Getting Portfolio Management To Level 5 Maturity

Portfolio management continues to gain traction across our client companies as a governance process best practice — a recent Forrester survey of 317 IT decision-makers has 60% of respondents indicating that they are practicing portfolio management somewhere within their organization. However, there is a wide divergence among industries, geographies, and company size. Anecdotal research suggests that the maturity level of portfolio management also varies greatly. The maximum return from portfolio management is realized when project portfolios are continuously optimized — the fifth and highest level of process maturity. IT organizations should assess their portfolio management process against a maturity model and then chart a path to level 5 portfolio optimization processes, which produces a portfolio balanced between risk and return and tightly linked to business strategic objectives. Such a portfolio ensures that organizations are receiving maximum value from their IT-enabled business change investments.