Executive Education Program  

ANALYZE  PRIORITIZE   LEAD   STABILIZE

IT portfolio under budget pressure
Focusing investments, setting priorities 

Make, explain, and defend difficult IT investment decisions when resources are insufficient.

Duration: 1 day (open enrollment); 1 day (in-house)

Format: In-person; open enrollment or in-house. Groups of 10 to 15. Not recorded. In-house, the day is run on the organization’s own anonymized portfolio; participants leave with a ranked list, a costed reduction scenario, and a stop list.

Target audiences

• CIO 
• Business executives responsible for digital investment decisions, transformation leaders
• IT and portfolio managers
• PMO leaders
• Heads of demand and investment management
• Managing directors of mid-sized companies
• Members of investment committees who must decide and defend a cut

Problem and relevance
Most IT portfolios are difficult because prioritization requires stopping something that already has stakeholder commitments and support. The pipeline routinely exceeds capacity two- to threefold, and only about a third of the IT budget is discretionary at all, the rest is operations, maintenance, and contracts. When a cut then comes, method no longer decides. What decides is whether someone can justify an uncomfortable ranking and hold it. The portfolio literature covers selecting from an offering; it omits the case that matters here: withdrawing from an existing stock, including cancelling initiatives already approved.

Learning outcomes and benefits

What you will take away

• Which part of the IT budget is discretionary at all, and why the run/change split sets the real limit
• The difference between criteria that produce a decision and criteria that justify one already made
• Why an overloaded pipeline is not merely uncomfortable but arithmetically expensive
• Why rational resource allocation systematically favors the wrong initiatives
• The mechanisms that keep a visibly hopeless initiative funded

What you will be able to do

• Score initiatives against business strategy and bring them into a justified ranking
• Compute a reduction scenario and present its consequences for schedule, benefit, and risk
• Cancel an approved initiative and defend the cancellation before a committee and the business
• Build a criteria model that decides rather than justifies, without getting caught in weighting debates
• Set decision rights so the ranking survives the next cycle

Topics and content
The morning establishes stock, scoring, and ranking; the afternoon is a single continuous reduction simulation on one case: twenty percent must go.

What is discretionary at all

• Run versus change; pipeline against capacity
• The utilization effect: why full planning halves throughput
• Why strategy is rarely the dominant prioritization criterion in practice

Criteria and scoring

• Categories and scales, deliberately without weightings
• Scoring against business strategy, not particular interests
• Criteria that decide versus criteria that justify

From scoring to ranking

• Priority levels
• Regulatory precedence and security-critical exceptions
• When an exception destroys the procedure

Dependencies and sequence

• What determines the sequence
• The roadmap as the single source of truth

The cut (simulation)

• Twenty percent must go; one scenario per group, with consequences shown
• Sunk cost and escalation of commitment

The committee (simulation)

• The decision is presented and attacked
• Defending the evidence, not the delivery

Governance for the next cycle

• Decision rights, roles, update rhythm
• What prevents the same debate three months later

Methods
Roughly 35 percent presentation to 65 percent participant activity; the afternoon is almost entirely participant work.

• A single continuous portfolio case: around twenty initiatives with budget, duration, benefit argument, dependencies, and regulatory positions
• Assigned roles as the load-bearing method (business, IT, finance) drawn by lot, because a portfolio cut is a political decision
• Counter-defense instead of presentation: each group defends its scenario against another group
• Peer exchange: participants first compare how their own organizations decide which initiatives get funded, before the scoring model is introduced
• Take-away templates: scoring model and RACI matrix for the proposal lifecycle

The distinctive approach

• Built on withdrawal, not selection: the case the portfolio literature omits: cutting an existing portfolio and cancelling approved initiatives.
• A decision practiced in assigned roles; participants rehearse defending a cut before a committee, not filling in a scoring sheet.
• Selected content has been piloted; two articles have appeared on cio.de.

Prerequisites

• Responsibility for an initiative portfolio, or involvement in its prioritization
• Business cases are read, not calculated: net present value and payback are named and interpreted, not derived
• No knowledge of a particular portfolio tool required (the course is tool-neutral); for the in-house version, the organization’s own initiative list, anonymized

Course lead: Dr. Christof Gellweiler: author of the IT Alignment Guide V2 and Strategic Analysis in Practice; 30 years in IT and transformation.

Scheduling and delivery: Via selected seminar providers. In-house on request.