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 Pritula. 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.