Applications Portfolio
Professor Chris Edwards
Steve Macaulay
IT managers are frequently faced with sometimes hundreds of decisions
about their applications. Now how best to manage those strategically.
Professor Chris Edwards has got an approach that he calls the Applications
Portfolio. Now Chris, tell me some more about this.
Chris Edwards
The Applications Portfolio has been around really for quite a long time. It’s a
way of organisations being able to manage a multitude of different types of
application. Let me explain. If you have just one way of managing
applications that works just fine for that sort of application but when you do
something different then you have a problem that the approach you are
using doesn’t quite suit. Let me give you an example, it’ll be clearer. If you
were trying to install a large ERP system then you would need something
that had prints all over it, lots of governance involved, really something that
was very robust. Contrast that with how you would manage a small
innovative application where you were just trying to find out whether
something was worth doing, you would manage that much more loosely and
much more informally, the governance meetings wouldn’t be rigid, wouldn’t
be quite so frequent. And what the Applications Portfolio is trying to do is to
provide a collection of different sorts of applications, so that you can start to
manage each type of application according to its value to the business.
Steve Macaulay
So that seems to suggest that you classify these into some sort of types?
Chris Edwards
Yes, absolutely. Usually it’s four. Some organisations make it three, some
make it five, but the normal one is four different classifications. The words
that are normally used are hypertential, strategic, key operational and
support, and these four groups represent the different values that each of
those sorts of applications represent to the business.
Steve Macaulay
And then presumably the treatment that’s given to these?
Chris Edwards
Absolutely, the treatment that is given to each of those four are different
and you’d expect an organisation somewhere to have a list of those four and
ways that they suggest each type should be managed. Now when an
application comes along the first question you ask is, which sort of
application is this, if it’s hypertential then the way of managing hypertential
is applied to that application.
Steve Macaulay
So let’s go into some nitty gritty detail, you’ve got a lot of experience using
this in practice so can you illustrate that with some examples?
Chris Edwards
We’ve just been working with a very large bank. They wanted to put in a
new project management system because the one that they had, people
were avoiding using it, people would say, well it doesn’t really apply to this
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project, it doesn’t apply to that project, and eventually no-one was using it
for anything, and they realised that any one method that they had of
managing projects wouldn’t work so they defined four separate project
management systems that were appropriate for those different sorts of
applications that I mentioned earlier. And they put in place a whole
governance regime which began with saying what sort of application is this,
then when they’d decided which sort of application it was they then applied
that project management method to that application. So effectively people
couldn’t avoid using it because they’d have to say which sort it was and then
they’d apply an appropriate sort of governance methodology to that
application.
Steve Macaulay
Do these classifications stay true for all time or do they tend to move
between categories sometimes?
Chris Edwards
Well the application may move between categories, absolutely, but the
definition of the categories remain robust in an organisation for a long
period of time and often don’t change at all, but for any one application it
may begin its life as a hypertential application. You try it on a small scale, it
may success, it may turn out to be hugely beneficial to the business on a
small scale, and then you redevelop that application as a strategic
application and this time you are doing it for the whole organisation rather
than just one small part and you use a different methodology for doing that..
Steve Macaulay
So if you were to sum up then the value of using this Applications Portfolio
what would it be?
Chris Edwards
I think it brings variety to managing projects. It allows people to use an
appropriate methodology rather than having to use one single methodology
which is sometimes not appropriate for very many of the things they are
doing.
Steve Macaulay
Chris, thank you very much.
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