Technology Portfolio Management (TPM) Best Practices

Overview

Technology lifecycle decisions — the deprecation of a platform, the retirement of a technology, the mandatory upgrade of an end-of-support technology — have service continuity implications that service continuity planning must account for. A technology retirement that eliminates the platform on which a business-critical application runs creates a service continuity risk for the duration of the migration period that service continuity plans should address. A mandatory technology upgrade that requires application testing and validation creates a service continuity planning window during which the upgraded and unupgraded versions may need to coexist. And a technology deprecation that extends over a multi-year migration program creates a sustained service continuity planning horizon during which the deprecated technology remains in production for some applications while others have already migrated.

Best Practice

Establish a connection between the TPM program and the service continuity planning process that surfaces technology lifecycle events as inputs to continuity plan review and update cycles. When a technology lifecycle decision is made — a deprecation decision, an end-of-support migration program initiation, a retirement program schedule — the TPM governance function should notify the service continuity planning function of the decision, the timeline, the affected technology, and the Technology Spread data showing which applications and services are affected. The service continuity planning function should review and update the continuity plans for each affected service to ensure that the technology lifecycle transition period is covered by a continuity plan that addresses the increased service continuity risk of the transition.

Similarly, service continuity planning insights should flow back to the TPM program: when service continuity planning identifies a technology dependency that creates a service continuity risk that the Technologies Inventory does not currently reflect as a risk record, that finding should be shared with the TPM governance function for assessment and potential risk record creation in the Risks and Issues Inventory.

Benefit(s)

Connecting technology lifecycle decisions to service continuity planning ensures that the governance decisions TPM makes do not create unmanaged service continuity gaps in the transition periods they create. Technology deprecation programs are more carefully sequenced when the service continuity implications of each sequencing option are visible to the governance function making sequencing decisions. Service continuity plans are more current and complete when technology lifecycle decisions are surfaced to the service continuity planning function as they are made rather than discovered by the continuity planning team only when the transition period has already begun. And the bidirectional information flow between the TPM program and service continuity planning creates a governance connection that makes both disciplines stronger than they are when operated independently.