Article by István Görgei - Experienced Project and Portfolio Management method and tooling expert with scaled agile knowledge

Who's back at Capture

Good things tend to come back, so here I am again, with more knowledge, more experience, and more perspective. Over the past few years, I have had the opportunity to work with an IT development-focused company, I led and was involved in multiple agile transformations and gained more knowledge on Atlassian product offerings and DevSecOps agile aspects. I managed to broaden my outlook brom a methodical and fooling perspective and now I am ready to share my insights and knowledge with you.

I came back to Capture for two main reasons:

The first is a personal reason, to challenge myself and push my boundaries by moving to Switzerland. Moving abroad is always a huge change, with various aspects that I could share in another blog post soon. The second is that Capture's decision to focus more on ServiceNow’s Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) and App Engine was professionally very attractive. Both areas are interesting, and both are worth observing and discovering in-depth, but for now, I am focusing more on SPM.

As someone who has implemented Broadcom's Clarity for more than twenty companies and nearly the same number of Atlassian products for other companies, I realized that the problem with these tools is that they only represent one aspect of the puzzle. They go deep, but not wide. As opposed to this, ServiceNow SPM is currently the most powerful solution for tons of client pain points, and it can be a future-proof ecosystem to support the steps ahead of the maturity journey.

Strategic and Portfolio Management Conference, Prague

Recently, I presented at a conference where I summarized the Strategic Portfolio Management topic from multiple business-driven aspects. But this topic deserves a lot more than just 30 minutes, therefore, I decided to create a series of blog posts on Strategic Portfolio Management and its general pitfalls.

First, I’m glad to see that ServiceNow renamed its offering from IT Business Management to Strategic Portfolio Management. This is so much more spot-on! Institutions in general need to connect their strategies with their operations and we all see how it's been getting more complicated and complex. Before diving into the details, let's first understand what Strategic Portfolio Management means.

Navigating the friction with strategic portfolio management and hybrid project management

In today's rapidly changing business environment, companies need to be agile and flexible to stay competitive and it's essential to have a streamlined approach to strategy and operations. Yet, many organizations struggle to align these two critical functions, leading to friction and inefficiencies. To address this challenge, businesses can adopt strategic portfolio management. These methods can help to clarify hierarchies and dependencies, allocate resources more effectively, and create greater transparency across projects and services so that the companies can eliminate challenges and achieve their goals. Choosing the right tools and implementing them the right way is just as crucial as using the right strategies.

I plan to deep-dive into this topic and in the upcoming weeks, I will cover the following areas: 

• What does digital transformation look like? What happens when you reach a certain level? What are the pitfalls? - A general historic overview focusing on the organizational structure.
• Combination of services, products, and projects. What could be the ideal structure for those? - A summary of the different lenses and layers.
• How to manage everything in one portfolio to get transparency in planning and monitoring? - How to put all those things into one bucket to understand the overall picture.
• How to get the strategic overview? How to connect all the relevant items to our strategy to create an overview? - If we have everything, how can we connect the dots?
• What and how do we need to implement to achieve our goals? - Tooling landscape
• Summary and Key Takeaways 

I'm passionate about this topic and I am excited to share my thoughts and knowledge with you, with the hope of starting an open conversation about it - to confirm the validity of my insights or to gain new ones from your perspective. If you have anything to add or share, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Stay tuned!