Application Portfolio Management (APM) Best Practices

Overview

The APM tooling market encompasses a wide spectrum of solutions ranging from general-purpose enterprise architecture platforms with APM modules to purpose-built portfolio management platforms to IT asset management systems with portfolio features to BI and reporting tools that produce portfolio views from connected data sources. Vendor marketing frequently conflates these categories, presenting each as the complete solution to the APM challenge. Organizations that evaluate APM tooling without a clear understanding of what any specific tool is designed to do - and what it is not designed to do - make procurement decisions based on demonstrations optimized for sales conversations rather than on a clear-eyed assessment of fit for organizational need.

Best Practice

Develop a clear organizational understanding of what APM tools are designed to do before evaluating any specific tool. APM tools are systems that store, organize, and surface portfolio data - they are repositories, workflow engines, and reporting platforms, not substitutes for the governance, ownership, assessment, financial management, and strategic planning disciplines that make APM valuable. A tool is only as good as the data it contains, the governance that ensures that data is accurate, and the organizational discipline that acts on the insights it surfaces. Evaluate APM tools as infrastructure that supports an already-functioning APM discipline, not as the mechanism that will create APM capability where none currently exists. An organization that has not yet established basic portfolio governance, ownership, and data standards will not solve those problems by procuring a tool.

Benefit(s)

A clear understanding of what APM tools are and are not prevents the most common and most expensive APM tooling failure: procuring a sophisticated platform as a substitute for the organizational discipline that APM requires, discovering that the tool cannot create discipline where none exists, and concluding that APM as a discipline failed because the tool did not deliver the expected results. Organizations that approach APM tooling as infrastructure supporting an existing discipline make better procurement decisions, achieve higher adoption, and generate more portfolio intelligence value from their tooling investment than organizations that approach tooling as the solution to organizational governance challenges.