Client Success Story

Background

A Fortune 50 company launched a strategic initiative to establish a robust portfolio governance model for managing a $100M+ digital investment portfolio. With a growing number of digital initiatives spanning multiple business and technology domains, executive leadership needed a structured approach to plan, govern, and track execution across a three-year investment horizon. We partnered with the company to create a holistic portfolio governance process. The objective was to create transparency across initiatives, improve financial discipline, and ensure digital investments were aligned to enterprise priorities and outcomes.

Company size

Budget

Digital Initiatives

4,000+ employees

$100M+

100+ globally

The Challenge

Despite the scale of investment, the organization lacked a standardized portfolio governance framework to plan, manage, and optimize digital spend. Portfolio planning and execution was largely decentralized, with initiatives managed independently using different roadmaps, financial assumptions, and reporting methods. This fragmentation limited the ability for executive leadership to understand true portfolio performance, compare initiatives, or make timely, data-driven investment decisions.

Financial management posed a particular challenge. Many digital leaders were accountable for significant budgets, but had limited experience with portfolio-level financial planning, forecasting, and variance management. Spend tracking was often manual and retrospective, making it difficult to anticipate overruns, identify underutilized funds, or respond quickly to changing business conditions. As a result, leadership lacked real-time visibility into forecasts and actual spend against budget, reducing their ability to proactively reallocate funding.

Compounding these issues, the organization needed to balance long-term strategic commitments with near-term delivery realities across a multi-year planning horizon. Without standardized processes for managing roadmap changes, financial trade-offs, and execution risks, the portfolio was at risk of inefficiencies, delayed value realization, and missed opportunities to reinvest capital into higher-impact digital initiatives

Portfolio governance

Scope

Timeframe

No portfolio governance across 20 digital leaders

• Financial mgmt

• Roadmap creation

• Execution governance

3 years

Our approach

We partnered with more than 20 senior leaders across the organization to design and implement a comprehensive portfolio governance framework. We began by establishing a clear, multi-year roadmap that aligned initiatives to strategic objectives aligning to defined investment priorities. From there, we established a standardized portfolio management processes to govern roadmap changes, execution progress, risk management, and initiative status reporting.

To strengthen financial governance, we introduced a structured portfolio financial management process that provided leadership with transparent views into forecasts, actuals, and variances across the portfolio. We developed financial training guides and materials to improve financial literacy. We partnered with the finance team to train the digital leads on these financial management best practices, standards and guidelines. Additionally, we built an automated financial tracking solution to simplify spend management, reduced manual effort and create portfolio spend visibility.

This end-to-end governance model enabled leaders to make informed, data-driven funding decisions, resulting in approximately $10M in savings. Allowing executive leader to reallocate the savings to fund additional high-value digital initiatives and maximize portfolio return on investment.

Savings

Governance framework

Financial insights

$10M+ prioritized to additional initiatives

Established multi-dimensional portfolio governance process

Established end to end financial visibility across portfolio to enable data driven decisions

Key Client Successes

Executive leaders gained real-time visibility into digital portfolio execution and financial progress. The framework enabled data-driven funding decisions, resulting in $10M+ in savings that were reallocated to higher-value digital initiatives, significantly improving portfolio ROI.

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