Five Steps to APM Success: Unlock Your Portfolio’s Potential
Is your organisation ready to optimise its application portfolio and drive greater business value? Effective Application Portfolio Management (APM) isn’t just a one-time task—it’s a game-changer for agility, innovation, and cost-efficiency.
Here’s a roadmap for success: five simple steps to transform your application portfolio and unlock its true potential.
1. Build an Inventory
Every successful journey begins with understanding the landscape. Conduct a thorough inventory of your organisation’s applications, detailing:
- A list of your logical applications
- Purpose and key roles
With Colloquial, you can streamline this process using pre-built templates, bulk upload features, and Microsoft Teams integration to engage stakeholders and gather data efficiently.
2. Assign Ownership
Who’s accountable for each application? Identifying application owners and understanding user impact is critical. During this process, you might uncover applications with dwindling or no users, paving the way for rationalisation.
3. Assess investment, criticality, and fit
Once your inventory is complete, evaluate each application by its:
- Current investment policy
- Criticality
- Business value
- Technical fit
Compare these findings to industry benchmarks and identify gaps. Leverage Colloquial’s library of assessment templates and dashboards to focus on strategic fit, technical quality, and compliance priorities.
4. Develop a strategy
Apply a structured framework like TIME (Tolerate, Invest, Migrate, Eliminate) to categorise applications based on business usage and impact. This will help you develop an investment strategy for each application:
- Tolerate — Low business value and high technical fit. Avoid major investment
- Invest — High business value and high technical fit. Innovate to extract more benefit
- Migrate — High business value and low technical fit. Replace or modernise
- Eliminate — Low business value and low technical fit. Remove or consolidate
Using heatmaps and other holistic views within Colloquial, prioritise the applications that need immediate attention and ensure every decision drives impact.
5. Monitor and Maintain
APM isn’t a one-and-done activity. To stay agile and aligned with business objectives, ongoing monitoring and reporting are essential. Establish a central repository for your data and assign domain architects to ensure its quality.
Set quarterly and yearly data quality targets to measure success, and let Colloquial’s flexible monitoring tools help you maintain alignment with your strategic goals.
Unlock the Future with APM
Taking these five steps can set your organisation on the path to optimised applications, streamlined costs, and improved agility. By leveraging tools like Colloquial, you can simplify the process, empower decision-making, and drive real business results.
Ready to take the next step? Let Colloquial help you navigate the complexities of APM and achieve lasting success.