Year after year, IT planning is still challenged. According to CIO magazine close to 70 percent of IT projects fall in the failed or challenged category – the latter meaning that projects were delivered but did not produce the promised value for the customer. Two common reasons projects fail are:

• A poorly defined organizational strategy
• The lack of a well-designed process to filter out low-value projects

Burwood Group provides tools and best practices to ensure the success of your periodic planning cycles. Any of the following tasks can be a starting point for prioritizing technology projects:

• High level data project capture and strategic roadmap development
• Project categorization and prioritization framework development
• Project budget and level of effort estimation
• Project justification and total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Consensus driven planning

Creating a business-aligned project/program portfolio is a key deliverable in this exercise and an ideal starting point. Other deliverables include:

• Portfolio roadmap
• Prioritization matrix
• Project estimation catalog
• Resource assessment and categorization
• Resource planning for portfolio

A sample Burwood approach and outputs can be illustrated as follows: