The IT Project Portfolio Planning Toolkit is a practical and easy to use set of Excel templates supported by a comprehensive Guide to IT Portfolio Planning and a Portfolio Planning training presentation to help you roll out your program.
The IT Project Portfolio Planning Toolkit has been used by 900+ customers and is now in its second revision based on their feedback. The Toolkit is designed to be a turnkey IT project portfolio planning solution that will help you:
- Quantify the usable resource capacity by skill set
- Identify gaps in staffing levels to support additional FTE’s
- Create a capacity planning and workload management model
- Improve IT governance decision making on project approvals
- Quantify and visualize the need for IT demand management
- Increase transparency into the balancing of IT demands vs IT capacity
The IT Project Portfolio Planning Toolkit was developed to provide CIO’s and IT managers with a rock solid but simplified method for IT portfolio planning using Excel. For CIO’s and IT managers looking to just get started with portfolio planning, or maybe need to formalize their IT project portfolio management for IT governance, the Toolkit offers an immediate and low cost method that will work for the majority of organizations.
IT Project Portfolio Planning Template
The IT Project Portfolio Planning Template is a fully editable MS Excel workbook with two worksheet templates. The Team Resource Planning Template is used to do resource capacity planning at a named resource level for those whose staffing model supports that level of detail or when the method of staffing projects and the skill sets needed require that level of detail.
The Portfolio Planning Template also develops resource capacity by resource types and supports allocations for non-contract time and Administrative, Maintenance and Support workloads to determine the net capacity by resource role or skill set that is available for project work.
The Portfolio Planning Template is also organized to group IT projects by priorities and record the estimated effort in hours required for each resource type. The Groups include Strategic Plan Projects, Mandatory Projects and Discretionary Projects in addition to setting aside allocations for a Contingency Bank and research projects.
Each priority grouping is subtotaled and deducted from the capacity for each resource type while also calculating the resource surplus or deficit. Finally, the Template captures estimated labor costs for supplemental labor to support estimating the cost of using contract labor for any shortages in capacity for the expected projects demands.
Guide to IT Portfolio Planning
The Guide to IT Portfolio Planning is a 13 page instruction that details how to use each of the worksheets in the IT Project Portfolio Planning Template. The Guide’s instructions also include the background concepts and principles of portfolio planning to help with the big picture and reasoning behind the options in using the Template.
The Guide to Portfolio Planning also includes a lot of great tips on alternative strategies in portfolio planning as well as workload management and resource planning. This include explanations to connect the portfolio planning concepts to strategies in IT governance so you can create a coherent model.
Portfolio Planning Presentation
The IT Project Portfolio Planning Toolkit also includes a 32-slide Portfolio Planning Presentation in PowerPoint that walks through the process of developing the IT resource capacity plan and how to use the Portfolio Planning Template. The presentation is a good instruction for anyone that will be actually setting up the Templates. Because it uses an actual example from a college IT department it also makes a great supplement to the Guide.
Because the Portfolio Planning Presentation is fully editable, it is easily customized to reflect the decisions you make in setting up your IT project portfolio management model. Once you have a customized version, you can use the presentation for training your IT governance committee and IT staff on the portfolio planning process.
Other Recommended Resources
The IT Project Portfolio Planning Template is intended to work with several other tools and templates I have available here.
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Thank you for sharing this post about portfolio planning toolkit. It has helped me tremendously. I hope there will be updates here soon. So far, it has been a great pleasure to be here.
You’re welcome Adam. I may take up revising this package but it is fairly far down on my list right now.