Using EAP’s Project Prioritization Software to Allocate Technology Investments
We’ve talked elsewhere about how EAP can provide sophisticated strategic resource planning and capacity planning. In those cases, the concerns were mostly around staffing—making sure key projects had the right people at the right time and anticipating and addressing staffing shortages. But other resources can benefit from this approach as well. Money, for instance—always needed and often in short supply. EAP’s strategic portfolio planning capabilities can help you figure out the best way to deploy a defined budget. The process isn’t far different from the kind of holistic portfolio review we generally advocate, but it is tailored to accommodate the strictures of a budget-driven R&D program.
Funding a Six-year Plan
One of our clients had a particularly well-defined investment cycle. Because it was federally funded, the organization worked on a six-year funding schedule. Each year, the government provided a budget detailing how much money would be available to the organization in each of the coming six years. With that information in hand, the organization’s yearly portfolio review involved prioritizing its technology initiatives and determining which ones it could afford to support given the promised funding. In the ideal process, the organization would create a plan for the entire funding period, which would then be updated and adjusted each year to account for the actual progress made by each initiative as well as changes in the actual funding, and then extended as the six-year plan rolled forward.