What is Strategic Portfolio

Management and Why Do You

Need It Now?
In an era of complex and highly matrixed
organizations, increased levels of visibility and
alignment are required to manage initiatives,
funding, and resources across portfolios, products,
and teams. Organizations need systems and
support to make faster decisions, ensure strategic
prioritization of investments, and to deliver
tangible business outcomes. Execution must be
bonded to strategy, enabling companies to make
quick pivots, mitigate risks, and seize opportunities
when internal or external factors change.

Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) facilitates

this kind of operational excellence, enabling
enterprises to stay competitive and profitable in an
ever-changing environment.
WHAT IS STRATEGIC PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT (SPM)?
Strategic Portfolio Management enables organizations to prioritize capital and resources across objectives, operating models,
and initiatives to build cross-enterprise plans that deliver on the organization’s strategic goals. It can connect the dots
from strategy to team and idea to outcome by providing companies with a holistic approach to planning, funding, portfolio
management and hybrid work delivery.

SPM empowers organizations to improve time to market, unlock organizational capacity for initiatives, and increase confidence in
strategic investments by continuously analyzing impacts to financials, people, business capabilities, and adapting models to fit
the future needs of the organization.

The Attributes of SPM:

Attribute SPM

Goal: Drive organizational outcomes.

Focus: Strategic and outcome oriented.

Usage Within the Cross-departmental, broad enterprise planning, prioritizing, and funding of objectives based on
Organization: their strategic value.

Time Horizons: Longer-term, persistent, ongoing.

Planning: Mix of annual and iterative.

Funding: Incremental, Outcome-based.

Decision-Making: Shared among various business units and departments.

Methodology Support: Mix of Hybrid, Agile, Waterfall.

Result Measurement: Outcomes, OKRs.

Strategy Execution, Enterprise Portfolio Visibility and Management, Product and Value Stream
Use Cases:
Funding, Deep Financials, Capital Planning.

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Why is SPM Important?

Think of SPM as the organizational glue used to drive successful strategy execution by improving speed-to-value and market
responsiveness, increasing confidence in strategic investments, and unlocking organizational capacity for priority initiatives.

It does this by:

• Aligning the organization to a shared set of objectives and • Leveraging real-time organizational data on the delivery
creating a common framework for value. toward business objectives from a centralized data source.

• Fostering enterprise-wide visibility into priorities across • Guiding the company where to shift portfolio funding and
portfolios, initiatives, projects, and products. priorities, better balance capacity, and how to optimize
investment performance using scenario modeling.
• Creating a way for different groups within a company to
collaborate and communicate timelines, identify risks, • Enabling dynamic planning, funding, and pivots to adapt to
manage dependencies, and understand how investments market or customer needs when change is required.
are contributing to company value.

When Is SPM Needed?

SPM is needed anytime your organization wants to align people, money, and time to successfully achieve desired business
outcomes. Some common use cases are below:

Dynamic Planning and Prioritization Enterprise Program and Portfolio Management

Priorities can change overnight. Many companies already Enterprise portfolio management offices focus primarily on
struggle with strategic planning, failing to translate strategic ensuring strategy execution alignment, portfolio governance,
objectives into measurable goals, operational roadmaps, change management, and visibility for strategic decision
and coordinated delivery across the organization. When making. Strategic portfolio management lets you plan
strategies change, it becomes even harder to reallocate and manage cross-departmental programs and products
funding, rapidly reprioritize, and realign teams. essential to achieving strategic objectives.

SPM facilitates planning and prioritization adjustments, Strategy Execution

ensuring that resources are directed towards the most An organization’s inability to bridge strategy execution
impactful initiatives. Reassess strategic initiatives and their gaps is the primary reason for the failure of new growth
relative levels of priority and associated funding. Then initiatives. Translating strategy to delivery is derailed by
rapidly model the impact of changes to balance tradeoffs conflicting priorities, overloaded resources, and confusion
and make smarter business decisions. about direction.

IT Strategic Planning SPM plays a vital role in the execution of strategic initiatives.
For today’s digital business, technology investments often By aligning initiatives, projects, programs, and products
underpin the company’s strategic objectives. The IT strategic with the overall business strategy and allocating resources
plan must span current and future business objectives while accordingly, organizations can effectively execute their
remaining adaptable when priorities change. strategic plans.

Strategic portfolio management provides a visual Capital Planning

representation of the interdependencies between strategy, Capital planning is about investing today to be ready
technology, and outcomes. It can also aid in trade- off for tomorrow’s business environment. Without a way to
analysis between innovation and legacy or run the business prioritize capital investment requests and gain visibility
work, ensuring the organization keeps resources and funding to drive informed strategic decisions, organizations can
balanced appropriately. miss opportunities, fall behind their competitors, or worse,
become irrelevant in their market. A single source of truth
across all capital portfolios, programs, projects, resources,
and financials empowers organizations to quickly shift
priorities, re-allocate capital, and monitor performance.
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Does your organization need Strategic Portfolio Management?

In addition to the use cases listed on the previous page, below is a chart of questions that can be utilized to further assess your
organizational need for SPM and an SPM solution.

Ask these questions to help determine your organization’s need.

Questions to Consider Response (Yes/No)

Does your organization have functional silos, disconnected tools, and fragmented
information?

Does your organization understand how IT is contributing to enterprise-wide strategic goals?

Are there differing ideas on how to define value within the organization?

Does your organization have a way to do longer term business planning, mapping funding
and resources to future needs?

Is there an enterprise-level view of the organization’s priorities?

Does your organization need a better way to manage and allocate resources across initiatives,
projects, programs and/or products within the company?

Is it easy to see how funding is allocated to priorities?

Are you able to reallocate funding and resources quickly?

When funding is needed for a new initiative or project, is it limited or frequently delayed?

Does your organization know when funding and capacity are not aligned to priorities/
outcomes?

Does your organization confidently and regularly deliver on its strategies?

Can you report on portfolio, initiative, project, or product progress in real-time?

Is there a way to easily see delivery risks, dependencies, and capacity issues and their
potential impact?

Are you able to model different planning scenarios to ensure your investments are the right
ones?

Does your organization have visibility into all projects, products, and initiatives regardless of
work execution type (waterfall, agile, hybrid)?

Are organizational silos preventing swift gathering of data to make informed investment
trade-off decisions?

Think about how your organization answered these questions. Based on your answers, it could be time to invest in a Strategic
Portfolio Management solution and Planview® is here to help you every step of the way.

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 Bring enterprise-wide visibility to your organization by connecting the dots from strategy to
team, idea to outcome, and project to product with a holistic approach to planning, funding,
About Planview portfolio management, and hybrid work across operating models. With Planview’s Strategic
Strategic Portfolio Portfolio Management solution you can bring your strategies to life and pivot when things
Management change, no matter how you plan, fund, or deliver.

To see Planview’s Strategic Portfolio Management solution in action, watch the demo now.

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