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