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. Here are 523 tools to manage it: 292 ready-to-use templates, checklists, procedures, matrices and AI prompts, 138 models and methods, 60 services shown on screen and 33 working files.

Open a lecture, take the workbook, apply it to your own portfolio this week.

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 not what it returned, because nobody defined the benefit before the money went out.

What changes after this course

Your technology plan is built on business goals. Every investment starts from a problem, a measurable goal and a business case. Requirements are written so they can be checked. Systems are bought against criteria set before the demo. Projects run on one delivery standard. Cloud cost is allocated and measured per user and per transaction. And AI initiatives are funded by impact, feasibility and risk.

A note on one block

The lessons on selecting and implementing systems use people-function software as the category: applicant tracking, learning platforms, feedback tools and chatbots. The method is general: how to classify solutions, where providers come from, how to build criteria before you are being sold to, how discounts are obtained and how to integrate a purchase with what you already run.

What is inside: 523 tools, counted lecture by lecture

You do not have to take this number on trust. Open any lecture and read its description: every tool inside is listed there by name.

• 76 downloadable resources: the lecture presentations plus 33 working files, from the Portfolio year calendar and business analysis templates to FinOps and AI workbooks
• 292 ready-to-use tools inside the presentations:
• 67 templates and sample documents: IT initiative prioritization, business goals to IT initiatives, IT roadmap, cost allocation model
• 50 checklists: IT current-state assessment, technology vendor selection, IT outsourcing control, FinOps quick wins
• 49 step-by-step procedures and workflows: IT project prioritization, business technology selection, change request impact analysis, showback to chargeback implementation
• 39 scorecards, rubrics and matrices: IT portfolio risk control, IT outsourcing decisions, IT governance framework selection, cloud optimization priorities
• 39 ready AI prompts: requirements prioritization, change request impact analysis, idle resource audit, cloud cost anomaly analysis
• 24 formulas and metric sets: IT project and portfolio success, earned value metrics, cost allocation metrics, cloud optimization metrics
• 22 question lists and scripts: IT resource and budget planning, CIO-CFO conversation script, technology value assessment, innovation investment assessment
• 2 other working tools: MoSCoW prioritization, value-added activity classification
• 138 models and methods explained with examples: COBIT governance framework, ITIL service management, run-grow-transform model, Lean management
• 60 services shown on screen, including Jira, Miro, Salesforce, Airtable and Microsoft Project

Where the tools are

• Start here (1 tool). The Portfolio year calendar: the four moments of your technology year.
• The technology leadership frame (3 sections, 108 tools). Strategy, digital transformation, infrastructure and security, the function and its suppliers, data, ITIL, COBIT and portfolio governance.
• Justifying the investment (2 sections, 116 tools). Problem or symptom, requirements, writing them so they can be checked, process modelling, systems view and scope changes.
• Buying (3 sections, 74 tools). What to automate first, selection and negotiation, learning and collaboration platforms, chatbots and embedded AI.
• Delivery on PMBOK 7 (4 sections, 98 tools). Business case, charter, stakeholders, scope, plan, schedule, budget, risk, team, control and closure.
• What technology actually costs (2 sections, 74 tools). The cloud bill, allocation and chargeback, optimisation, unit economics and a 90-day rollout.
• The AI category (2 sections, 83 tools). Strategy, prioritisation, data readiness, lock-in, adoption, risk, ethics and return.

Who is teaching

I am Mike, the #1 HR instructor on Udemy, with 1,800,000+ course enrollments from 170,000 students, and the author of about 200 books on Amazon. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn and worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank across 20 years in HR. I hold PHRi, SHRM-CP and HCI sHRBP certifications and represent HRCI in Eastern Europe. I am also a founder and lead the strategy of my own academy.

I have seen technology governance from the business side. At Wargaming there was a separate internal IT function with a strong leader who ran infrastructure, business continuity and disaster recovery planning and internal support, working alongside the head of development. At iDeals, a state-owned client in Brazil made audits and information security evidence an entry condition: without them we would not have been allowed into the project at all.

How to use the course

Start with the first lecture and its calendar. Then follow one investment through the blocks in order, or open the block where your portfolio hurts most. Section and lecture titles show how many tools are inside, and each lecture description lists them by name.

What is included

• 45 lectures across 17 sections, 21.5 hours
• 76 downloadable resources: lecture presentations and 33 working files
• 523 tools across the lessons, including 60 services shown on screen
• Lifetime access to all materials
• Active instructor support in the Q&A section
• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

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 your first lesson today.