Portfolio Management Consulting

Midmarket CxO’s are constantly challenged with slashed IT budgets, out of control applications maintenance costs, difficulty in ranking and assessing existing application suite, pressures to use fewer infrastructures and significantly reduce OPEX and CAPEX all while constantly deliver measurable value to business. Our 4 Step Portfolio Management Consulting Process help midmarket CxO’s in the following areas:

• Assess their current business, operations and IT architecture supporting business
• Design cloud ready IT architecture and optimized applications pack.

At the end our assessment, our customers will receive a report that clearly showcase the following items:

• Summary of operation challenges across the organization broken down by criticality, occurrence and major KPI’s applicable to the organization.
• Gaps and recommendation in existing business architecture.
• Cloud and business ready assessment of existing IT architecture.
• A secured, cloud ready, business enabled architecture roadmap
• An optimized non redundant list of applications mapped within the cloud ready architecture

Our Portfolio Management Consulting Process is explained in detail below.

Step1: Identify CXO’s Operations Challenge

Our primary goal in this section is to ensure that our customers are able identify organization bottlenecks, process flaws and “Business-As-Usual” challenges that exist in their organization. Our operations experts perform three different categories of activities, which help identify CXO’s operations challenges.

Problem Definition	Data Verification	Data Analysis
Issue Tree Customer Surveys Gap Analysis Employee Surveys Five Forces Model	Issue Tree Customer Organization Audits & Tours Work Sampling Flow Charts Organizational Charts	Issue Tree Portfolio Analysis Bottleneck Analysis Statistical Tools Evaluating Decision Trees Evaluating Scorecards Stakeholder Analysis Responsibility Charts

Step2: Create Business Alignment Roadmap

In the last section, we helped our customers identify the operations bottlenecks and challenges. We take these learning in consideration and work with our customers to identify and enhance their growth objectives. We spend time analyzing their existing processes, work packages etc. to build an optimized tactical, measurable work plan broken down in chunks. We showcase the work plans via our time tested quadrant model, which breaks activities into highest and lowest value generators, as well as immediate and long term action activities. This method helps our customers pick and choose work plans in a cost effective manner. The diagram below shows an example of our quadrant model in action.

Step 3: Cloud and Architecture Assessment

Once we finish creating the business alignment roadmap, we compare that with the existing architectural design of the underlying IT systems. Our experience has shown us that many midmarket companies have done outsourcing and offshoring to reduce temporary cost without really cleaning up existing architecture. So, although these organizations saved money in the short run, they did not build the foundation required to constantly save money year over year and scale up easily at the same time. Besides, these organizations keep their IT systems vulnerable as they
We help design an optimized cloud ready IT architecture. Our architecture buildup is vendor and product independent. Our goals in this architecture buildup are security, efficiency and cost effectiveness while exceeding organization SLA’s.

Step4: Create Applications Transformation Roadmap

In the final step of our assessment, we help midmarket CxO’s assess the current IT portfolios, identify the value generating and underperforming applications and prioritize IT investment. Our goal in this step is to perform the following activities:

Portfolio Cataloging: We help identify the sources and resources to collect information regarding functionalities and redundancies about existing applications.

Application Inventor: Once the source and the resources for application related information are identified, we help create a single business view of an inventory of application portfolio and store all the related information across multiple corporate groups that could be used to perform various analyses.

Portfolio Analysis: We analyze the collected raw data in various dimensions. Some of the typical analyses include TCO (Total Cost Of Ownership), Cost Benefit, ROI, Technical – Business alignment, Application – Business Process mapping and Risk assessment..

Portfolio Disposition Recommendation: This is the step where we rank IT portfolios on based on 3 categories: 1. Technical suitability: How well the applications fit in the current technical environment. 2. Business alignment: How are the applications or IT portfolios aligned with the business objective? We validate if these applications can support enterprise’s business strategy. 3. Cost: Assess how much have we so far spent on the applications or IT portfolios vs. how much does this application contribute towards achieving the business strategy.

Investment Sequencing & Roadmap: Once the recommendations are approved by the CIO or IT executives, we help create 90 days -120 days – 1 year stop gap check, to validate if the plan is getting executed as per the plan.