Blogs

Mainframe Education Course Catalog

By Lenn Thompson posted 4 days ago
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Are you looking for education about your CA Mainframe Software products?  You can always find our Mainframe Education Course Catalog here.
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Mainframe Product Roadmap Webcast Replays

By Lenn Thompson posted 4 days ago
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Did you miss the latest product roadmap session for the CA Mainframe Software products you are interested in? Or do you want to watch part or all of them again? The links to all of the most recent replays are now available here. Note: Because our product roadmap webcasts are only available to customers, the above link requires a valid support lo
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Projects-to-Products: RC Project vs Product Delivery

By Brian Nathanson posted 5 days ago
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So here we have our first reader comment (RC) based post. In response to my post about product managers, James Ifill asked several good questions, which I'll address in separate posts over time. The one I'm focused on here is: " Is there a direct 1-1 relationship between the delivery of a project and the delivery of a product?" The short answer is no. It is far more likely that there is a 1:many relationship between delivery of a product and delivery of projects. A particular product, because it has an indeterminate life, is likely to be the subject of several projects over its lifecycle. The most obvious one, of course, is the project to set up/create/establish ...
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Projects-to-Products: How to Organize

By Brian Nathanson posted 5 days ago
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When making a significant change like transitioning from projects to products, it only makes sense that you might rethink how you are organized. As an organization that is confident about the success we've seen in completing our agile transformation and scaling agile to our product line, we felt it might make sense to provide details of our organizational structure as a potential guideline for how to organize in the product world. Key aspects of the structure defined below: Product Management and Engineering are two separate but equal functions. This allows input from each side to be weighed when making the tough decisions to balance business demands ...
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Projects-to-Products: Providing Translation

By Brian Nathanson posted 5 days ago
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As part of a projects-to-products transition, one of the roles that the PMO or SRO (Strategy Realization Office) in an organization will likely perform is a translation role to align or standardize the terms different parts of the organization use for different pieces of the product framework. In some cases, there will be enough momentum to get the entire organization to agree to standards. In other cases, each business unit or group will maintain its own autonomous terminology, which will then require the PMO/SRO to translate for aggregation purposes. Here's what a typical "translation" might look like: Product --> Capability Value --> Epic Product ...
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Projects-to-Products: The Value of Releases

By Brian Nathanson posted 5 days ago
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If the goal of products is to deliver business value, then recognizing that value once it is delivered is important. You may call them launches instead of releases, but an event to recognize new value that the product offers is often required for products to be successful. This is not synonymous with "releases" from a DevOps perspective. Code can be released constantly into production; that doesn't mean we celebrate or communicate every code deployment. Once enough value has gathered over a period of time (typically a quarter or longer for enterprise software; possibly less if you product value more quickly), a release event should be held to communicate to ...
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Clarity Client Automation 14.0 SP3 - What's new community presentation-20191010 - Recording

By Steve Parker posted 10 days ago
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Clarity Client Automation 14.0 SP3 - What's new community presentation-20191010 1316-1 Thursday, October 10, 2019 2:16 pm  |  GMT Summer Time (London, GMT+01:00) Play recording (59 m
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Projects-to-Products: Product Managers vs Product Owners

By Brian Nathanson posted 11 days ago
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In my last post , I described the role and characteristic duties of a Product Manager. Now I want to take a minute to highlight the differences between two often-confused roles within many organizations: the Product Manager and the Product Owner. (Note that these are roles , NOT titles. For example, you may call "Product Managers" in your firm "Capability Owners" because it indicates they own the budget for the product. They're still Product Managers even though their title says Owner.) Most products have one or more Product Owners. Our team has collectively found that Product Owners do the following things: Understand the (internal or external) audience ...
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Projects-to-Products: The Product Manager

By Brian Nathanson posted 11 days ago
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It's difficult to get much further into this conversation without discussing who the product manager is and what they do. Who is a product manager? Put simply, a product manager is the person who runs or guides one (or more) products. That is, they are responsible for one or more of the things we defined in this earlier post . That may sound overly simplistic, but I think it helps to define it in writing/out loud because it narrows down who actually performs this role. Based on our own experience managing Clarity PPM and our gathered research from other customers, our team has determined the Product Manager role (whether or not the person has the title) ideally ...
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Q&A: What's New in Clarity PPM 15.7

By Alf Abuhajleh posted 12 days ago
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With   @David Sprague , Product Management, Clarity PPM Q: What are the biggest improvements in Clarity PPM 15.7? A: Let me break it down into four buckets.  In the first bucket, we have new modern tools for different personas, like project managers, portfolio managers or team members. Our task hierarchy timeline, for example, gives you that visual way of managing tasks that customers really like. We’re bringing in boards, which are very intuitive and easy ways to manage investments and work across a lifecycle.  We’re also bringing in additional capabilities around idea management and custom investment types, such as cost plans that allow people ...
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Projects-to-Products: Defining Value

By Brian Nathanson posted 13 days ago
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In my last two posts ( here and here ), I focused on defining what value is and the typical categories of value out there. Here I want to focus on the most effective method I've seen so far for articulating and measuring  business value -- since that's what most of our organizations are really after. In most cases, customers articulate value in terms of a common  value element . What's a value element, you ask? It's a breakdown or decomposition of a goal or outcome that is big enough to be easily understood but small enough to be delivered within a fairly short timeframe. Value elements are often given different names: Epic, marquee feature, and sub-epic ...
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Projects-to-Products: Types of Value

By Brian Nathanson posted 13 days ago
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In my last post , we arrived at a working definition of value. Now, I would like to have a brief discussion of different types of value that could all contribute to  business value . In my conversations with customers over the years. I've generally found that value can be divided into 4 main types: Commercial or market value -- This is, by far, the easiest one for most businesspeople to understand. Incremental revenue generated or cost savings obtained, market share gained, customers acquired, etc. Value that can be expressed in typical financial or commercial metrics falls into this category. Sentimental value -- Sometimes, a thing or action has value ...
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Projects-to-Products: What Is Value?

By Brian Nathanson posted 13 days ago
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One of the most common refrains heard in organizations making the projects-to-products transition is that they are more focused than ever on business value . In fact, some more "enthusiastic" souls seem to be obsessed with this concept -- we need to maximize business value -- but is that really a concrete concept that we can all agree upon? This post takes a look at the definition of  value . According to Merriam-Webster, value is the " relative worth, utility, or importance " of something. The interesting word here is "relative" as it implies that value can only be measured in relation to something else. Something can be more valuable or less valuable than ...
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Projects-to-Products: What's in a Name?

By Brian Nathanson posted 18 days ago
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When making the product transition, a common question I hear from customers goes something like "We don't have products; how does this product transition stuff apply to us?" Whether or not you call them "products" will often be based on a series of factors: Internal or external audience Your particular industry Nature of the value being delivered As long as whatever it is meets the criteria outlined in my previous post , it could be considered a product for the purposes of making this transition. Here are just some of the terms that we have heard used in various customer organizations for "products": Capabilities Platforms Systems Applications ...
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Projects-to-Products: Example of a Product

By Brian Nathanson posted 19 days ago
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Yesterday I posted about the defining characteristics of a product. In conversations with customers, we've often found it useful to discuss an example of a "product" that illustrates how a product might be distinct from other investment types such as applications or systems. Here's one example of a possible  product : Airline Check-In Durable asset/sequence that receives recurring investment and an indeterminate end date Has a manager (or group of managers) responsible for the experience In this case, the airline may use it "internally" to place people on their own planes or contract it for use "externally" with regional carriers (as an example) ...
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Customer Newsletter: Clarity PPM

By Alf Abuhajleh posted 20 days ago
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Clarity PPM Newsletter Welcome to the latest edition of the Clarity PPM Newsletter, where you will find the latest product updates, news, and resources. Live Webcast: Roadmapping Your Enterprise Plans It's time to change how we plan in the enterprise. Come and Join us on October 17th to see how roadmaps in Clarity PPM ends your organizational fatigue with drag-and-drop speed, real-time insight and quick changes on the fly. RSVP Some Tips on Using Roadmaps Take a tour through these e-books, papers and webcasts to learn more about the roadmapping tools in Clarity PPM. Forge plans in minutes, then add the details around team, tasks and budgets as ...
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Projects-to-Products: What is a Product?

By Brian Nathanson posted 20 days ago
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In speaking with customers attempting to make the projects-to-products transition, I'm often reminded of the early days of the expansion of PPM. We would often run into customers asking the key question: "What IS a project (for our organization)?" They say history repeats itself; lots of customers are now asking "well, what is a product for us?" It's not always asked with intent, either. Some practitioners ask the question out of confusion as they don't see their organizations delivering traditional "products". A major government organization expressed concern that "we don't really have products". We then proceeded to have the following conversation: ...
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Projects-to-Products: How Did We Get Here?

By Brian Nathanson posted 21 days ago
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One of the primary drivers for many organizations to move toward a product-based organization is to get to a model that encourages consideration of the total investment lifecycle and total cost of ownership around their technology investment -- but have you ever wondered how we got to a place where the setup investment (e.g. project) got so disconnected from the operational spend? Historically, fixed assets were purchased based on justification around their entire cost -- you wouldn't create a "setup asset" and an "operational asset." So what happened? It's probably difficult to pinpoint a specific set of circumstances that led us here, but I do have a story/urban ...
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Projects-to-Products...and Everything In-Between

By Brian Nathanson posted 21 days ago
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Our customers and industry analysts agree that the time has come to make the transition from "projects" to "products" -- but many organizations seem to be struggling with how to get started or what to do. This blog is to discuss key success factors of our own project-to-product transition to provide insights into what might be confusing or challenging to your organization.  This blog will only be as interesting as your feedback. We will (attempt to) post once each business day and want to hear your comments/feedback/questions. If you find this valuable, please take a few minutes each day to contribute. Ask questions, suggest improvements, or just chime in to ...
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ITSM IN NON-IT USE: A ZOOM INTO FACILITIES MANAGEMENT

By Michael Lentini posted 25 days ago
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In coordination with our services partner Enterprise Studio and ITSM expert Indrajit Banerjee, we are excited to bring you the next blog in our series about implementing service management beyond IT. Stay tuned for additional blogs and supporting webcasts with industry experts for additional insights about how you can evolve your enterprise and improve your ROI. We’ve discussed in general terms how service management can break out of its IT-associated box, and examples of enterprise management use cases. If you missed that installment, you can read it here , then listen to the recording of our ITSM – The View Beyond IT webcast for more examples and ...
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