IT portfolio management: extending PPM to runtime

Project portfolio management (PPM) has helped IT organizations impose formal financial discipline over software development, supporting systematic processes for determining whether, when and how much to invest in development projects. However, as traditionally practiced, the systematic portfolio management over projects has addressed only the first half of the lifecycle. Yet, there is no reason why the financial portfolio management disciplines cannot be extended from the project to the operational phase of the application lifecycle. With the goal of tracking the health of software from cradle to grave, there are several different paths that IT organizations can take towards applying portfolio management to the full lifecycle. This report defines those paths and compares how leading PPM solutions currently support the tracking of the health of an application – or the IT service to which it maps – from development through production.