Connect with Us

 

A guide to Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) software

Strategic Portfolio Management software works with Project Portfolio Management tools to enable continuous, agile planning across the enterprise


Table of Contents

Chapter 8: Who We Serve
 

Chapter 1

What is Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM)?

The future of project and portfolio management revolves around continuous collaboration and strategic alignment. As the "speed of business" accelerates, PMOs need the tools to capture and react to opportunities more quickly.

SPM Software

Strategic Portfolio Management software helps transformation leaders with top down planning to assess, prioritize, and schedule initiatives with visibility into resource constraints, while exploring alternative options through what-if scenario planning.

Assess

Visualize the portfolio planning lifecycle and where all items fall within it. Our highly-customizable Kanban board ties ideas to the strategies they support and allows you to quickly and easily create new ideas, update status, and communicate changes.

Prioritize

Customizable scoring models help you create a common criteria to prioritize efforts across your enterprise. Create a scoring model, rate ideas and demands, and identify your primary candidates.

Roadmap Planning

SPM's powerful Roadmap Planning tool visualizes where initiatives are in time as well as resource effort and budget constraints. Our intuitive interface makes it simple to explore multiple scenarios and optimize your plan. 

"Changepoint SPM has streamlined our portfolio planning process by providing intuitive, collaborative boards to visualize our projects, roadmaps, and priorities. We can make quick decisions on allocation in real time." - PMO Leader, Small Business Transportation Services
 


Discover how Strategic Portfolio Management
can elevate your planning

Request a Demo

 

Chapter 2

Aligning Strategy to Execution

In today's fast-changing world, organizations must stay focused on initiatives that will optimize business outcomes.

Link initiatives to the strategies they support

Strategic Portfolio Management clearly maps initiatives to the business strategies they support, at every step in the planning process. Clear visualization via the Kanban boards, prioritization boards, and the project roadmap help leaders and teams understand the importance of their work. 

When teams understand how their efforts tie into enterprise-level strategies, they are more engaged in their work, driving better business outcomes. 

And by eliminating or de-prioritizing efforts that do not directly impact key business strategies, your organization will increase efficiency and have a bigger impact across the enterprise. 

"Changepoint's alignment of projects to business plans allowed us to change priorities based on our new goals." - EPMO Leader, Medium Enterprise Energy & Utilities Company
 


See how Strategic Portfolio Management
aligns your initiatives to strategy

Request a Demo

 

Chapter 3

Improve Strategic Planning Agility

React to changing business conditions quickly and efficiently while understanding how portfolio changes will impact resources and delivery of outcomes.

Continuous Planning

The needs of your business will change as you and your organization evolves and as the world around us changes. Annual planning is no longer enough, even quarterly planning is not enough for many organizations. Strategic Portfolio Management offers the tools you need to update your plans and recognize the impacts of changes on resources, timing and prioritization. Visualize the impact of potential changes throughout your planning cycle.

Increasing your planning agility relies on planning at the right level. If you are too "in the weeds" it becomes overly-complicated and time-consuming, especially for organizations that do this through spreadsheets. Changepoint SPM tools empower you to quickly assess changes and the impacts those changes can have on your current roadmap. 

Kanban board visualization, a user friendly priority board, and a portfolio roadmap that highlights resource and budget constraints help you quickly plan for multiple scenarios and communicate those plans with your stakeholders so you can gain alignment on your new strategy before adjusting the plan of record.  

 

Learn more about planning agility

Request a Demo

 

Chapter 4

Alignment on Investment Decisions

Prioritize project and new product initiatives based on self-defined, consistent criteria including alignment to strategy, benefits, costs, and risk.   

Project Investments

Have you ever put together a project investment strategy only to have an executive come in at the last moment and ask you to "fit in a few more pet projects in your spare time?" No matter how "easy" someone thinks their project is, the downstream effects of this can be devestating. Even more so if you need to spend days updating spreadsheets to truly understand the impact.

Strategic Portfolio Management gives you a consistent set of tools to quickly and easily evaluate new project ideas across an agreed-upon set of criteria. Once that project is ranked against all other candidates, decisions can be communicated and agreed upon by all stakeholders.

Product Investments

New Product Development (NPD) organizations are using Changepoint to identify potential products and enhancements that align with their strategy and provide the highest return on investment. Our user-friendly tools make it easy for industries from Pharmaceuticals to Financial Services to prioritize and communicate product options to key stakeholders, so everyone can make informed decisions based on a shared set of information. 

Paired with PPM's NPD solution, new products can be managed from inception through development and all the way to market.  


Learn how Strategic Portfolio Management
helps you prioritize initiatives
and get buy-in

Request a Demo

 

Chapter 5

Scenario Planning

Agile enterprises are ready to pivot based on changing needs, but how do they plan ahead for "What if" scenarios?

Continuous Planning for an Unpredictable Future

Organizations used to rely on an annual planning cycle to set their schedule for the year and tie projects to strategies. In today's fast-changing world we must be more agile and plan for competitive threats, security threats, strategic changes, pandemics and more. Strategic Portfolio Management provides the tools to quickly adapt to our changing world. 

"What If?" Scenario Planning

Scenario planning reduces overall risk by allowing you to plan, communicate, and evaluate strategies for a variety of situations. 

  • What if we focus all our efforts on Project A and delay Project B?
  • What if we need to create a new product to meet the demands of our largest customer?

The ability to compare multiple potential roadmaps and the impacts those plans will have on timelines, people, budgets, and more help your organization communicate options and make the right decisions while also preparing you to react more quickly to a changing environment. Having a variety of situational strategies increases your confidence, reduces potential risks, and speeds your ability to adopt a new plan of record when needed. 

 


Be ready for a rapidly changing business landscape
with Strategic Portfolio Management

Request a Demo

 

Chapter 6

Capacity Planning for Strategic Initiatives

SPM provides top-down capacity planning for agile strategic planning. Insight into budget and resource constraints at the planning stage improve efficiency and optimize PMO performance.

Why Top-Down Planning?

With the right tool in place, your team can gain real-time insight into all of your projects from one central location, aligning projects in a way that makes it easier to meet and exceed your business goals. Key to this alignment is having a 360-degree view of all the resources across your organization. 

Top-down planning helps you match initiatives to strategy, then visualize any resource capacity constraints. Strategic Portfolio Management eliminates or reduces surprise resource constraints down the line. 

The SPM Roadmap

After you assess and prioritize an initiative, you need to find when you can complete this work. When does it start, and when can you finish? The SPM roadmap planning tool visualizes the impact on your available capacity in real time so you can free up resources when needed. What once took days or weeks of analysis, can now be visualized in moments.

A Better Capacity Planning Tool

Strategic Portfolio Management Capacity Planning is powerful, elegant, and easy to use.

  • Guided selection for defining supply and demand.
  • Measure capacity to reflect corporate needs — budget, effort, or fixed resources and assets.
  • Flexible. Set time and location constraints on your supply and define when and where your resources or budget will be available.

"Changepoint is a one-stop shop for project information with intake streamlining, project portfolio visibility, and resource allocation based on capacity and demand."
- PMO Leader, Global 500 Consumer Services Firm
 


Discover how simple capacity planning can be

Request a Demo

 

Chapter 7

Changepoint Project Portfolio Management with Strategic Planning

For most organizations, a rigid, annual planning process is no longer enough. Project portfolio management must become more adaptive to respond to the increasing pace of change. Strategic Portfolio Management simplifies and accelerates planning and execution functions while allowing for simple cross-functional alignment. 

There are four real roadblocks to effectively managing and planning portfolios which Strategic Portfolio Management can overcome.

Stakeholder Coordination

Coordinating across cross-functional stakeholders is a challenge. Finance, engineering, manufacturing, IT - they all need to be able to coordinate and see how things align visually with their strategies and how it will impact their resources. Spreadsheets don't scale to the needs of a complex enterprise.

Prioritization

With everyone fighting for "their" project to get approved, it is critical to have an agreed-upon set of criteria to evaluate them against. Making this criteria visible for all will build alignment for top priorities.

Visualize and Communicate

Enterprises need to be able to visualize the priorities, progress, and results of their portfolios. Spreadsheets with lots of random information on them are hard to consume and hard to keep updated.

Visualizations show where projects and ideas fit strategically and where they fit in the overall roadmap.

Resource Management

Strategic Portfolio Management identifies constraints early on to help optimize planning. SPM makes sure your initiatives fit inside your capacity limits at a high level. Once determined, that information can be passed into your PPM tool for detailed assignments with lower risk. 

Strategic Planning

The Changepoint SPM module provides the agile level of planning you need to react to changing market conditions and gain alignment across stakeholders. Paired with Product Portfolio Management (PPM), it creates a powerful solution to take you from planning to execution, with actionable analytics to accelerate the success of your projects and your PMO. 

 


Learn how Product Portfolio Management and
Strategic Portfolio Management
work together

Request a Demo

 

Chapter 8

Who We Serve

Strategic planning should not live in a silo. Changepoint Strategic Portfolio Management connects users across the organization.

Enterprise Project Management Office (EPMO)

EPMO leaders get unparalleled control and insight into project lifecycle planning, prioritization, and roadmap scheduling. Plan, communicate, and align initiatives to business strategy to drive positive business outcomes.

Project Management Office (PMO)

Improve project outcomes and stay on top of your strategic initiatives with Kanban boards, priority lists, and project roadmaps. With insight into capacity constraints during planning, PMO leaders can make the right decisions quickly. 

IT Project Management Office (IT PMO)

Whether you are using Waterfall, Agile or Hybrid methodologies for your projects, SPM helps with planning across teams to maximize available resources and complete more projects on time and on budget. 

New Product Development

NPD Leaders can improve alignment between product innovation and business strategy. Strategic Portfolio Management drives efficient resource allocation and allows you to adapt to shifting goals through flexible planning tools. 

Strategic Planning Offices

Align projects, programs, portfolios, and other initiatives with key business strategies. Changepoint SPM provides the flexibility and insight you need to make quick decisions, stay agile, and ensure your teams are working on the right projects, at the right times, for the right reasons.

Resource Managers

Every organization has a long list of desired projects to undertake, but not enough resources to tackle them all. Changepoint SPM matches resource capacity to your project roadmap and automatically updates as needed. Make quick decisions, stay agile, and ensure your teams are working on the right projects, at the right times, for the right reasons.

 


Accelerate planning and execution with Strategic Portfolio Management

Request a Demo

 

Chapter 9

World-Class Service Offerings

Changepoint is committed to helping your organization reach its goals. Our consultants have real-world PMO leadership experience to help you drive your business forward.

The Customer Journey

Changepoint Customer Success Managers work with you to understand your challenges, your goals, and to move you through our Customer Journey so you can optimize your experience. Many of our CSMs joined our team after developing a passion for our PPM solution working for our customers. 

CSMs stick with you on your journey to help you succeed.

Integrations

As part of your Changepoint SPM implementation, your Changepoint implementation consultant will discuss your organizational needs. Based on your unique requirements we will recommend the optimal data connection between your PPM and SPM environments and will assist with the initiation and follow-through of the integration. 

Changepoint Education Services

Adding more users? Need to better understand our latest release? Changepoint Education Services is a powerful learning platform to get you and your team engaged quickly and successfully leveraging the power of our PPM solution. 

And more...

Does your organization have unique requirements? Need more support? Just ask.

We offer multiple service offerings, a vibrant customer community, and experienced CSMs and consultants to help you achieve your goals. 

 


See continuous collaboration in action

Request a Demo

 
close chapters modal

Changepoint is a suite of purpose-built portfolio management solutions for project and program management offices, services organizations, enterprise architects and business transformation teams. Transform project, engagement, or application portfolios with an adaptable, intuitive, and intelligent solution that is configurable for today’s changing business landscape. With a Changepoint solution, companies can make informed and innovative business decisions that impact changes in project or market direction, maximize resource utilization, improve financial control, and align outcomes and revenue to corporate goals.

Follow us

© 2021 Changepoint Corporation.

All Rights Reserved.

Corporate Headquarters

1111 Third Avenue

Suite 700

Seattle, WA 98101