Presenter: Audrey Apfel, Research Vice President, Gartner

This presentation describes the PPM Activity Cycle - the main activities those managing project and program functions need to perform. We will describe where you need to do more, where you need to do less and where innovation counts. The challenges of executing successful projects in the midst of changing expectations, elusive business value, and the uncertain ROI from PMO functions remain daunting. 
Key Issues:

• What frameworks are effective for defining business cases and project value
• How can organizations build an effective project portfolio?
• Why is execution still such an ongoing challenge?
• How should projects and programs be evaluated?
• How is PPM evolving?

Presenter: Matt Light, Research Vice President, Gartner

This presentation gives guidance in how to consistently get, and keep, your portfolio balance. Technical Infrastructure and commodity applications are certainly important to running the business, but such IT spending should be balanced with opportunities to advance business goals via innovative and enhanced IT services and systems. Too many IT organizations suffer the "death of a thousand cuts": Letting insatiable demand for application and infrastructure maintenance and support slash away at their resource capacity till little or nothing is left. At a time of tight IT budgets, leadership is needed to preserve high-value projects in the IT portfolio.  
Key Issues:

• What best practices should be used to prioritize and manage IT portfolios?
• How should IT investment risks factor into project portfolio prioritization?
• What is the appropriate level of application portfolio risk, and how is it determined?

Presenters: Matt Light, Research Vice President, Gartner and
Daniel Stang, Principal Analyst, Gartner

Having established itself as a viable exercise in continual process improvement, PPM is not immune to challenges and potential risks. Ensuring your PPM strategy and system implementation are both successful requires a balanced investment in process adoption and process automation. In this session you will learn WHY and HOW you should pursue PPM, while mitigating and avoiding potential risks.

Presenter: Joseph Feiman, Research Vice President, Gartner

Security technologies and practices must be integral parts of enterprise application portfolio. Application developers are more focused on functionality and less on security, thus applications get built with security vulnerabilities that hackers exploit to their advantages and enterprises’ mounting losses. Here we review application lifecycle: from requirements analysis through development and operations, to determine how it can be made secure.
Key Issues:

• How AD Project Management should be expanded to address security?
• What are maturity levels of a security solutions portfolio?
• How to make application security an enterprise-wide program?
• What vendors, technologies and methodologies will provide security solutions for enterprises?

Presenter: Daniel Stang, Principal Analyst, Gartner

The market for PPM applications remains dynamic, with continued growth, more M&A activity in 2007 and continued active partnering globally. This presentation gives Gartner's model of the areas of PPM application functionality requirements, examines market developments and surveys products' positioning in the market. Effectiveness in project selection, efficiency in resource allocation, project visibility and accountability are key market drivers. In 2008 enterprises continue to adopt a variety of PPM solutions, whether in the IT organization, or to support product development processes, or in broader enterprise implementations. 
Key Issues:

• How will technology and market trends affect PPM market vendors?
• What are the key functions and market drivers of PPM application packages?
• What are effective approaches to PPM implementation?
• What is the state of the PPM market, and how do you assess product and vendor market positions?

Presenter: Matt Light, Research Vice President, Gartner

After an introductory overview of major IT portfolio management themes, workshop attendees break into small groups to identify their major concerns, then Gartner analysts facilitate discussions of how these problems can be solved. The session ends with each group presenting its findings.

Presenter: Audrey Apfel, Research Vice President, Gartner

Enterprises execute change through project-based activities under the PPM (program and portfolio management) umbrella. The methodologies, roles and best practices for these activities have been written about, standardized, certified, promoted, and documented. Yet "success" (the ability to pick the right projects, execute and deliver to deliver to expectations) is often still elusive for today's IT organizations. In this presentation we discuss how to find the real critical success factors - the ones no one taught you. In addition, we take a look into the future and find increasing evidence that even less of the standard project methodology foundation we depend on today will serve us effectively in the future. We'll discuss what the future holds and how projects and programs will need to change.  
Key Issues:

• What are the critical success factors in today's world of complex projects and programs?
• What roles and skills should organizations develop in order to provide PPM leadership?
• What are the future trends that will shape PPM practices and leaders?

Presenters: Michael von Uechtritz, Research Director, Gartner and
Matt Light, Research Vice President, Gartner

Services for Project and Portfolio Management encompass several types, from assessments, to independent Validation and Verification, to services from a non-affiliated third party in implementing PPM practices and tools – all areas addressed in this presentation. We will explore how to assess PPM complexity, ways of better integrating processes with the support of tools to achieve business objectives faster, and how best to leverage the assistance of an external service provider. Finally, we will describe techniques for selecting a best-for-need service provider who will leave value and positively impact the following business issues:  

• Why do users invest in PPM service provider capabilities?
• How to best select and evaluate a PPM Service Provider?
• What are sourcing options, and how best to evaluate providers?

Daniel Stang, Principal Analyst and
Teresa Jones, Sr. Research Analyst and
Jim Duggan, Research Vice President, Gartner

This presentation provides an understanding of the worldwide and EMEA market for Project and Portfolio Management Software. It covers issues such as what is the size and forecast growth of the market, and how vendors are positioned within it. We’ll discuss market dynamics as well as the future evolution of the market, and how vendors can take advantage of the economic downturn.

Lars Mieritz, Research Director, Gartner and
Donna Fitzgerald, Research Director, Gartner

Most organizations have a tendency to get stuck somewhere between level 1 and level 2 of the maturity curve. In this presentation we'll focus on how to match the people, processes and technology to the needs of the organization based on its industry culture and its current level of maturity. We'll then suggest approaches to moving toward the next level of maturity in a manner that everyone in the company will be comfortable with. Finally we'll review a variety of structures for the PMO and help align the structure to the problem that needs to be solved at each level of maturity. 
Key Issues:

• What is the role of industry culture with regard to PPM maturity?
• How can an organization transition between maturity levels
• How can a PMO best be structured to support increasing levels of maturity

Presenter: Donna Fitzgerald, Research Director and
Matt Light, Research Vice President, Gartner

What will the IT PMO look like on its 25th birthday? Will it still be an institution that fails approximately 50% of the time but is deemed capable of producing results that make it worth the struggle? Will it have fully grown up and moved into a leadership position in the business as a whole? Will it have been discarded as a good idea that didn't work out in practice or will it become something completely unique in the emerging hyper-connected future? Since there's no way to know the future we'll explore all four alternative scenarios  
Key Issues:

• How can the PMO as we know it today improve its performance?
• If the PMO is going to help manage all project work in the company what steps do we need to take now to prepare for the future?
• How can the PMO in the hyper-connected future serve as a knowledge hub?
• What are the current trends that are laying the foundation for the demise of the PMO?

Jim Duggan, Research Vice President, Gartner

Application Portfolio Management (APM) is central to coordinating alignment of IT spending with business goals, planning for transformations of the application base, and improving the predictability and perceived performance of IT. This presentation will lay out ownership, governance and operational processes and point out how ALM will produce tangible business benefit.  
Key Issues:

• What is the Value of Application Portfolio Management?
• How can IT organizations best begin gathering the right application portfolio information?
• How can application portfolio knowledge help structure application portfolio decision making?