For the past few CA PPM General Availability (GA’s) announcements, this has been highlighting the latest capabilities and their value to you - our Practitioner community! Coming from the perspective of feet-on-the-street services and architecture, this post will focus on impacts to your business processes; and highlight how new powerful enhancements are designed to improve your ability to deliver on outcomes crucial to your organization. A high-level recap of recent and new usability focused capabilities is below, but make sure to follow up with CA Services for customized demos and insights specific to your unique environment.
Click here to read the Solutions Brief:
Hot Topics I see in the field:
- Team-Based Planning is finally here! This request has become a vital market need that I hear more and more with my customers and maturing PMOs. In simple terms, you can now define, allocate, assign and submit timesheets for teams, including via the mobile app. This even includes populating cost plans with team data. CA PPM can now treat teams as a single resource, which may hugely impact the effort to manage; as well as data quality for insightful reporting. This is the kind of win / win that resonates within our ecosystem and I look very forward to implementing it with customers.
- Roadmapping with the balance of top-down and bottom-up techniques enables us to have a more complete view of resource information. With my customers I often explain Portfolio, Capacity Planning, and What-If Scenarios like a bouncing ball. Yes, we need the granularity of investment schedules and costs, but before we can "bounce up" with that detail, we need to drop the ball from a "high level" perspective. I find this is a paradigm shift from a traditional Project Management construct (bottom-up), but must be understood and manifested at a Portfolio Management concept (top-down).
- Configurable Investment Types enables organizations to label, organize, and track their work from the perspective of their lexicon. When I discuss PPM and / or Agile topics, nearly every time terminology gets in the way; and as these concepts may be reasonably understandable, the implementation and adoption of them tends to differ with and within every organization. Diffusing this unnecessary friction can be a key tool when implementing change and delivering the true business value.
- CA PPM + CA Agile Central Investment Integration has been balancing agility and governance to enterprise portfolios for some time now, but is still cutting edge for most organizations. This Portfolio, Waterfall, Agile, and in-between solution requires corralling unique processes within groups, and also maturing the organization. Large change is not easy for organizations, but when data and systems are aligned to leading practices and flexible enough to adapt, Practitioners have the utility to be the PPM hero they strive to be.
Other Important Links:
For more, check out the PPM Insights . I encourage you to participate in the best-in-class CA Communities site, where we have access to peers, events and support. You can also reach out to CA Services for individualized business outcome references and analysis. Feel free to post in the comments section of this blog or contact me directly via email and @PPMWarrior.