Assess your application portfolio
Review a small set of applications with their owners and decide which dependency, risk or overlap to investigate first.
On this page
Suppose Finance wants to replace the payroll system before the next financial year. A first portfolio assessment should tell Finance which systems the change would affect, who can confirm the dependencies and what must happen before a retirement date can be agreed.
Choose the applications to review
Start with one business capability or one proposed change. For payroll, include the payroll system, the system that supplies approved hours and the finance system that receives the payroll journal. Search Applications for each one. To decide whether a module needs a separate fact sheet, see Applications.
If the starting point is a spreadsheet, reconcile the relevant rows with the existing inventory. See Bring an existing landscape into Atlas.
Review each application with its owner
Open an application by name. Review the same questions for each system so the answers can be compared.
| What to establish | Where to look and whom to ask |
|---|---|
| Who can confirm the record? | Check Owner. Ask that person which business task the system supports. If the owner is unknown, ask the responsible team to identify one. |
| What would an outage interrupt? | Compare Criticality with a concrete consequence. The payroll lead can tell you whether a day's delay would miss the payment deadline. |
| When could the system be replaced? | Check Lifecycle and the recorded dates. Ask the owner to distinguish an agreed retirement date from a target still under discussion. |
| Does the system still serve the business, and can IT maintain it? | Ask the business owner about manual work and unmet needs. Ask the technical owner about support, security and the effort to make changes. Keep the two judgments separate. |
In the pilot, when the header shows Editing live, choose More actions then Classic fact sheet. Under Overview, TIME Assessment shows Business Fit and Technical Fit scores when recorded. Where Run TIME Wizard is offered to an editor, the wizard asks about business and technical fitness. Review the recommendation before choosing Confirm & Save.
Compare the recorded TIME decision with the score-based quadrant. For example, a payroll system can retain Invest while Business Fit 2/10 and Technical Fit 2/10 place it in Eliminate. The fact sheet shows both so you can investigate the difference. In Reports, Technical Fit is the horizontal axis and Business Fit the vertical axis. An application needs both scores to appear as a point. Applications missing either score count as unassessed in the selected portfolio.
Follow the dependencies
On the payroll fact sheet, open the outgoing entry under Integrations. Check that Finance receives the payroll journal and ask its owner how they know the posting succeeded. Use Impact to find other recorded applications and owners to involve. For each important claim, check the supporting field or document in Sources and gaps. Give an unresolved question to someone who can answer it. See Sources and evidence.
To look for overlap across the wider portfolio, open Business capabilities, choose As-is and select App coverage. If two applications support payroll, check which employees and pay cycles each covers. Two systems may serve different populations. See Business capabilities.
Agree the next action
Open Rationalization and check Capability mapping. The analysis compares up to 30 pairs that share at least two current capabilities. If 3 of 8 applications have at least one current capability link, 5 still need mapping. The denominator includes all workspace applications, including retired ones. Only links to current capabilities in the workspace count.
Open Annual cost basis to follow each candidate back to its application. The amount combines annual licence, hosting, support and internal staff costs in the workspace currency. For example, 100, 20, 30 and 50 add up to 200. If the staff field is empty, the known subtotal is 150 across three fields.
A stored zero can come from a database default. Atlas displays it and withholds savings estimates if any candidate has a zero or a missing component. With restricted financial access, you can still review shared capabilities. Where an estimate is available, check the model's assumptions with the application owner before recording a retirement decision.
One payroll system might run weekly payroll for hourly staff while the other runs monthly payroll for salaried staff. To record why both should stay, open Propose keeping both applications, select the pair and enter the reason under Why keep both? Select Save proposal. Open the proposed decision from Decisions on either application fact sheet. An MCP client can also search for the decision with find_decisions and read it with get_decision_text.
Use TIME for the recorded direction. Tolerate means continuing to run the application, Invest means developing it further, Migrate means moving its work to another solution, and Eliminate means retiring it. In Applications, combine Lifecycle and TIME to find active systems already marked Migrate. Use Criticality to decide which owners to speak with first.
When you review retirement candidates under Decommissioning Planner, a suggested sunset date helps you plan the work. To establish a realized saving, compare actual payments for a dated period with the baseline. Keep that amount separate from an annual estimate.
End the review with a decision, an owner and the evidence still needed. In the payroll example, Finance might agree to test the replacement's journal against the current posting at the next payroll close. That gives the finance system owner a concrete check before anyone sets a retirement date. To propose a change to the model, follow Change requests and review.