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- Don't just cut 20% of your IT budget - be smart, not hard
Don't just cut 20% of your IT budget - be smart, not hard
A simple lesson in Professional IT Portfolio Management
Sophie Seiwald-Højer
February 17, 2025
In my recent LinkedIn post, I talked about my boss whose approach to cost-cutting I still admire. Whenever budget cuts were imposed, he refused to simply do the same work with fewer resources. Instead, he made the hard choices: cutting entire initiatives rather than delivering lower-quality results.
His main argument? Credibility.
His weapon of choice? A transparent IT portfolio.
We all know how budgets are hoarded in organizations. But before looking at the numbers, the real question was: What are we trying to achieve here?
The Power of Portfolio Management
Every six months, we would reassess our IT landscape. We’d take the time to look at our applications and categorize them into four simple buckets:
Sundown – Time to retire and decommission.
Promote/Invest – Critical applications that need further investment.
Keep as-is – No further investment, but necessary to maintain.
Re-evaluate – On the edge, needing further discussion.
The first time we did the exercise, the result looked like this:
Not surprisingly, everyone had good arguments to keep their applications - it is the baseline of everyones work in your department. But if we invest into software, shouldn’t we then be able to sundown a couple of them? What is the actual goal of your organization ? (Note: A whisper of ‘Purpose’ could be crawling up your back now’)
From Passive to Active Portfolio Discussions
In corporate environments, we often massage the data to fit a preferred narrative. But after repeating this exercise, something interesting happened: our portfolio suddenly looked completely different.
Why? Because now, we were having real discussions about strategy.
And this is only the beginning. Once you’ve built transparency around your IT portfolio, you can extend the discussion:
Is this cloud-ready? Yes/No
Is this business-critical? Yes/No
Does it align with our long-term strategy?
In All Hands on Tech, we encourage organizations to use Wardley Maps to visualize which applications are truly strategic—and which aren’t.
Creating transparency and having structured conversations about what your portfolio should actually achieve is mission-critical for building a high-performance IT organization.
In case you want to know more - feel free to reach out to me so we can have a quick check on your portfolio.
Follow the discussion on LinkedIn (both German & English)
