Technology Portfolio Management (TPM) Best Practices

Overview

Digital transformation initiatives — programs that fundamentally change how an organization uses technology to deliver value to its customers, execute its operations, or compete in its market — are among the highest-stakes and highest-investment programs that enterprise organizations undertake. They are also among the programs most frequently compromised by inadequate technology portfolio intelligence: transformation programs that do not have a complete, accurate picture of the current technology portfolio consistently underestimate the complexity, cost, and sequencing requirements of the technology changes required, and consistently encounter delays and cost overruns attributable to technology dependencies and constraints that were not identified during planning.

Best Practice

Position the TPM program as a foundational input to digital transformation planning and execution, providing the technology portfolio intelligence that transformation programs require to scope, sequence, and fund their technology work accurately. At the planning stage: use the Technologies Inventory family to identify all technologies in the current portfolio that are relevant to the transformation — both the technologies that the transformation will replace and the technologies that the transformation will depend on. Use Technology Spread analysis to identify the full set of applications and services affected by the technology changes the transformation requires. Use the technology debt quantification to surface technology remediation work that must precede or accompany the transformation program rather than being deferred until after the transformation is complete. At the execution stage: use the technology portfolio roadmap to coordinate the technology transitions required by the transformation with the other technology changes in the portfolio, ensuring that transformation execution does not create conflicts with planned upgrades, migrations, and rationalization programs that the portfolio governance framework has already committed to.

Benefit(s)

Using TPM as a foundational input to digital transformation planning produces transformation programs that are more accurately scoped, more realistically sequenced, and more thoroughly funded than programs that proceed without portfolio intelligence. The hidden technology debt and architectural complexity that most transformation programs discover partway through execution — creating scope expansions, timeline extensions, and budget overruns — are identified and incorporated into the transformation plan at the planning stage. Technology dependencies and sequencing requirements are managed proactively rather than discovered reactively during execution. And the transformation program benefits from the portfolio governance disciplines — Technology Currency management, vendor management, license compliance — that the TPM program maintains continuously rather than establishing from scratch for the transformation.