Additional details about the book

The description of the book available on Amazon.com is below. I'm also happy to report that the book will contain five great case studies on organizations who are leveraging a CPM strategy & discipline. The case studies will be of the following organizations:

1. American Express
2. Cisco Systems
3. Hewlett Packard
4. State of Oregon: Department of Human Services
5. TransUnion

As you can see from the list, there is great diversity amongst the types of organizations chronicled. As you will see in the case studies that ultimately will be developed, each organization has undertaken CPM in different ways with all, however, realizing significant benefits.

Let me thank the following practitioners who helped make these case studies happen. Bill Bien of Cisco Systems, Michael Menke and Kevin Yorks of HP, Dennis Wells of the State of Oregon, and Piyush Sanghani of TransUnion. These are the people who are out 'in front' of the still burgeoning space of Corporate Portfolio Management - the pioneers. I'm indebted to each for their time, insights and openness. I learned a great deal and thoroughly enjoyed our interactions.

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The book's description as given on Amazon.com is given below.

Optimizing Corporate Portfolio Management: Aligning Investment Proposals with Organizational Strategy goes beyond the typical plain vanilla discussion of corporate portfolio management (CPM) and its many benefits to actually offer a set of pragmatic and proven steps to help executives, managers and current and prospective practitioners understand and ultimately bring this powerful strategic discipline to their organizations. Step by step, this book shows one how to build a CPM discipline within their organization based on their organization’s strengths/competencies and development areas. The book eschews simplistic one-size fits all approaches to detail a dynamic capability that can be deployed across organizations of various sizes, industries and readiness.

The book’s foreword is also written by a major proponent of CPM – Gary Crittenden, CFO and EVP of American Express.

Optimizing Corporate Portfolio Management details how the CPM discipline can be applied to an entire company or specific functional areas including information technology, marketing/A&P, capital expenditure, R&D/innovation, salesforce and virtually any area grappling with where to invest discretionary investment dollars. Finally, Optimizing Corporate Portfolio Management demonstrates actual utilizations of CPM within several prominent and diverse organizations through case studies which help readers see firsthand how CPM is enabled, utilized and the benefits it imparts.

The book draws on portfolio management expert Anand Sanwal’s years of research and work in this area at American Express where he led the deployment of CPM across the entire company. The practice known as Investment Optimization within American Express is patent-pending. He has been a featured speaker on this topic to many individual companies and at many seminars and conferences held by the CFO Executive Board, Beyond Budgeting Roundtable, Gartner, Enterprise Portfolio Management Council and others. The discipline he has helped spearhead has also garnered several external awards for its significant and tangible impacts to American Express. His knowledge is further enhanced through best practices research and discussions with other leading organizations engaging in CPM.

Within this essential corporate portfolio management resource, Sanwal methodically covers CPM offering the following:

1. A description of Corporate Portfolio Management and its importance
2. A framework for CPM success
3. The seven and a half deadly sins of CPM
4. A detailed four step process to bring CPM to any organization
5. Utilizations of CPM within various functional areas including IT, Innovation/R&D, Marketing/A&P, Capital Budgeting/Capital Expenditure, Salesforce
6. Case studies of leading organizations using CPM including American Express, Hewlett Packard, Cisco Systems, TransUnion, State of Oregon: Department of Human Services
7. Several additional resources and tools available with the book and at http://www.corporateportfoliomanagement.org

Followup on Gartner ITxpo 2006 Program & Portfolio Management panel

I had the opportunity yesterday to participate in a panel at the Gartner ITxpo on the topic of Corporate Portfolio Management. I was pleased (and surprised) to see the room was standing room only so obviously the area of corporate portfolio management is a hot one. The focus was, of course, on IT portfolio management given Gartner's deep expertise and relationships with IT professionals.

Besides myself, there were 3 other panelists who I had the pleasure of meeting including: Michael Menke of HP, San Retna of Transformaction and Mark Stabler of AAA of Northern California, Utah and Nevada. Each of us were asked to speak about our own organizational efforts around CPM and then we had a lively session of Q&A facilitated by Matt Light of Gartner.

A couple of observations from the discussion:

• Many organizations are still defining their portfolio management efforts around IT.
• Organizations seem focused on governance first and process second. So I heard much alphabet soup around PMOs and various IT councils, but this seems counter-intuitive. If the process is well-defined, the governance can then be established around this. If you don't what you are trying to enable, governance structures are pointless. Additionally, much of the governance structure seemed bureaucratic.
• I received a couple of questions about how American Express' Investment Optimization effort is enabled, i.e. what technology/software are we using? Again, as previously mentioned in prior posts, technology should not be your first concern. Understand the process and change behavior. But it seems that there is still a huge focus on "what tool should I use?" Matt Light probably summed up the over-focus on tools with his statement - "A fool with a tool is still a fool."

All in all, it was a great session, however. It was nice to see so many people in attendance who are also passionate about Corporate Portfolio Management. I also had the opportunity to meet many trendsetting prospective and existing practitioners moving their organizations towards realizing the benefits of CPM.

For anyone in attendance at the panel, were there any other insights you gleaned from the session that are worth highlighting?