Data Center Portfolio Planning & Execution Lead

When to Use

• Build or refresh a multi-site data center capacity roadmap (3–5+ years)
• Prioritize competing DC investments under a fixed capex envelope
• Run portfolio governance: stage gates, RAID, dependencies between DC projects
• Align regional strategy (latency, sovereignty, DR, cloud burst)
• Consolidate business cases from site leads into one portfolio narrative
• Track execution across concurrent builds, expansions, refreshes, and exits
• Prepare steering or board-level DC portfolio status
• Decide build vs colo vs extend vs cloud at portfolio level

When NOT to Use

• Single facility design, MEP, commissioning → data-center-design-execution-lead
• Server/GPU utilization, consolidation, refresh tactics → data-center-compute-supply-efficiency
• Multi-team software program (no DC portfolio) → technical-program-manager
• Corporate strategy, operating model, issue trees → business-consultant
• Terraform, VPC, K8s foundation → infrastructure-engineer
• K8s cluster operations → cluster-deployment-engineer
• Launch messaging only → communication-lead
• MW/rack delivery program and readiness gates → senior-data-center-capacity-delivery-manager

Related skills

Core Workflows

1. Portfolio charter and scope

Define:

• Sites in scope — owned, colo, edge, planned
• Horizon — planning years and refresh cycles
• Constraints — capex ceiling, power at utility, sustainability targets
• Decision rights — steering, stage gates, who owns site DRIs

See references/portfolio_charter.md.

2. Capacity and demand rollup

1. Aggregate demand by region (kW, racks, GPUs) from engineering and product
2. Map to supply per site (committed, available, planned)
3. Expose gaps by quarter and region
4. Flag single points of failure (one site, one carrier, one cooling plant)

See references/capacity_roadmap.md.

3. Investment prioritization

Score initiatives: strategic fit, risk reduction, NPV/TCO, dependency unlock, time criticality.

Output: ranked backlog, funded / deferred / kill, and tradeoff narrative.

See references/investment_prioritization.md.

4. Execution governance

• Stage gates — concept → approved → execute → operate
• Portfolio RAID — risks that span sites (power, lead time, vendor)
• Dependency map — e.g. network build before hall acceptance
• Integrate site-level status from data-center-design-execution-lead DRIs

See references/execution_governance.md.

5. Hybrid and exit strategy

• Portfolio rules for cloud burst vs committed metal
• Site exit or consolidation when utilization and TCO favor move
• Contract and migration dependencies

See references/hybridexitstrategy.md.

6. Steering reporting

Monthly/quarterly: portfolio health (RAG), spend vs plan, milestone slip, top risks, decisions needed.

See references/steering_reporting.md.

Output standards

• One-page portfolio summary + detailed initiative register
• Roadmap by region (kW/racks/GPUs) with assumptions stated
• Prioritization scorecard with explicit tradeoffs
• Decision log for steering (what was decided, what was deferred)
• No duplicate site engineering detail — link to site workstreams

When to load references

• Charter and roles → references/portfolio_charter.md
• Multi-site roadmap → references/capacity_roadmap.md
• Scoring and funding → references/investment_prioritization.md
• Gates, RAID, dependencies → references/execution_governance.md
• Cloud, colo, exit → references/hybridexitstrategy.md
• Steering pack → references/steering_reporting.md