Hello PPM Practitioners! I am a CA PPM Architect in the Services team here at CA. I was a CA PPM customer for more than 10 years as a Technical Architect and Functional Administrator. I focused on identifying business problems and designing solutions. I joined CA in February 2016 to help customers implement CA PPM to solve their business problems.
Like many customers, I wasn’t aware CA PPM Packaged Work Products (PWPs) existed. I now know that my account team told me about them and wish I hadn’t missed their suggestions!
This post highlights flexible and configurable CA PPM PWPs that support business outcomes, enhance administrator productivity and provide solutions to your business needs. All are supported by CA for usage and upgrades.
Why do customers purchase CA PPM PWPs?
Because they can be much less expensive than building and maintaining those functions yourself. At my former company, we attempted to build resource management, data extraction and timesheet validation functionalities. For each functionality, we spent months defining business rules and requirements, developing code, testing business rules, deploying functionality, fixing issues and deploying fixes, maintaining and upgrading the functionality and performing regression testing.
Currently, we have 17 PPM PWPs, which are listed on the CA PPM Packaged Work Products page. Here, I will highlight just a few.
Timesheet Validation for CA PPM
| A flexible approach for validating complex customer-specific time entry business rules. This PWP can increase the integrity of data actuals submitted, streamline time submissions and provide real-time or process-oriented time entry validation. |
Have you ever wished you could check to see if a user has:
- Entered the correct number of holiday hours on the correct date, before it was sent to the resource manager?
- Created a note to explain generic task time for better reporting?
- Sufficient vacation time to cover entered time? And if not, have you ever wanted to tell the user to correct the timesheet before “leaving” it, without changing the status of the timesheet to “Submitted.”?
The CA PPM Timesheet Validation PWP can achieve these business outcomes. The PWP is installed and configured to include your organization’s business rules supporting the usage of CA PPM. This can also make CA PPM easier to adopt and support.
Data Extraction for CA PPM
| Allows users to define, schedule or run ad hoc data extraction jobs directly from CA PPM’s user interface. Jobs can be configured to query specific data and capture results in a wide range of industry-standard file formats, append or over-write data in existing files or generate new extract files with unique timestamps. Data extracts can be integrated with third-party systems, including SharePoint, Oracle, SAP and others. Files can be retained in CA PPM folders for convenient access and viewing. |
Data captured in CA PPM can provide much information about resources, ideas, projects, programs and portfolios, to name a few. This information, when combined with data from other sources, provides a bigger picture in executive dashboards, reports and SharePoint sites, and can be saved for use in trend analysis and reporting.
The ability to manually export data from CA PPM via list views/export to Excel enables the information to be used for these purposes. However, you are limited to what the list views can display. You also can’t schedule the system to run these exports at a specific date/time, thus limiting the exports to times when someone can log in and run it manually.
This PWP removes the above limitations, allowing you to define specific data queries, schedule extracts to occur so that they match business rules, save files to a specific location in a wide variety of standard formats, and support more data reporting and consumption from CA PPM.
CA PPM - Microsoft Excel Interface for Resource Management
| Used by resource managers to create resources or update resource properties such as management, financials and custom single sign-on. |
How many administrators on your staff load and update human resources in CA PPM? Are you overwhelmed with spreadsheets of new users, users to terminate, or changes to make to resources/users? Would you like to reduce the effort through automation?
This PWP can provide the automation you’re looking for, freeing up administrators for other work. The PWP is installed and configured to support your organization’s user needs and business rules for new, updated, and terminated users.
You can reach out to CA Services for more info about CA PPM PWPs and individualized business outcome references and analysis.
I encourage you to participate in the best-in-class site, where you have access to your peers, events and support. Feel free to post in the comments section of this blog or contact me directly via email and Twitter @janetulrich.