Published: August 19 2009, 12:44 PM | no comments
by Elizabeth Kelly

The IDC MarketScape report for IT Project and Portfolio Management, 2009 Vendor Analysis was recently published. This report is different from other analyst reports on IT PPM in that it divides the IT PPM market into two distinct categories, one for On Premise (or Enterprise) and the other dedicated to the emerging On Demand or SaaS products.

I was happy to see CA Clarity PPM features as a leader in the enterprise market and as a major player in the SaaS category.

Despite a challenging economic environment, the report states “IDC still expects the overall growth for ITPPM to remain solid over the forecast period, with an overall CAGR of around 9% and total market size reaching around $1.1 billion by 2012.”* This is a testament to the continuing importance of PPM an important investment for organizations.

Download an executive summary of the report.

*taken from the IDC document, "IDC MarketScape: IT Project and Portfolio Management, 2009 Vendor Shares," (document number 219087) July 2009

Published: August 11 2009, 11:22 AM | no comments
by Pradeep Bhanot

 

I just read a direct and insightful article by Bob Lewis at InfoWorld article, in which he reminds us that if you want more time to do the important projects, kill the ones that are already dead.  Bob provides some examples of the kinds of projects that need to be put out of their misery. Some of the cases worth a mention are an uncommitted or absent sponsor and big projects that are over 6 months overdue (that need to split up).   

My friends in California will be familiar with the notion of a zombie company, the San Francisco Bay Area is littered with companies that are startups that have already failed but are kept on life support as the last round of funding dries up. They missed their first mover advantage, the product failed to get a set of commercial companies to sponsor them or they went out of vogue. My startup was an Open Source development marketplace with went of fashion around the time as other business to business exchanges did.

An organisations project portfolio exists in a constantly changing environment where sponsors come and go, competition moves into your opportunity and the economic environment impacts your projects prospective target market. In light of all this change, it makes sense to have the infrastructure (such as a central PPM system) in place to enable planned (quarterly) or unplanned portfolio reviews. Lean IT thinking encourages us to consider how to reduce time wasted projects that are no longer relevant to our customers.

You never know what's around the corner.        

Published: August 09 2009, 05:34 PM | no comments
by Pradeep Bhanot

 

Monday is the deadline for my draft "Extending PPM Processes" presentation I am making in Belgium in October, so I racked my brain thinking of what the most useful processes an organisation might extend PPM into. The following image shows the six I could easily associate customers to:    

 

One of the main reasons companies deploy centralized PPM solutions is to create repeatable processes that help enforce some best practices across departments. A common process integration I have seen is between the IT Service Desk and PPM, which creates visibility to operational and tactical demand. The natural extension to this (following an ITIL Incident-Request-Problem-Change path) is to unify change management to project management. The benefit of this is follow the incident lifecycle, through a Change Advisory Board into the creation of a Change Request, which is the point at which it makes sense to create and link a project in order to track the change lifecycle from inception to delivery.

The use of PPM is not limited to IT. An increasing number of organizations have deployed PPM to manage their stage-gated innovation management process, allowing them to use the dashboards to evaluate ideas and foster the selected ones to fruition.

For Finance, having actual people and asset costs tied to project investments is essential to working out the economic value a project delivers and calculating the ROI. It is tough to express this in process terms, but linking the asset lifecycle to the projects it supports is certainly contributes to the goal of providing financial transparency for projects. One way to link ITAM to PPM is through a direct integration (as CA Clarity does) though I think the more common approach is more indirect through links to SAP or Oracle Financials for instance, to capture asset costs, apply people costs and pass the totals back to the financials system to perform the roll-up.

I welcome discussion on around what approach you use, either as comments to this blog or preferably at the linkedin group at http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1221867