Any journey worth taking has a destination as its end goal. From an organizational perspective, the destination is to fulfill enterprise value. Enterprise value can take different forms. For commercial entities, it’s typically profitability and for government organizations, it’s delivering services. For almost every organization, though, there exists not one single destination, but rather many interim points along a continuous journey.

The fourth and final part of my "Reinventing..." series (see links at end of article) concentrates on a project portfolio rollup chart. Since this charting technique also includes and tracks business priority, I call this communication tool the "Project Barometer".

As with the previous articles, the chart attempts to maximize the amount of information a single diagram can communicate, without overwhelming the reader. However, unlike the previous techniques, which required the use of Visio, the barometer takes advantage of the simplicity of Excel.

The Steppe Winds and the "Virgin Lands"

In 1953 after the death of a dictator Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, the new Soviet leader became aware of the serious issues in the country's agricultural sector. Because of the prolonged heavy investments in the industrial and military growth, coupled with a devastating war, the production of wheat, meat and dairy in Soviet Union had plummeted to historic levels. Russia, a traditional exporter of grain, was forced to buy it abroad.

When economic conditions get tough, CIOs must focus on two simple priorities: how to produce value and how to cut cost. Pushed by economic and competitive pressures, IT organizations need to organize their project and application lists as an aggregate collection of expense buckets that they then attempt to balance against priorities, budgets, and available resources.