IT Portfolio Management Step-by-Step: Unlocking the Business Value of Technology

SINGLE SYSTEM OF RECORD

What makes these scorecards, and all the PMO data, reliable and actionable is the acceptance by all project participants at Xcel Energy—from the CEO, CFO, and CIO, to business unit leaders, and all project team members, whether in-house, outsourced, or vendor-related—of a single system for managing the portfolio and projects. Projects cannot proceed except by use of the system, so the practice, still common in some companies, of "renegade" projects operating without sanction has been all but eliminated at Xcel Energy. By performing all project actions through the system—from requesting consideration of an idea, to analyzing costs and benefits, to executing the resulting project—all data is uniformly captured and used to generate consistent metrics. There is no more checking and reconciling versions of project status spreadsheets at update meetings; project data is always available in real time through dashboards, putting everyone on the same page.

This automated data capture also automatically generates a complete audit trail. This is not only beneficial to double-check who performed which actions at what point in time, but it also provides a strong foundation for demonstrating the key processes and policies that IT control assumptions are based on. The single system also plainly displays the resources allocated to each project, making conflicts visible and easier to resolve, as well as greatly facilitating forward planning.

Xcel Energy Business Systems ...