Strategic portfolio management (SPM) empowers organizations to transform complex business decisions into actionable insights that drive operational excellence. Serving as the cornerstone of modern business optimization, SPM allows companies to adapt swiftly to market changes while maximizing operational efficiency and maintaining their competitive edge. But what is strategic portfolio management?

This article will dive into SPM and how organizations leverage it to turn business strategy into business outcomes.

Lösungsdemo – Strategisches Portfoliomanagement: Unternehmensweit Strategien umsetzen und Transformation vorantreiben

Erfahren Sie, wie Sie mit strategischem Portfoliomanagement einen klaren Überblick über strategische Initiativen erhalten und Ihre Organisation in die Lage versetzen, schneller Geschäftsergebnisse zu erzielen.

Lösungsdemo ansehen • Lösungsdemo: Strategisches Portfoliomanagement

What is Strategic Portfolio Management and Why Do You Need It Now?

Adapt to change and stay competitive with SPM.

Webinar ansehen • What is Strategic Portfolio Management and Why Do You Need It Now?
Bring strategies to life and pivot when needed, no matter how you plan, fund, or deliver with Planview's Strategic Portfolio Management solution.
Bring strategies to life and pivot when needed, no matter how you plan, fund, or deliver with Planview’s Strategic Portfolio Management solution.

Definition von strategischem Portfoliomanagement

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.

Moreover, strategic portfolio management empowers organizations to improve business agility by reducing time to market and unlocking organizational capacity for initiatives. It also increases confidence in strategic investments by empowering business leaders with accurate, up-to-date information to inform their decision making.

The benefits mentioned above are achieved by continuously analyzing impacts to financials, people, business capabilities, and adapting models to fit the organization’s future needs.

How many enterprises are leveraging strategic portfolio management effectively?

According to the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Strategic Portfolio Management, “only 13% of organizations have done the work to gain high effectiveness with the three attributes of strategic portfolio management (SPM).”

With strategic portfolio management, you can benefit from business goals such as:

  • Gaining enterprise-wide visibility into priorities across portfolios, initiatives, projects, and products
  • Leveraging real-time organizational data on the delivery of business objectives from a centralized data source
  • Enabling dynamic planning, funding, and pivots to adapt to market or customer needs when change is required
  • Providing a way for different groups within a company to collaborate and communicate timelines, identify risks, manage dependencies, and understand how investments are contributing to company value

If the question, “what is strategic portfolio management?” still remains, below are the top ways companies see the benefits of SPM.

Was sind die Vorteile des strategischen Portfoliomanagements?

Strategic portfolio management reprioritizes tasks and continuously adapts and optimizes the values of projects, programs, assets, and/or product investments to align with strategic objectives.

By weaving together data-driven insights with agile methodologies, SPM empowers organizations to pivot swiftly in volatile markets while maintaining peak operational performance. This intelligent approach cuts through complexity, transforming scattered initiatives into a cohesive strategy that drives both innovation and sustainable growth.

There are some significant benefits to strategic portfolio management. Below are some of the reasons why implementing SPM will help your enterprise meet their strategic goals and achieve successful business outcomes:

Responding to disruptions quickly and effectively

In today’s business landscape, disruptions aren’t just occasional challenges—they’re a constant reality that can make or break an organization’s future. While MIT Sloan Management Review emphasizes that companies need “bold offensive strategies” to emerge as winners, the key lies in having the right tools to execute these strategies effectively.

Strategic portfolio management creates an offensive strategy with technology that continuously garners insights and adapts to changes. It mitigates risks by orchestrating real-time data insights with dynamic resource management and allocation, so organizations can pivot swiftly when disruptions strike.

Rather than relying on static planning, SPM’s intelligent framework continuously evaluates market signals, reprioritizes initiatives, and optimizes resource deployment – turning potential threats into competitive advantages.

When disruptions emerge, organizations aren’t just reacting. With strategic portfolio management, they’re executing precise, data-driven responses that maintain operational excellence while capturing new market opportunities.

Kürzere Time-to-Market

Strategic portfolio management delivers deeper, quicker insights by analyzing all data across the enterprise and delivering insights to a single, unified platform. This improves business agility by allowing stakeholders to focus on analyzing progress and identifying trends quickly.

Die Geschwindigkeit und Einfachheit ermöglichen eine schnellere Strategieumsetzung und einen schnelleren Abschluss von Initiativen. Je schneller der Entscheidungsprozess, desto schneller wird die Idee den Innovationstrichter durchlaufen und desto schneller wird sie den Markt erreichen. Diese Bereitstellungsgeschwindigkeit verschafft Unternehmen einen Wettbewerbsvorteil und minimiert die Kosten drastisch.

Bessere Abstimmung von Strategie und Ausführung

According to McKinsey & Company, 70 percent of strategy transformations fail. What’s more, successful strategy execution tends to be more of an exception than a rule.

Das strategische Portfoliomanagement umfasst Unternehmens-Roadmaps, die die Strategie mit Investitionen, Produkten und Anwendungen verbinden.
Das strategische Portfoliomanagement umfasst Unternehmens-Roadmaps, die die Strategie mit Investitionen, Produkten und Anwendungen verbinden.

That’s where strategic portfolio management can help. It enables companies to thoroughly evaluate and prioritize tasks to allocate limited resources consistently and objectively based on each proposed project.

With visualized dependencies between business capabilities, applications, products, services, organizations connected to strategies, investments, and value metrics, everyone on your team can see what’s next and create custom plans to reach shared goals, both short and long term.

ROI maximieren

Apropos Ressourcen: Wir wissen, dass sie begrenzt sind. Durch einen objektiven, datengesteuerten Ansatz für Ihr strategisches Portfolio ändern sich die priorisierten Aufgaben, wenn sich das Geschäftsumfeld weiterentwickelt.

As resources and funding change, reallocation of resources and funding is visualized, allowing executives to leverage flexible funding approaches to reflect changing circumstances.

Attaching metrics and financials to all initiatives allows executives to control and reallocate resources based on data-driven models. Transparency and real-time metrics eliminate wasted time and ultimately create significant bottom-line savings.

Strategisches Portfoliomanagement – Anwendungsbeispiele

With a clear plan in place, executives can lead transformational change, monitor performance, and measure progress to accelerate strategy delivery. See how organizations use strategic portfolio management across the business to align people, money, and time to successfully achieve desired business outcomes.

Dynamic planning and prioritization

Priorities can change overnight. Many companies already struggle with strategic planning, failing to translate strategic objectives into measurable goals, operational roadmaps, and coordinated delivery across the organization. When strategies change, it becomes even harder to reallocate funding, rapidly reprioritize, and realign teams./p>    

Strategic portfolio management facilitates planning and prioritization adjustments, ensuring that resources are directed toward the most impactful initiatives. Reassess strategic initiatives and their relative levels of priority and associated funding. Then, rapidly model the impact of changes to balance trade-offs and make smarter business decisions./p> 

Unternehmensweites Programm- und Portfoliomanagement

Enterprise portfolio management offices focus primarily on ensuring strategy execution alignment, portfolio governance, change management, and visibility for strategic decision making. Strategic portfolio management lets you plan and manage cross-departmental programs and products essential to achieving strategic objectives.

Gain access to comprehensive portfolio analysis and reporting, dashboards, and “what-if” scenario planning with the help of an effective strategic portfolio management solution. This will help to ensure you fund the best investments for delivering business outcomes and measure progress along the way so you can adjust and optimize when needed./p>

Here are some ways strategic portfolio management can help you achieve your desired outcomes:

  • Bring strategic programs to life: Define top-down timeframes, financials, and roadmaps; adjust based on progress and forecasts
  • Create capacity for innovation and transformation: Balance capacity against demand; compare scenarios to evaluate alternative staffing and funding approaches for achieving outcomes, and effectively focus resources for on-strategy delivery
  • Automate phase-gated processes: Gain visibility into gate deliverables and status; visualize trends with configurable gate status fields and dashboards
  • Mitigate risk with improved visibility: Analyze impacts and manage dependencies while building technology plans and roadmaps to achieve strategic objectives
  • Share progress through executive dashboards: Provide leaders clear visibility into strategic progress across the organization

Kapitalplanung

Capital planning is about investing today to prepare for tomorrow’s business environment. Without a way to prioritize capital investment requests and gain visibility to drive informed strategic decisions, organizations can 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, reallocate capital, and monitor performance.

  • Real-time visibility into capital budgets and investments: On-demand reporting with dashboards equips executives with the data they need
  • Build capital plans that maximize ROI: With investment and capacity planning, ensure capital is best allocated considering financial metrics such as NPV, IRR, and payback period
  • Optimize the capital portfolio: Manage capital forecasts with actuals, model various prioritization scenarios, and depreciate capital into future periods, enabling trade-off decisions for reallocation of funds to drive outcomes

IT-Strategieplanung

For today’s digital business, technology investments often underpin the company’s strategic objectives. The IT strategic plan must span current and future business objectives while remaining adaptable when priorities change.

Strategic portfolio management visually represents the interdependencies between strategy, technology, and outcomes. It can also aid in trade-off analysis between innovation and legacy or run the business work, ensuring the organization balances resources and funding appropriately.

Management im Hinblick auf die Strategieumsetzung

Die Unfähigkeit eines Unternehmens, Lücken bei der Durchführung der Strategie zu schließen, ist der Hauptgrund für das Scheitern neuer Wachstumsinitiativen. Der Weg von der Strategie zur Umsetzung wird durch widersprüchliche Prioritäten, überlastete Ressourcen und Unklarheit über die Richtung behindert.

Strategic portfolio management plays a vital role in the execution of strategic initiatives. Organizations can effectively execute their strategic plans by aligning initiatives, projects, programs, and products with the overall business strategy and allocating resources accordingly.

Mithilfe des strategischen Portfoliomanagements kann die Nutzenrealisierung aus Produkten, Services und anderen Ergebnissen sichergestellt werden.
Mithilfe des strategischen Portfoliomanagements kann die Nutzenrealisierung aus Produkten, Services und anderen Ergebnissen sichergestellt werden.

Choose a strategic portfolio management solution that offers a system where executives, strategists, EPMOs, and Finance can work together to achieve objectives by managing strategy execution and adapting to uncertainty. This will enable you to:

  • Gain executive line of sight: Visibility milestones, financials, and KPIs of strategic programs
  • Mitigate delivery risk: Manage performance with a KPI dashboard highlighting issues to address
  • Map strategy to outcomes: Visualize dependencies between business capabilities, applications, products, services, and organizations connected to strategies, investments, and value metrics
  • Define desired outcomes: Set objectives and the target results, focus portfolio funding decisions on objectives and business value
  • Collaborate on portfolio decisions: Engage leaders and stakeholders with workflows, dashboards, Kanban visualization
  • Access real-time, accurate data: Roll-up progress status and financial data from teams throughout the organization
  • Streamline gated processes: Fail fast, deliver faster with improved efficiency and consistent, informed go/no-go decisions

Dynamische Planung

Priorities can change overnight. Many companies already struggle with strategic planning, failing to translate strategic objectives into measurable goals, operational roadmaps, and coordinated delivery across the organization.

When strategies change, it becomes even harder to reallocate funding, rapidly reprioritize, and realign teams. Having actionable information can inform good decision making, enabling everyone from executives, EPMOs, and project management to work together and quickly shift strategies, priorities, funding, and resources by:

  • Revisiting the strategic direction: Reassess strategic initiatives and their relative levels of priority and associated funding. Rapidly model the impact of changes and balance trade-offs
  • Reallocate funding: Visualize the reallocation of resources and funding over different timelines. Leverage flexible funding approaches to easily reallocate as circumstances change
  • Reprioritize investments: Set new portfolio priorities. Balance work that needs to be done immediately, and over the next month, quarter, and year
  • Realign teams and work: Quickly redeploy resources. Maintain alignment with strategic goals, financial constraints, and resource capacity
  • Review performance: Engage stakeholders by measuring results and dynamically adapting as required

IT-Strategieplanung

Technology investments underpin the company’s strategic objectives for today’s digital business. The IT strategic plan must span current and future business objectives while remaining adaptable when priorities change.

Strategic portfolio management software offers CIOs, enterprise architects, portfolio managers, and finance leaders an integrated portfolio that connects strategy to delivery. This enables the organization to realize strategic objectives for growth, innovation, and operational efficiency through:

  • Accelerated innovation and transformation: Prioritize investments within initiatives that will best deliver strategic objectives, while understanding the impact of trade-offs and decisions
  • Integrated IT portfolio management: Map outcomes to strategic objectives, spanning investment, project, program, product, service, application, and technology portfolios
  • Risk mitigation: Create multiple investment and change scenarios; compare impact to costs, capacity, and interdependencies to identify the least disruptive options
  • Visualized relationships between strategy, technology, and outcomes: Break down organizational silos with visibility, showing interdependencies among strategies, portfolios, and programs to drive strategic initiatives
  • Addressing dependencies: Use visualizations to understand and explore the connections between strategies, objectives, business capabilities, products, applications, technology, and work. Understand how relationships can help or hinder progress so you can build the right plan for transformation
  • Modernized application portfolios: Reveal actions to reduce risk and technical debt by consolidating legacy software and infrastructure. Expedite deployment of new enabling technology for strategic outcomes
  • Connectivity to your ecosystem: Integrate a variety of affiliated data sources to bring information into a single system of record to visualize interrelationships and monitor performance. Sources include work management, agile development tools, CMDB, and financial systems

Umfassende Daten als Grundlage für erfolgreiche Lösungen

If your company has an extensive portfolio and is trying to keep up with your strategy execution process on spreadsheets and static program tracking tools, there’s a better way.

The right strategic portfolio management solution will enable you to continuously monitor the risks and rewards of opportunities and decisions so that all projects in your portfolio are prioritized, contributing to your goals, and positively impacting your bottom line.

Planview’s Strategic Portfolio Management solution enables executives to garner immediate insights and enact informed solutions that empower business leaders to turn their strategic plans into long-term value.

About Planview Strategic Portfolio Management 

Let’s look back at our initial question: what is strategic portfolio management?

It’s a holistic approach to planning, funding, portfolio management, and hybrid work across operating models.

Strategic portfolio management is how your organization brings enterprise-wide visibility by connecting the dots from strategy to team, idea to outcome, and project to product.

With Planview’s Strategic Portfolio Management solution you can bring your strategies to life and pivot when things change, no matter how you plan, fund, or deliver.

  

To see Planview’s Strategic Portfolio Management solution in action, watch the on-demand demo. See how to use SPM to improve market responsiveness, boost confidence in strategic investments, and focus your constrained resources on initiatives that yield the best strategic outcomes.