Introduction

Keywords: Application Portfolio Management (APM), Application Governance, Project Portfolio Management (PPM)

Description: A portfolio investment decision making tool used with stakeholders with regard to a constantly changing time dimension.  Used to create alignment of IT investments with institutional strategy.  Provides transparency into the decision making process.

The core TIME diagram shows three dimensions:

• Business value: ranking items by based on their increasing/decreasing business value over time

• Technical quality/condition: ranking items based on the increasing technical cost or risk of maintaining them over time

• Time: looking into the future, where items will move between quadrants over time

At each point in time, the core diagram divides items into four quadrants for different kinds of action:

• Tolerate -

• higher bar for enhancements

• Monitor for increased risk

• Consider providing some functionality elsewhere

• Re-evaluate for elimination

• Invest

• Respond quickly to enhancements

• Maintain focus on the best solution

• Maximize usage

• Migrate

• Minimize enhancements

• Mitigate risks

• Sponsor a replacement or alternative

• Prepare users for migration

• Eliminate

• No enhancements

• Mitigate risks

• Get buy-in for shutdown

• Work through dependencies

Goals: 

• Help a group of stakeholders get a shared understanding of business value and technical relevance as criteria

• Help a group of stakeholders get a shared understanding of how applications or services change in value over time, and should therefore be managed differently over time

• Prioritize applications or services for different kinds of action, such as investment, migration, or elimination

Context: A TIME model is well suited for:

• Application or solution portfolio management; prioritizing investment in applications or solutions
• Project portfolio management; prioritizing projects that will expand, migrate, eliminate, or mitigate risk around applications or solutions
• Service portfolio management; prioritizing services in terms of business and architectural value

Source: Gartner provides materials on this method, such as the article cited on this slide.

Scenarios

TIME is a key method used in Application Portfolio Management (APM). It can help IT have difficult conversations about where investments should be made and where they should not be made.

• Audience: IT directors, application owners, business stakeholders

• Scope: An application portfolio (institution-wide, or more narrow)

• Goals and outcomes: Agree on priorities that will drive next steps (such as investment, elimination, or mitigation)

TIME can also inform the Project Governance process by aligning proposed projects with the direction set by the business and reflected in the completed TIME model (applications mapped to TIME). TIME can be used to help prioritize projects that are needed to invest in (expand or improve), migrate away from, successfully eliminate, or mitigate risk around applications or solutions

• Audience: IT directors, project sponsors, business stakeholders

• Scope: A project portfolio (typically IT or IT-related projects, institution-wide, or more narrow)

• Goals and outcomes: Prioritize projects based on how they co

Method

Roles: 

• Enterprise Architect, Business Architect-Understand and visualize the current state of application and service to communicate to stakeholders

• Enterprise Architect, Project Manager-Facilitate TIME Models creation with Stakeholders in relation to institution strategy

• Project Manager-Implement investment identified projects

• Portfolio Manager -

Steps: For reference we include the diagram:

Communication

• Why are we as an organization using TIME for portfolio management?

• Show the process of how the decision was made?

• Identify the inventory of applications / services

• Categorize these services into the quadrant based on their business and architectural value

• Display the progress of diagram over the time (z-axis)

• Allow people to voice their opinions / concerns

• Help people separate themselves / personal-value from the services they created / invented / manage

• Tie the outcomes of the TIME diagram over time with the organization’s strategic goals

Examples

(to be completed)

Related Methods

TIME could be used to align investments to capability maps to show where investments will be made for each business capability.

One might use Brick Diagrams to ASSESS technical quality and condition, and use this assessment as the input to determining the x coordinate for the mapping exercise.