It’s never been more important than now for enterprises to get the maximum business benefits for the dollars they spend on their application portfolio. To achieve this, it’s critical that you have a solid approach to managing your application portfolio -- you need a methodology that’s straightforward and can be used easily and consistently -- in order to make the right decisions about which applications take priority and which projects and how urgently and aggressively they should (or should not) be undertaken.

Cutter Senior Consultant Bob Benson has developed a tested approach to managing the application portfolio as a result of assisting dozens of client companies define and implement successful application portfolio management programs. When you engage Bob to bring this methodology to your organization, you’ll not only learn how use his unique portfolio assessment process, you’ll also:

• Understand how to determine the basic ground rules that will put all your projects on a level playing field

• Discover the best ways to recruit and train the business and technical people who will assess the projects in the portfolio

• Understand how to quantify the risks as well as the costs involved in maintaining applications within your portfolio

• Understand formulation at time frame for renewing application portfolio information and governance processes to ensure accurate analyses and astute decision-making

When you bring Bob Benson into your enterprise for an Application Portfolio Management engagement, he will help you:

• Understand the basic ground rules about which costs will be included, how accurate information must be, the involvement level of the business units, etc. for each application included

• Identify the applications to be included in the portfolio(s) and their line items.

• Determine the bases for assessing the applications.

• Define the governance of the process results.

• Understand who and how to recruit and train the business and technical personnel who will do assessments.

• Establish the tool set for data collection and reporting.

• Design the reporting needed for analysis, reporting, and decision-making.

• Determine the cycle time for renewing application portfolio information and the governance process for analysis and decision-making.

Using a subset of your application portfolio and working with your project team during this engagement, Benson will run through the methodology, templates and analysis reports with you to assure your understand it completely, understand the nature of assessments that will be done, what the results of the assessments will look like and how you can use the results to make decisions.

As a result of this engagement you will have, and understand how to effectively use, a repeatable process and framework for application portfolio management that ensures all stakeholders are represented and that decisions, while still subjective, are arrived at by following an objective process.