What should be considered when implementing a Portfolio Management software solution?

Many factors need to be considered when implementing a Portfolio Management software solution. When conducting a tool evaluation for a large client, one of my colleagues summarized the key factors to a few bullets. I want to share those with the community.

o Geography – For an enterprise solution you must have a good understanding of your environment. For example, are resources located remotely? Are there multiple offices that are all over the world? Do people tele-work? Will this system be used by functional and operational organizations?
o Users – You need to understand your user base. How many users are there? What is their history of accepting new technologies? Will they fear the new accountability and visibility into their work and productivity?
o Projects –The number, size and complexity of projects will help to define the proper architecture of your solution. This will drive database requirements and performance standards.
o Security – Understanding the hierarchy of users and the security model that will be used is critical to ensure data integrity and security.
o Redundancy – Disaster recovery and continuity planning is a key. Is this a mission critical system for your organization? Will you have a failover solution? Database cluster? Load balanced servers? And further does the solution you are buying support all of those continuity and availability standards.
o Collaboration – Any solution is built to improve communication and collaboration. Alerts, notifications, project workspaces, are all key areas that any solution should provide.
o Training – Do not underestimate the power and need for training. The solutions are usually role-based and training should be targeted accordingly.

What is a portfolio management tool?

I think a good portfolio management tool should support several functions. They include the ability to view and categorize investments; rank and rate investments based on specific criteria; capture basic data about an investment such as descriptions, costs, ROI and etc; integrate with a project management tool or provide project management functionality; and support workflow processes.

What is IT Portfolio Management?

When I ran an executive workshop recently, a senior manager asked me what is IT portfolio management. We need to define portfolio first before getting into portfolio management. A portfolio is a collection of investments that designed for achieving specific strategic goals. I think IT Portfolio management is a dynamic decision making process for aligning investments with the organization goals, balancing risk and return, and maximizing resource allocation. It is a communication tool between IT and business in a common language. More definitions from PM Wiki.