Portfolio Management is a practice among the 34 practices in ITIL 4 that you don't need to know in depth for the foundation level exam. But we at contradistinction, brought to you by Dion Training, do not want to just leave any of our readers hanging. So, here is an article that is going to cover it to give you a good general understanding of it.

This is the practice of ensuring that an organization has the right mix of programs, projects, products, and services to execute its strategy within its funding and resource constraints. Now, what does this really mean? Let's take DionTraining.com, the company that brought you itil.diontraining.com, as an example. There are a lot of different products, projects, programs and services that they could be using. They could be doing a lot of different things, but they have to figure out what works with their strategy. For example, they can make practice exam courses, make video courses, do live training, create apps in the App Store or Play Store, or they might even write a book. There are lots of things that they can do. In DionTraining.com's first couple of years in business, they did a lot of those things; in fact, all of those things. But over time, they figured out where their true strengths were. They figured out what the vision for the company was and built a strategy around it. So now, based on that strategy, they assigned certain funding, and resources to their strength: online video courses. The biggest resource constraint is the amount of people they have that can teach and having the right people on staff to do it, and so they are limited in the amount of stuff they can do. So, based on those restraints, they have figured out what is the proper mix of programs, projects, products and services to give their consumers the best experience and the most bang for the buck. For example, inside the ITIL framework, Dion Training does the foundation of exams and they're going to do all of the ITIL for exams. That was a decision they made, but they are not doing all of the ITIL 3 intermediate certifications, because at that time those were coming to end of life in the next 12 to 18 months and so it didn't make sense for their vision and strategy to put a lot of resources into building those courses when the exams were going to be phased out in just 12 or 18 months. Whereas ITIL 4 is brand new and will last for many years to come so they have done online video courses for ITIL 4.

That's the idea inside your organization. You need to think about what is the right mix of products and services, and programs and portfolio management helps you do that. You figure out exactly what you want to do, and then you build towards that.