Adapt to Win

Chapter 14Corporate IT Portfolio Management

Corporate IT portfolio management is a world of portfolio management all its own. If you do not interact with corporate IT or are not interested in a deep dive on the consequences of and remediations for terrible resource management, you might wish to skip this chapter.

After decades of cost-center culture and a relentless focus on reducing costs and relatively little focus on accountability for benefit delivery, traditional corporate IT in its standard modes of operation provides a learning library of antipatterns and inefficiencies. Many of the “best practices” preached for decades by the leading project and portfolio training and certification bodies actually undermine the transparency and effectiveness of investments and project performance in general. I’ve witnessed a few companies perform IT portfolio management quite well, even with agility, but given that techniques for Agile and adaptive Portfolio Management with excellent financial and strategic returns have been in evidence for more than a decade, too many firms are still clinging to outmoded and ineffective techniques.

Whose fault is it when hundreds of person-years of software development finally excrete a product that, surprise, is so ill-fit to its intended purpose that it’s useless to the sponsor? In many conventional IT shops, accountabilities are so siloed that below the CIO himself, it’s everyone’s/no one’s fault, thus there’s no accountability for failure. The ...