Enterprise Portfolio Management: Strategic Alignment and Collaboration 

By Rebecca Davis

In today’s fast-paced business world, it is more important than ever for organizations to quickly adapt to changing economic conditions, emerging technologies, and fleeting opportunities. This response often requires a coordinated effort across multiple portfolios and business units as the entire Enterprise aligns with the work to be done. With this in mind, we are delighted to announce an important update to the Enterprise article. 

The new Enterprise article now describes Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPM), a strategic approach to managing multiple SAFe portfolios and coordinating cross-portfolio Epics.  

Figure 1. EPM provides alignment across multiple SAFe Portfolios

EPM involves a number of activities fueled by the collaboration of people shown below. Their responsibilities typically include defining enterprise portfolio Strategic Themes, allocating portfolio budgets, coordinating cross-portfolio initiatives, measuring enterprise portfolio performance, and organizing portfolios around value. 

Figure 2. Key EPM Collaborations

EPM is important for several reasons. First, it helps organizations ensure their portfolios align with the overall Enterprise strategy. This is critical in today’s business environment, where organizations constantly face new challenges and opportunities that have widespread impacts.  

Second, EPM helps organizations manage their resources effectively and invest appropriately. By providing a framework for evaluating new initiatives and allocating portfolio budgets, EPM can improve development flow by eliminating work unlikely to deliver the expected benefits and help achieve the strategy. 

Third, EPM provides the means to support the coordination and governance of some of the most significant initiatives in the organization, bringing transparency to the work and helping to track progress through the application of key metrics. 

EPM is a powerful tool that can help organizations achieve their strategic goals. If your Enterprise is looking for a way to improve its levels of organizational agility, cross-portfolio collaboration, and strategic decision-making, then EPM may be the answer. 

Read more in our updated Enterprise guidance article. We look forward to hearing about your EPM journey. 

—Rebecca Davis and the Framework Team