As every doctor will tell you, it’s critical to get a check-up once a year – and it’s no different with your application portfolio.  Over the year you’ve added new applications, moved resources around, and started new projects.  It’s easy to lose track of those changes if you don’t have an objective view of the costs, risks and effort hiding inside your portfolio.Companies can run an internal audit through surveys and apply a complex correlation with IT service management activities in order to associate application health with the number of defects in production.  Another option is to rely on third party advisors to execute a deep dive into part of the portfolio in order to collect findings and when applicable, set some recommendations.

This document outlines a new approach to fact-based analysis and identifies the top 5 critical insights to keep in mind when developing an application health baseline.

Author: Michael Muller