A strong portfolio management program can turn all that around and do the following:

Maximize value of IT investments while minimizing the risk Improve communication and alignment between IS and business leaders

Encourage business leaders to think "team," not "me," and to take responsibility for projects

Allow planners to schedule resources more efficiently

Reduce the number of redundant projects and make it easier to kill projects

There's no single right way to do IT portfolio management. Vendors, consulting companies and academics offer many models, and often companies develop their own methodologies. Off-the-shelf software is available from a variety of vendors (see "Tools of the Trade," right). But there are plenty of hurdles to doing it well. There are, however, best practices and key logical steps that can be gleaned from organizations such as Brigham Young University (BYU), DHL Americas and Eli Lilly, which have integrated portfolio management into the fabric of IT management, as you'll see in this story.

Here are the key steps in creating and managing your IT investment portfolio.

Gather: Do a Project Inventory

Portfolio management begins with gathering a detailed inventory of all the projects in your company, ideally in a single database, including name, length, estimated cost, business objective, ROIROI and business benefits. Merrill Lynch maintains a global database of all its IT projects using software from Business Engine. Alles zu ROI auf CIO.de

In addition to project plan information, Merrill Lynch's users - almost 8,000 from Asia, Europe, India and the United States - add weekly updates on how much time they spend working on projects. "We use that as our internal cost assignment tool back to the business, so that the business is paying for every technology dollar monthly," says Marvin Balliet, CFO of global technology and services.