Your Application Portfolio goes wrong, why?

The management of a portfolio of applications is in some ways similar to the management of an account, in the way that you have in one hand the customer satisfaction and on the other hand you have the profit you do.

I would like to go in deep for a situation like the one showed below: the customer is happy, but the vendor is having important issues.

You can have situations where the customer is so happy but internally you are suffering bad consequences. This usually happens when you are growing or decreasing your presence as IT vendor with respect your customer.

From customer point of view the perceptions can be positive: SLAs are achieved, the projects are delivered with some issues and the management of the portfolio is running with issues due to the complexity of the environment. Things are running and at the end of the day this is what really matters. The customer is happy.

On the other hand, you review your numbers and they are not good. You analyze the situation and you find the account team is organized in a way that they can absorb 5m$ – 10m$, but they are not ready to absorb a volume of 20m$.

What could be the causes?

• The maturity of the processes are not good.
• The communication channels are so weak and limited to the old team members that talk each other, but the new members are out.
• The way to manage the projects is valid for a small amount of medium size projects, but not for a bigger amount of medium and big projects.
• The PMO is overloaded, the delivery managers too.
• The staff is jumping from one project to other, sometimes you see moves where you feel that in general the urgent things are attended and the important things are attended later.
• Senior managers are also overloaded, they are attending a demanding customer and suddenly the internal activities are not fully attended.
• You receive payments based on project milestones, you suddenly have a lot of payments to manage, and to do it manually takes to much time and communications between PMO, SDMs and finance.

You need to look at the situation with perspective, you need to re-organize your team, promote the automation of some processes, mature and standardize the communication channels and the processes.

You need a change,