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?
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