
In this lecture you build the four moments of a technology year, see the one almost everybody skips.
This course is built from six disciplines: technology leadership, business analysis, system selection, project management, cloud cost management and AI leadership.
A dictionary for reading lectures written for other fields as work on your own portfolio
Three questions to ask after every lecture
A short self-diagnostic that shows which sections to watch first
Download the Portfolio Year Calendar and fill in one line after each lecture.
How the role moved from running systems to shaping strategy
Where it differs from the technology, data and product roles
Driving efficiency and innovation as two separate jobs
The competencies the role actually requires now
Building a technology strategy around business goals rather than trends
The drivers and stages of a transformation
Assessing your current technology maturity honestly
Creating a roadmap over three to five years
Cloud, on-premise and hybrid, and what each actually costs
Continuity and fault tolerance as budget lines
Current threats and the protection they require
Regulation and standards: data protection, ISO, SOC 2
Structuring the function and its roles
Leadership and developing the people in it
Working with senior management and business units
Managing vendors and outsourcing arrangements
What being data-driven requires from the technology function
Data lakes, business intelligence and real-time analytics
The metrics and indicators for the function itself
Working alongside the data and AI leadership
The current candidates: AI, connected devices, distributed ledger, edge
Selecting the ones that create value rather than headlines
Running a pilot, and deciding whether to roll it out
Embedding a technology into the business model rather than beside it
ITIL, COBIT and ISO as a management framework, in plain terms
Managing the technology project portfolio as one thing
Agile, waterfall and hybrid, and choosing per initiative
Working with the project office
Moving from cost centre to profit centre in practice
The technology voice at board level
Building an ecosystem rather than a stack
What is coming for the role next
Translating a business need into a question that can be answered
Problem thinking against solution thinking
Telling a symptom from a problem before you fund anything
The problem, goal, constraint and metric frame
Stakeholder mapping and influence analysis
Elicitation techniques
Asking the business a question it can answer
Reconciling conflicting input, and prioritising by value against effort
Business, functional and non-functional requirements
User stories and their anti-patterns
Acceptance criteria in given-when-then form
The documents that get used, and definition of ready
What a process means when you have to analyse it
Current state and target state
The minimum useful set of process notation
Finding the bottleneck, and proposing the change
The system context diagram
Functional decomposition
User flows, data objects and business rules
Traceability from requirement to process to solution
Operating inside different delivery methods
Working with a backlog and shifting requirements
Change requests and impact analysis
Controlling scope, and defending the conclusion to both sides
Classifying the systems available in a category
Where to find providers, and the current landscape
How these systems have evolved, and what that means for lock-in
Building selection criteria before the first demo
The types available inside one category
Building the selection criteria for a specific need
Reviewing the popular solutions against them
Negotiating with providers, and how discounts are actually obtained
Whether to fix the process first or let the system define it
Reviewing the solutions in a category
The functions that turn out to matter after purchase
Rolling it out inside a company
The basics of what these platforms do
The types available
A review of the systems on the market
Starting from nothing, and integrating with what you already run
What collaboration tooling is actually for
A review of the systems
Organising the work around them
Getting everyone onto them, which is where most rollouts fail
How these evolved from scripts to models
A review of the solutions
What you can build yourself
Low-budget platforms, and where AI changes the picture
What the current models can actually do
A review of the existing solutions
Applying it across a full process rather than one step
Platforms with AI built in, and whether that changes the buying decision
What a project is, and its four stages
Delivering a result rather than running activity
The role of the person accountable, and the main difficulties in it
The PMBOK 7 principles and performance domains
Collecting the ideas worth considering
Building the business case
Developing the charter
Cost-benefit analysis, and selecting which one to fund
Who your stakeholders actually are
Compiling and prioritising the list
Assessing influence against interest
Planning engagement rather than improvising it
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Nobody sits down and designs a technology portfolio. It accumulates. Every individual purchase was justified; the total never was.
The specific failure
Three years in, you are paying for two tools that do the same thing because different teams bought them in different quarters. There is a platform with an annual renewal that four people use. Somewhere there is a cloud account nobody can attribute to a project, and it costs more per month than a junior salary. When finance asks what the technology spend produced, the honest answer is that you know what it cost and you do not know what it returned — because nobody defined the benefit before the money went out, and there was no mechanism to check afterwards.
What this course covers
Forty-three lessons across the full life of one investment. The leadership frame first: strategy built on business goals, maturity assessment, a three-to-five-year roadmap, cloud against on-premise, regulation, vendors and outsourcing, data as an asset, choosing technologies by value rather than novelty, ITIL and COBIT as a governance frame, portfolio management with the project office, and moving the function from cost centre toward profit centre. Then justification: telling a symptom from a problem, stating a goal that can be measured, gathering requirements from people who disagree, writing them so they can be tested, modelling the process you are changing, and holding scope when it moves. Then buying: classifying solutions, mapping the provider landscape, building selection criteria before the first demo, negotiating discounts, and integrating what you bought with what you already run. Then delivery on PMBOK 7: business case, charter, stakeholders, scope, plan, schedule, budget, risk, team, control and closure. Then what it really costs: reading a cloud bill, tagging and allocation, chargeback and showback, right-sizing and commitments, unit economics per user and per transaction, and a 90-day rollout. Finally the newest category — where AI is worth funding, build against buy against partner, prioritising by impact, feasibility and risk, data readiness, lock-in, and the return you can calculate separated from the return you cannot.
A note on one block
The seven lessons on selecting and implementing systems were recorded using people-function software as the worked category — applicant tracking, learning platforms, feedback tools, chatbots. The method is the point and it is entirely general: how to classify solutions, where providers come from, how to build criteria before you are being sold to, how discounts are actually obtained, and how to integrate a purchase with an existing estate. It is the only place in this material where a full purchase decision is taken apart end to end.
Who is teaching this
I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.
What is included
Lifetime access to all 43 lessons
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
A Udemy Certificate of Completion
Working material: the maturity assessment, the roadmap, selection criteria, the business case, PMBOK 7 charter and control set, the cost decomposition template, tagging policy, unit economics
Governance frames stated plainly: ITIL, COBIT, ISO
Where to start
Open your technology spend and mark every line where you cannot name, in one sentence, what it produces. Then total the marked lines. That number is why this course exists. Enrol now and start today.