300.1 Introducing Business Portfolio Management

In more recent times, this same "portfolio management" concept has become popular as a way to manage business investments. At a high-level, many of the same concepts are involved. You have a limited amount of money to apply to your business. You want to manage this money as a portfolio to maximize the overall value and to allow you to reach your goals. A portfolio management process provides a way to select, prioritize, authorize and manage the totality of work in the organization or individual department. This includes work that has been completed, work in-progress and work that has been approved for the future. Further, it helps you come up with the baseline that you can subsequently use to measure how well you are managing the portfolio to meet the department's needs.

Financial portfolio management does not focus on costs, since the assumption is that expenditures will result in the purchase of an asset (stocks, bonds, etc.) or a service (trading fee, investment advice, etc.). Likewise, when you manage your work as a portfolio, you change the emphasis from the costs of each portfolio component to the value provided. If the value (and alignment) is right, the work will get authorized. If the value is not there, the work should be eliminated, cut or backlogged. This focus on value is especially appealing to the IT department, which has traditionally been seen as a cost to the business rather than an enabler for providing business value.

On some websites, you will find links to order books. On others, you find a professor's notes from a college class. Many others will offer consulting help. On this PortfolioStep website, you will find most of what you need to successfully establish and manage portfolios of work. Organizations of all sizes can use PortfolioStep. Smaller business units and departments will not use all of the processes and features offered. Larger organizations will be able to use much more. The larger and more sophisticated your unit or department is, the more material from PortfolioStep you can leverage. After reviewing the PortfolioStep processes and templates, you will agree that the content is unique and provides a more comprehensive picture that is not found anywhere else.

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