be decided. Each and every project thus submitted would then be assigned a score level of low, at a 7, to a high, at a 142. This virtually eliminated the guesswork out of prioritization, and it also had the added advantage of tackling easier and faster projects first that is, those projects that would need very little time and resources. This sort of IT portfolio and the prioritization that came as a result came as a boon to John Deere, which was at one time flooded with project, and insufficient resources and no prioritization to handle them efficiently and effectively.