Defining Agile Software Development for Portfolio Management

by Scott W. Ambler

The goal of portfolio management within an IT environment is to help improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of IT efforts within an organization. You do this by ensuring that all projects and existing systems are visible, planned for, and aligned to the goals of your organization. Critical activities within your portfolio management discipline include project identification and selection, project monitoring and governance, and IT inventory management. Enterprise disciplines, such as portfolio management, are important because successful IT departments look beyond the needs of a single system. Studies have shown that organizations that manage their IT investments must successfully generate as much as a 40% higher return than their competitors.¹ Portfolio management is arguably one of the most misunderstood aspects of IT activities, perhaps because of its cross-system scope and because there is so little written about it at the practitioner level.