Guidelines for Building Your Application Portfolio

Your application portfolio consists of applications and their relationships to the business objectives and processes used by your organization.

Follow these guidelines to build an application portfolio:

Learn about the relationships in—and collect basic information about—your organization and its business objectives and processes. This information assists you with understanding and determining the necessity and value of the applications in your application portfolio.
Ask the APM administrator to create the users who are to serve as points of reference for the entities that you create. These users could be business owners, technical owners, IT contacts, budget or benefits managers, subject matter experts, reviewers, respondents, resources, and sponsors of an entity.
Start building the application portfolio inventory, including related entities such as the location and process entities.
If organization units and business objectives have not been provided for you, create them as necessary. You create business objectives and organization units in PPM.

Note: Before you can create and manage organization units and business objectives, the APM administrator must create a security group that allows you to do this and assign it to you. For more information, see the APM for PPM . For instructions for creating and managing business objectives, see the Program Management User’s Guide. For instructions for creating and managing organization units, see the Resource Management User’s Guide.
Create workstreams to monitor the progress of your analysis.
Collect information about your applications, and then create application entities and add them to your application portfolio inventory.

Note: You can create entities one at a time or you can import multiple entities at one time into APM from a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet using the PPM Data Migrator for Microsoft Excel. For instructions, see Using the PPM Data Migrator for Microsoft Excel.

Information that you collect about applications includes system information, names used, versions, and contact information. It should also includes details about the business and technical environments, budget and resources, service and support, usage and scale, and relationships with processes, organizations, and other applications.

To fill gaps in your knowledge about an application, you can use the "Need More Info" workflow step to invite another user to access an application entity and update the information about it.
Determine the type of data you want to analyze (business-related, technical, or general) and send out surveys to application owners and users to have them rate the applications.
Create application sets and use shared or configurable portlets to represent the data in a meaningful manner.
Use dynamic graphing to graphically view application sets, applications, and process relationships and to develop application sets for analysis.
Generate reports to analyze the completeness of data and, when you are satisfied with the amount of data you have collected, start your analysis. Use portlets to analyze the most important qualities about each application or application set and share this data with other users.
Create an improvement transformation proposal based on your findings.