IT Portfolio Management
Demand, capacity and money, managed as one view instead of three arguments.
One integrated view of what is being asked for, what can be delivered, and what it costs to say yes.
Advisory. Run as a one-off exercise, or set up as a standing practice with your own teams.
CIOs, IT leaders, PMO and finance teams, and the executives deciding what gets funded.
Budget planning is coming, demand exceeds capacity by an unknown margin, or projects keep starting without anyone deciding what they displace.
The practice
Demand capture
Every request in one place: funded projects, informal asks, shadow work already underway, and the things people stopped bothering to raise.
Force ranking
A ranking that holds up in the room — value, risk, dependency and effort weighed together, with the reasoning recorded against each call.
Scenario planning
What the portfolio looks like at three budget levels, which items move, and what the business gives up in each case.
Business impact assessment
What each item is worth to the business, what it costs to run once it exists, and what it costs to keep deferring.
Demand and capacity management
The plan tested against the delivery capacity you actually have, including the people already committed to run-the-business work.
Budget planning and IT finance
Portfolio decisions expressed in the same numbers finance uses, so the plan survives contact with the budget cycle.
Architecture views early
Dependencies, duplication and platform commitments understood before a project is chartered, not discovered in delivery.
Project setup
Scope, sequence, owner and success measures defined at the point of funding, which is where most delivery problems are created.
PPM tooling
Requirements, selection and setup for the tool that holds the portfolio. Where you want the discipline run week to week, ClarityArc Vision is our own software for it.
Demand, tested against what can actually be delivered.
- 01Capture
Every request in one place, including shadow work and the asks people gave up making.
- 02Assess
Architecture, dependency and duplication against each item, before anything is ranked.
- 03Cost
The build and the years after it, in the numbers finance already uses.
- 04Rank
Value, risk and effort weighed together, with the reasoning recorded against each call.
- 05Fund
What survives becomes projects with owners, dates and a written trade-off.
The ranked list is tested against the delivery capacity you actually have, including the people already committed to run-the-business work. Scenario planning shows leadership the portfolio at three funding levels, which moves the argument from whose project matters to what the business is willing to give up.
We capture demand from across the business, assess each item against the architecture, cost it over its life, rank it against the capacity you actually have, and turn what survives into funded projects with owners and dates.
One view, not three
Demand, capacity and money are usually managed by three groups who meet rarely: business engagement holds the requests, IT finance holds the budget, architecture holds the constraints. Portfolio management is what joins them, and the joining is most of the value.
Ranking is a conversation, not a formula
Value, risk, dependency and effort go into it. Scenario planning is what makes the conversation productive: show leadership the portfolio at three funding levels and the argument moves from whose project matters to what the business is willing to give up.
A one-off, or a practice
Some organizations need the exercise once, before a budget round or after a strategy refresh. Others need the discipline installed — the forum, the intake, the tooling, the rhythm, and the people in business engagement, finance and architecture who have to run it. Both are on the table, and technology strategy usually sets the priorities that the ranking then serves.
The application estate
Where the pressing question is what to do with the applications themselves, that is an application estate review, and it stands on its own.
What you keep
The code and the data·Your existing relationships·Approval and control·The ability to stop·The off switchWhat that means
IT Strategy
A technology plan tied to what the business is trying to do, and funded.
Learn more ↗Enterprise Architecture
Standards, reference models and the governance that makes them stick.
Learn more ↗AI Strategy & Enablement
The same strategy discipline, pointed entirely at AI.
Learn more ↗IT Operating Model
How IT is organized, funded and held to account — and who decides what.
Learn more ↗IT Service Management Design
Designing the processes — not running your service desk.
Learn more ↗Program & Project Delivery Assurance
An independent read on whether a programme is where it says it is.
Learn more ↗IT Financial Management
Knowing what technology costs, where it goes, and what it buys.
Learn more ↗Fractional CIO
Senior technology leadership, in whatever shape the situation needs.
Learn more ↗Start with a 45-minute briefing.
No pitch. We’ll map your situation against what actually works and tell you honestly where to start.