Software Product Portfolio Management - Towards improvement of current practice

In recent years, the growing importance of product portfolio management has made organizations aware of the costs when not done properly. Wrong investment decisions, lacking product information, inefficient use of resources and above all a misfit with strategy are just few of the consequences of bad portfolio management. But product portfolio management is not a clear cut, one time implementation of tools. Instead it is a dynamic decision process where processes, products and projects are constantly updated and revised. Another difficulty is posed by the fact that also project portfolio management and product lifecycle management are strongly related to product portfolio management. For all of the subjects methods, best practices and models exist, but as far as known no method exists to implement the entire process within software organizations while the relation between each subject has been agreed upon. Also, whilst often maturity situations are described, no concrete actions are presented to actually reach these maturity situations. These are indeed situational, but generic pointers could be given to enable the realization of the maturity situations. This research aims at facilitating the implementation of product portfolio management within software organizations. By performing literature study, key issues have been identified that need to be taken care of to successfully implement product portfolio management processes. To enact upon these key issues, guidelines have been created. And based on the guidelines the software product portfolio management implementation model has been created. In this model the implementation of product portfolio management is described as well as the implementation of related subjects that facilitate the portfolio management process. To clearly show the increase in maturity that is realized, also a maturity matrix was created. In this matrix capabilities are presented that serve as a measurement of the current processes and guide towards the next level in maturity. Finally, to ensure the practical value of the implementation model and maturity matrix they have been applied at UNIT4. Initial results show that the model can indeed be used to implement more mature product portfolio management processes within software organizations.