Executive

Explore how this role helps to drive business agility

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6 Steps To Mastering Application Portfolio Rationalization.

Application Portfolio Rationalization not just a one-and-done process. The value delivered extends well beyond typical metrics like TCO. Attend this webinar to discover how Application Portfolio Rationalization impacts your specific role, and what’s needed from you to ensure success.

role overview

Executive

More than just the individuals responsible for key enterprise functions, departments or business areas, executives drive business agility by ensuring that the enterprise, and every function within it, is contributing to the overall organizational strategy. This requires tools and solutions to provide enterprise-wide visibility, drive effective decision making and help maintain accountability to the organization’s strategic plan.

Key Challenges

  • Alignment of all investments with strategy – everything starts with the strategic priorities, goals and objectives, with investments derived and funded directly from those strategic priorities.  With a single source of all strategic work the process of communicating those priorities and investments across the organization becomes easier, helping to ensure that every stakeholder is managing to a common set of priorities and can take the appropriate action at all times.
  • Orchestrating strategic roadmaps at the macro level – roadmaps are a great tool for communicating with all levels of the organization. They are intuitive, can convey a lot of information in a single visualization, and are easy to create and update. However, they must be integrated across your entire organization. To optimize the ability to convey information and understand everything from relationships, dependencies and milestones, your roadmaps must be generated directly from your strategic priorities, updated to reflect actual performance and recommunicated whenever adjustments occur.
  • Managing to clearly defined outcomes – having the right strategic priorities is critical, and being able to define all work directly from those strategies helps build alignment across the entire organization. This is an area where even the best organizations struggle. Measurement of actual performance, especially for non-financial metrics becomes little more than guesswork, if it even happens at all. But performance measurement is the only way of ensuring your investment decisions are generating the expected return. You cannot pursue business agility unless you are sure that it is generating optimal performance for your business.

Comprehensive Solutions for every Executive

The right tools to drive business transformation

Benefits Realization & Outcome Management

Tracking results is easy when all execution is derived from strategy

What-If Scenario Planning & Analysis

Conduct target analysis to maximize benefits and outcomes

Portfolio Roadmapping

Create Strategic Roadmaps Quickly & Easily

It Takes a Village to Drive Business Agility

Organizational roles we support

Click on each role in the interactive chart to learn how that role helps drive business agility.

Product Manager

The product manager should be one of the more straightforward roles in helping an organization drive business agility. Since they are directly accountable for the success of their products, the tools and solutions they require are directly linked to the strategic success of the entire organization.

Program Manager

Program managers differ from project managers in that they’re responsible for multiple different initiatives with multiple teams, under a variety of delivery approaches. To drive business agility, they need the right tools to ensure the best possible performance across all of the related projects and initiatives they manage.

PMO

The management function closest to the frontline of work execution, the domain PMO must be given the tools and focus needed to succeed. To be effective and contribute to business agility, PMOs require total visibility across all work regardless of how it is being delivered (traditional, agile or ad-hoc).

Resource Manager

Resource management must happen at a strategic level, span all resources in all business areas, and address needs across multiple business cycles. To drive business agility, resource managers should adopt a comprehensive approach that supports all work, across the entire enterprise, regardless of execution method.

Project Manager

Project managers drive business agility through effective delivery and execution. But being on-time, on-scope and on-budget is irrelevant unless a project also delivers ‘on-benefit’. So it’s critical for project managers to embrace capabilities that ensure all execution is aligned with strategy.

Scrum Master

Using Lean and Agile practices, this role helps to drive business agility by delivering the innovative, high-quality products and services the organization needs to compete in an ever-changing world. This requires solutions and approaches that transcend and complement the typical Agile toolset, connecting work with value.

Team Member

Many of the decisions that happen every day to help drive business agility, happen at the individual team member level. That’s why having the right tools and solutions that ensure alignment across the enterprise is so crucial to ensure that everyone’s work is driving the right transformation.

Enterprise Architect

Today’s Enterprise Architects (EAs) must do more than simply define and enforce technology standards. EAs who understand their role within an agile business focus on driving innovation and business outcomes. EAs who don’t adapt to this reality risk being marginalized to foundational tasks, which won’t drive business value.

Data Manager

Having access to trusted data is fundamental to driving business agility. Using company-wide data best practices – and in coordination with the business architect – a data manager can leverage a variety of capabilities to help ensure that the organization can quickly respond to any opportunity or disruption by leveraging a complete, accurate and contextualized enterprise data set.

IT Portfolio Manager

IT portfolio managers need visibility into all work, regardless of how it is being executed. To contribute to business agility, IT portfolio managers must be able to see an integrated picture of everything that is happening – across all of the tri-modal reality – while also moving beyond just managing traditional projects. Only then can they support the ability to optimize business value.

Business Analyst

This role is crucial in helping an organization identify, articulate and establish the rationale for change – a fundamental concept of business agility. But the business analyst must also have the right tools and processes in place to help them align with other key stakeholders to ensure that they are defining an effective transformation approach.

Business Architect

Nobody better understands how all the key elements within an organization work together to define the enterprise. The business architect needs the right tools to see and understand these relationships, in order to help the organization more effectively connect its strategies with the operation of the business, and with the planned evolution and transformation of that business.

Executive

More than just the individuals responsible for key enterprise functions, departments or business areas, executives drive business agility by ensuring that the enterprise, and every function within it, is contributing to the overall organizational strategy. This requires tools and solutions to provide enterprise-wide visibility, drive effective decision making and help maintain accountability to the organization’s strategic plan.

Finance Analyst

Whether work is being delivered using agile, waterfall or ad-hoc methods, the financial role requires visibility. From products to projects to programs to capabilities, in order to help drive business agility, finance must be able to see everything that’s happening as it happens, and how much money is being spent, and is forecast to be spent.

Transformation Office

Also known as SRO (Strategy Realization Office) or EPMO (Enterprise Project Management Office), this role is crucial for driving business agility and strategic outcomes by ensuring that all work is aligned with business strategy. It is the function that delivers Strategic Portfolio Management, while connecting top-down strategy execution with the working teams delivering throughout the organization.

Portfolio Manager

The portfolio manager is key to business agility and enabling business outcomes, acting as the glue between the Strategy Realization Office, line-of-business executives and the domain PMOs delivering the work. Their success depends on the portfolio manager’s ability to deliver against the organization’s strategic plans.