Technology Portfolio Management (TPM) Best Practices

Overview

Technology standards exist to produce consistency, security, and interoperability across the portfolio. But no set of standards anticipates every legitimate organizational need. There will be projects with specific requirements that the approved technology set does not fully serve, teams with existing expertise in non-approved technologies that represent the best available option for a specific context, or situations where the urgency of a business need justifies proceeding with a technology outside the approved set before the formal evaluation process concludes. Exception governance is not a mechanism for bypassing standards; it is a mechanism for making visible and accountable the decisions to deviate from them, while ensuring that the deviation is purposeful, bounded, and time-limited.

Best Practice

Establish a formal exception governance process for the Technology Standards Register that defines: the types of technology decisions that require a formal exception request (any use of a technology in the Deprecated, Prohibited, or Under Evaluation status categories in a context that goes beyond the conditions governing those statuses); the information required in an exception request (the specific technology, the specific use case, the justification for the deviation, the scope and duration of the exception, and the plan for transitioning to an approved alternative if the exception is granted for a limited period); the governance body responsible for reviewing and approving exception requests; and the conditions under which exceptions expire and must be renewed or resolved. Make the exception log available to all teams as a transparent record of deviations from the Standards Register, including the justification for each approved exception. Review the exception log regularly to identify patterns — recurring exceptions for the same technology may indicate that the Standards Register position should be reviewed rather than that the technology should continue to be governed as a repeated exception.

Benefit(s)

Exception governance converts standards deviations from invisible workarounds into visible, accountable governance events. Teams that need to deviate from the Standards Register for legitimate reasons can do so through a defined process rather than simply proceeding without authorization. The governance body retains visibility into the full scope of standards deviations rather than only the ones that happen to be discovered in retrospect. And the exception log provides an early warning system for Standards Register entries that may need to be updated — a technology that generates a high volume of exception requests may be generating friction that the governance function should address by reconsidering the standard.