Published: December 30 2009, 07:23 PM | no comments
by Elizabeth Kelly

As the year quickly draws to an end, I wanted to reflect on a few thoughts around Project & Portfolio Management over the last year. 

The economy had an impact on almost every organization worldwide.  Departmental budgets were cut, projects were delayed and resources were downsized.  The down economy, however, had less impact on PPM adoption than what many predicted early in the year.  Many industry analyst firms indicated that there was a strong increase in inquiries regarding PPM tools, more than they'd ever seen before. This was further demonstrated at the inaugural Gartner PPM Summit held in Orlando in early June.  It was an absolute success, drawing more IT and business executives along with PPM professionals than expected!  So, what's the explanation for the resiliency in continued interest in PPM?  The need to not only make informed decisions, but to make the right decisions is permeating through every organization today more than ever before.  Accountability is key.  Organizations see the value in project & portfolio management and the positive impact it can have on their business, thus they're willing to invest in technology that helps automate the decision-making process. 

To manage and mitigate the risk when implementing a PPM solution, we've seen many organizations shift their interest toward a SaaS solution.  Today, every notable PPM solution is available on demand.  In fact, a good portion of our new Clarity customers are investing in CA Clarity PPM On Demand.   This allows customers to implement in as little as a week, without the need to purchase, manage and support software or hardware within their organization.  With SaaS becoming mainstream, we're even seeing many on premise customers move to our on demand offering. 

The need for PPM beyond IT also became more main stream in 2009.  With organizations operating in an environment of reduced revenues and razor thin profit margins many had no choice but to extend accountability and visibility across a broader span across the organization sparking the growth in enterprise PMO's and the need for more discipline with corporate portfolio management. The traditional PPM for IT analyst community also acknowledged the expansion of the PPM market.  For example, Forrester Research in their 2009 publication of the Forrester Wave for Project & Portfolio Management Tools, segmented their analysis for the first time ever into two distinct areas: IT-driven and business-driven PPM.   Another example of the expanding application for PPM solutions emerged as a result of the newly enacted American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).  Organizations began reaching out to PPM vendors for a solution to meet the entire grants management lifecycle process.  CA responded by providing a solution, built on a core PPM foundation, that can fully integrate and control grants selection, acquisition, implementation, and performance tracking and reporting.

As you take a moment to reflect on 2009, how did your organization adjust to face the challenges of the economic environment? What impact did project & portfolio management have in addressing those challenges?  How do you see your role and your use of PPM evolving as we enter 2010?  

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Published: December 19 2009, 01:22 PM | no comments
by Gregor Petri

This blog features both under our Service Management and Portfolio Management sections and revolves around a video we created earlier this year.

In the video a demand manager tries to convince an operations manager of the benefits of a portfolio approach. The operations manager is not easy to convince as he feels his approach of monitoring his hardware and software gives him good insight into what is going on.

Such a bottoms up approach, starting from the technical components we are running in our datacenter, is a common approach when implementing traditional service management (if we do not run it ourselves, it can’t be very important so we don’t need to support it, let alone document it). Cloud Computing puts a spanner into this logic. Starting from the components we run ourselves will give an increasingly incomplete picture.

Does that make the video less applicable? On the contrary! A top down portfolio approach now becomes even more essential. So suggest you have a quick look, if only for the undeniable entertainment value.  

BTW If you’re interested to see how Service Management, Portfolio Management and Cloud Computing are also coming together in terms of popularity have a look at my Cloudy Xmas trends blog.

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Published: November 19 2009, 09:13 AM | no comments
by Elizabeth Kelly

Today, CA announced a partnership with salesforce.com to create CA Agile Planner, a management solution in the cloud for agile developers. The new solution from CA will better enable users to simultaneously manage multiple development methodologies such as Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP). Scheduled to be released in the first half of 2010 and integrate with CA Clarity PPM, the CA Agile Planner will enable our customers to achieve enterprise visibility and control over all their projects, whether they are using Agile, traditional waterfall, or another type of methodology.

CA is one of the first major enterprise vendors to develop a new product on salesforce.com's (Force.com platform) to make deployment faster and easier by users. By leveraging Force.com, CA Agile Planner joins the more than 135,000 custom applications built by the salesforce.com community of 200,000 developers.

To assist with the success of this new partnership, CA also announced an the Agile open community where anyone can submit, discuss and vote on ideas to shape the initial and ongoing features of the product. Participants will be able to provide feedback on the latest product designs from the Clarity team, and get the latest news and product updates.

The announcement took place this morning at Dreamforce, salesforce.com's annual user conference. At the event, CA is also showcasing the use of CA Clarity PPM to manage Salesforce CRM's implementations and, Security and Application Performance Management solutions - all of which add value to their implementations. Anyone interested in agile development should visit ca.com/agile to find out more.

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Published: November 14 2009, 02:02 PM | no comments
by Gregor Petri

To protect the innocent I won’t repeat all responses or the names of the senders here, but a particularly interesting response to "IT, cost or investment?" came in today and included the following observation:

 “IT can help to optimize processes and therefore to reduce cost. So, you invest to reduce the cost in any function, IT is not different to Finance, HR, Sales, etc. The question you should ask is why does your C-Levels see IT as a cost at all. Do they see Marketing as a cost ?”  

  “I’m positive we waste half the [marketing] money we spend, I just don’t know which half".

In marketing this is no problem, we just call the part we cannot allocate directly “awareness building” or even better “strategic spend” or “corporate imaging”. I believe we need a similar bucket in IT. I am not kidding, bear with me.

In every business there is always some cost that cannot be allocated directly to results (no direct ROI), but still everyone agrees they are needed. Examples are providing a (desk) phone to every employee, having a corporate wide area network (soon to be called Cloud), providing an email system (well that last one probably has a demonstrable negative ROI given the time it consumes of our employees). No departmental manager with a P&L responsibility will agree to fund such infrastructure projects.

Yet in IT we tend to make no difference in how we treat these. Sure we distinguish between “keeping the lights on” and “new projects”. But keeping the lights on includes cost we probably could attribute directly to results, and some new projects (like migrating to IP6 or Windows7) can not.

Guess I am asking for cost categories comparable to “Demand Generation” and “Awareness Building” for IT. In marketing the first is treated as a cost (50 dollars per lead) and can be directly be linked back to increased revenue. The latter (awareness) is treated as an investment and cannot be linked back directly.

Interested in your all comments and thoughts.

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Published: October 26 2009, 02:46 PM | no comments
by Elizabeth Kelly

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In the 21st century, managing the complexity of IT has gotten harder, not easier. Now we're moving our physical assets to virtualized environments and then to outsourced data centers in the cloud. Portfolio management enables IT to make strategic decisions about how resources are deployed and what can and should be virtualized, taking into account the needs of the business, regulatory concerns, mission criticality of applications, and cost...all while minimizing risk.

To help IT organizations reduce complexity and manage their valuable resources, CA today launched the latest version of CA Clarity PPM On Demand for Fall 2009. The new release focuses on continued ease of use, the inclusion of industry best practices and simplified reporting designed to allow organizations to maximize the use of CA Clarity PPM On Demand. 

Here is an overview of the new enhancements:

• Improved ease of use - Federated single sign-on provides simplified password management and improved integration between the network and the customer's environment.
• Enhanced reporting - The On Demand Catalog automatically deploys portlets, reports and other items to your customer's CA Clarity PPM On Demand environment.
• Leverages industry best practices - Includes out-of the box reports, portlets and workflows that align with PMBOK Guide® best practices to help improve project success rates.

For more information on CA Clarity PPM, visit:  http://www.ca.com/us/project-management-software.aspx

Learn how other CA solutions reduce business risk and increase the benefits of virtualization:        http://www.ca.com/us/press/release.aspx?cid=219991

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