Part II

Using Portfolio Management to Achieve
Strategic Goals

Part II builds on the basic strategic planning and portfolio management processes outlined in Part I with a more in-depth discussion of advanced portfolio management processes used by successful organizations today.

Chapter 3 introduces the enterprise architecture—the infrastructural design and connections among an organization’s systems—and describes how architectural work captures and portrays business and technical information in an interconnected way that promotes consistency between business operations and their enabling IT products and services. Chapter 3 also focuses on the subcomponent business architecture, which the business analyst creates and maintains to guide the execution of organizational strategy through managed change.

Strategic planning and the creation of a business architecture provide a firm foundation for understanding where an organization is today and where it wants to be in the future. From this foundation, organizations must select the best initiatives to manage the changes necessary to reach goals as quickly as possible, and with the least cost and risk. Chapter 4 describes the business analyst’s role in incorporating feasibility studies into the portfolio management process, making project selection more effective.

Supporting information from the feasibility studies and the business architecture is combined with a formal business case to present a complete decision package to the portfolio management team. Chapter 5 outlines the business case in detail, and then discusses the business analyst’s role in developing the decision package, which additionally includes scoping and defining business opportunities and conducting initial risk assessments.

Chapter 6 describes how the business analyst acts on the information collected and analyzed during the pre-project portfolio selection activities by managing project value and measuring business benefits after deploying the project solution.