Agile planning portfolio management

What EY can do for you

Without clear visibility, financial organization leaders often struggle to strategize effectively. Transparency isn’t just an advantage – it’s essential for aligning strategy with execution and achieving meaningful outcomes.

Agile delivery offers a way forward, fostering flexibility, speed and efficiency to deliver tangible business value. However, many organizations face barriers that prevent them from fully capitalizing on these benefits.

The EY Agile Planning & Portfolio Management (APPM) solution was developed to elevate transparency, ownership and accountability among business, technology, finance and other functions. It can open bottlenecks in the funding process by streamlining processes, such as approvals, with simplified architecture and fit-for-purpose design. This includes planning and monitoring portfolio capacity, outcomes, and corresponding financials at the intersection of technology, finance and the business. And an enhanced partnership between business and IT offers new visibility to optimize capacity, demand and outcomes, from budgeting through initiative delivery and execution tracking. 

By understanding what resources are doing and how their work efforts link to strategic enterprise objectives and KPIs, EY APPM ensures alignment across the organization, fostering improved accountability and value realization.

Common challenges APPM is designed to meet

When financial management is mired in legacy technologies and outdated practices, resulting challenges can include:

• Under and overspending vs.plan
• Stranded costs and highly manual reporting
• Misalignment of outcomes and initiatives delivered
• Lack of spend accountability across teams
• Unclear value realization

Observed effects of incomplete or inconsistent adoption of agile planning in an organization include:

• 60% delivery execution churn
• 20% excess portfolio capacity
• ~50% slower time-to-market
• 4x manual reporting effort required

Modern financial planning for agile organizations

The EY APPM methodology offers a structured approach to align resources, financials and strategic priorities, enabling leaders to gain clearer insights into capacity and demand while reducing reliance on manual efforts.

Planning strategies to support business agility

The EY APPM methodology shifts funding to fixed capacities aligned with strategic priorities, allowing for clearer insight into both tech- and non-tech spending to direct more effective use of resources overall.

Implementing EY APPM provides a broad  view into capacity, demand and expenditures, empowering organizations to track outcomes against customer metrics, velocity, organizational effectiveness and quality. This ensures a stronger connection between strategic goals and execution while moving away from inefficient, manual processes to achieve more agile and effective portfolio management.