Project Portfolio Management

TLDR: Higher education IT budget planning now includes a question that did not come up as often five years ago: what stops if this budget comes down fifteen percent. Most institutions answer it in a spreadsheet, at speed, in a meeting where the answer becomes a commitment. The spreadsheet version collapses on the second follow-up question, because it can show cost but cannot show what is mandated, what is committed, what depends on what, and what the deferral costs later. Thi

TLDR: Application portfolio management in higher education is the least glamorous work available and one of the highest-return. Decades of departmental purchasing, grant-funded tools, gifted software, and point solutions have produced a portfolio in the hundreds at most institutions, much of it invisible to central IT and some of it with no accountable owner at all. APM is the business record of that portfolio: what the institution owns, who owns it, what it costs, when it re

TLDR: ServiceNow SPM higher education deployments fail for a reason that has nothing to do with the product. Enterprise portfolio guidance assumes a single intake path, a role-based resource pool, a rolling approval process, and a fiscal calendar that bends to the business. A campus has none of those things. Demand arrives through five front doors. Capacity is a handful of named people. The academic calendar is immovable. Approval runs through multiple governing bodies with d