What is CA PPM good at?

[Anon Anon]

Hi Everyone,

 

During a recent usability study a participant reminded me that to make the product better we could start looking at what we do well and make that better. Instead of trying to add/build missing features that we have to spend a lot of time learning we could focus on features that we can move from good to great. With that in mind, I'd like to ask you ...

 

What is CA PPM really good at?

What is the most important piece or feature of CA PPM for you?

 

Thanks!

Janna

Sr. User Experience Researcher

ITBM UX Group at CA

[Robert_Ensinger]

Hi Janna. I have strong opinions on this one...

    I've worked with multiple PPM tools, am in LinkedIn Groups of other tools (so I can hear the 'noise on the wire'), sit for demos from other vendors as well as demos from other end users of other tools (we call these 'PMO deep dives'). CA PPM's Hierarchical capability is unmatched. From sub objects like issues, risks and changes to sub projects, projects, programs, portfolios - it all rolls up, down & can be sliced and diced as needed. The objects hierarchy is a big part of this - but so is OBS. When it comes to providing an 'Enterprise' view, drilling up & down and providing security around all of this - OBS is the wizard behind the curtain.

 

  There are a lot of GREAT ideas in the Idea site to make OBS better, more end-user friendly and intuitive to use.

 

This is wicked cool: Improved Navigation on OBS. Why shouldn't it work like that?

Better visualization capabilities would further enhance this as a differentiator: Ability to extract OBS structure into a diagram.

Some usability 'quick fixes' would be well worth the time, such as simply picking up from the saved value when the user clicks 'Browse'. Once one understands this, again, it's like why doesn't it just work like that?

Of course, I have a host of other OBS ideas.

 

Great topic! I can't wait to hear what others think.

[System]

Thanks for reaching out to the community Janna for input! In addition to what folks provide here, everyone should join Janna for December 16th @ 11:00 AM ET. See you all there!

[navzjoshi00]

Agree with what Rob has mentioned (seems to be on a steam-roll mood )

 

Just a thought - the OOB portlets/ reports can be revisited as well. It's not about just quantity / quality of the portlets / reports pushed OOB. When I look at some of the CA PPM solution providers, I think as to why it can't be achieved with the OOB reports / portlets.

 

e,g, check this (not promoting any solution provider, but just a thought) -

 

regoXchange :: itdesign Assignment Editor

 

regoXchange :: itdesign MTA

 

As Rob mentioned in this thread, ".... let's do better with what we've got today"

 

Even with the documentation, you can always have the tips and tricks / placards (scresnshots and steps for important Clarity pages based on the roles) for PMs / RMs / FMs / admins etc, along with the user guides.

 

NJ

[mike2.2]

Along with the portlets by Stephen Forney at Excers.

[Robert_Ensinger]

Hi Janna.

  At CA World we discussed the 1.8 million users of CA PPM. With our Customer Experience hat on, if we were to create a Customer Journey Map of these user's weekly usage of the software to best understand their greatest touchpoints in the app, what would be the feature with the greatest number of weekly touches?

 

  With our UX hat on, examining the most touched feature - what's the user's experience with this feature today? How does it affect their Reservoir of Goodwill? If the user's experience with the apps's most used feature is less than positive - how does this affect their overall experience, their impression of the app and ultimately The CA Technologies Brand?

 

  Finally, let's put our Product Management & Engineering hats on. What's the risk of enhancing the feature? How well understood is the end state of taking said feature from good to great? If the end state is fairly well understood, the risk is deemed manageable.

 

  If the risk is manageable, enhancing the user experience of the most used feature provides the greatest opportunity to enhance the most users' overall experience, impression of the app & The Brand.

 

  I don't have the data - but all of the above questions could be answered. My hunch is the most touched feature per week is Timesheets. My experience is the user's experience is less than positive. Timesheets are not germane to Clarity - they are a commodity feature across all kinds of applications. There is little to no invention necessary here & there is no shortage of needs and great ideas.

 

  Timesheets affect The Brand. When my Endpoint Engineering team goes to look at SSO solutions, their Clarity Timesheet experience colors their impression of SiteMinder. When my network team goes to evaluate network monitoring tools, their Clarity Timesheet experience colors their impression of NetQoS. My Enterprise & Mobile Apps groups likes Clarity Timesheets so well they plotted to build their own interface in another tool.

 

  Not every customer uses Timesheets, but my hunch is, regardless of modules implemented it is still the largest touchpoint across all implementations. Taking Timesheets from Good to Great provides the greatest opportunity to affect our user's overall experience, their impression of the CA PPM Application and ultimately The CA Technologies Brand.

[Anon Anon]

Thanks Robert_Ensinger! Both your answer have been really helpful and thoughtful. (Yours too navzjoshi00) I wish I could have been at CA World to discuss with everyone. Just curious since this is the first I've heard of it, were these ad-hoc discussions or would someone on the team hear have some of the takeaways?

[Robert_Ensinger]

The 1.8 number came from Kurt. I would look to Dave Werner for overall impressions and specifics from the Product Advisory Council. Brian Nathanson has been charged with digging into the community generated Ideas - his experience in the trenches with customers would add to any insight found in the Ideas. I fear I'm on an island with my concerns over the Reservoir of Goodwill and Brand Impact. Understand that, right or wrong, in the above example, my user's experience with Clarity Timesheets impacts not just CA's Brand, but our PMO's Brand, our organization's opinions of project management - and heck - even me. I was blessed to learn Brand Thinking from one of the best at it and I think it's an undervalued decision making factor.

[mike2.2]

I totally agree. The timesheets are a central part of what the majority of Clarity users will experience and they look like a timesheet from the 90's. Also, a lot of organizations have to force fit their timesheet processes to work with Clarity. A conversation with the largest users of Clarity timesheets would create volumes of great recommendations for timesheet improvements.

[Anon Anon]

Great points!

 

Can you tell me any more about how you or other have had to 'force fit' the timesheet process?

What was it like to start collecting and what compromises have been made to make it work?

[mike2.2]

I would start by reviewing the ideas that have been posted and all the outstanding enhancement requests.

 

Fixing the TSV limitations on resoruces, integration to Outlook, etc.

[navzjoshi00]

Along with the run-time timesheet validation

 

NJ

[mike2.2]

What is CA PPM really good at.. Hats off, thumbs up to the ability to customize and allow the end users to modify their displays, portlet configurations, save filters, same portlet in multiple contexts,  and tabs! Other tools pale by comparison in this area. This really makes my end users happy. They absolutely love these features.

[Robert_Ensinger]

Good to Great - Program Management in CA PPM

 

One can create Programs in Clarity and associate sub projects - the plumbing in the system is there - the technical aspect of setup exists - this is good. What will make Programs Great is building out the functional pieces to support the day-in/day-out needs of Program Managers. They don't see Clarity as a tool that they 'do their job in' today.

 

A great place to start is with the existing, documented needs & Ideas.

 

Here are a couple User Stories of needs we've had that, while *technically* the clarity datamodel supports, we’re missing the ‘business user interface’ that makes this valuable to users.

 

Program to Project Dependencies

- As a Program Manager, I need to easily create Major Program Milestones on my Program and be able to associate these milestones with milestones or tasks on the Program's Projects.

- As Program and Project Managers we need '360 degree' communication and visibility on these dependencies and the progress of all the moving parts towards the milestones.

- As Program and Project Managers, any date change on Program Milestones needs to be easily visible to the Project Managers. Any Projects in danger of meeting dependency timetables or costs need to be easily visible as early as possible.

 

Program to Project Costs

- As a Program Manager I need to easily monitor Program and Project Costs. I need to be able to set control limits and reporting periods/gates that allow me to best monitor and control overall Program costs and take action as necessary.

 

Program and Project Issues, Risks and Changes

IRCRs on Projects in a Program are best managed *intra* Project - tools used to aid the project's success. Program level IRCRs are concerned with the larger business & environmental concerns of the Program and the interrelationships of the Projects. This leads to a two tiered monitoring & controlling need for Program Managers.

- As a Program Manager, I need to be able to separate, combine, slice & dice Program level and Project level Issues, Risks and Changes for my monitoring, controlling and communication needs.

 

On a recent Program we created tools to accomplish much of the above in Clarity via Workbench Views, Portlets and Reports - again - the data model *can*. This failed to launch because the collection of tools was just not easy and intuitive enough for the busy Program Managers.

 

We need to take a "Business User In" approach to easing and enhancing the user experience at getting the most of Programs.

[Robert_Ensinger]

Good to Great - Building out use case driven features & functionality to support specific PPM Roles & Responsibilities.

 

One doesn't need an Enterprise PPM tool to manage a project. For a single project, I'm a fan of the One Page Project Manager. An Enterprise PPM tool shines in its ability to aggregate, slice and dice - providing insight across multiple investments. Clarity's OBS and Object Hierarchy empowers this. As mentioned before - it's all in the data model. Now we need to let this architecture show what it's capable of and make the tool more useful to more users.

 

To demonstrate this, let's use the PM Alerts dashboard that ships with the PMO Accelerator. I'll stay out of the argument about what's core product and what isn't - understand that my users don't care - they just need the tool to support them doing their job.

 

PM Alerts is awesome. It is a fantastic project monitoring & controlling tool. True to what a PPM tool is good at, it allows the user to aggregate data across projects then drill into the details. Let's look at the Roles and Use Cases supported by the existing PM Alerts.

- As a Project Manager, I want to review PM Alerts for my Projects (Project Manager filter).

- As an Executive or Manager, I want to review PM Alerts for Projects for a my area of responsibility (OBS Filter).

 

Are there other PPM Roles & Responsibilities that this could serve?

- As a Portfolio Manager, I want to review PM Alerts for Projects in my Portfolio (Portfolio filter)

- As a Program Manager, I want to review PM Alerts for Projects in my Program (Program Filter)

- As a PMO Manager, I want to review PM Alerts for Projects across my PM Team (Project Manager OBS)

- As a PMO Manager, I want to review PM Alerts for Projects across a selection of Project Managers (multi-select Project Manager filter)

- As anyone, I want to review PM Alerts for a specific project or a collection of projects through wildcard filtering (Project filter)

I'm using this PM Alerts example to illustrate my point of how easily what's in the box today can become more valuable to more business users. There are other business users Clarity can provide value to - it's simply not easily available to them out of the box today. Net New features like the new Portfolio Planning capability is great - but we still have day-in/day-out users who need to use the tools to monitor & control. The Roles and Responsibilities are well known. I'd love to see features built out from the perspective of the business users and the jobs they need to do.

[Robert_Ensinger]

Good to Great - Process Engine and Action Items

 

Everything I've listed so far has been Business User focused for my end users. This one's for us Clarity people. We could do a lot more for our users by enhancing the Process Engine, Action Items and surrounding framework. One of the goals of implementing an Enterprise PPM tool is to 'do things' consistently and better across a 'collection of things' (Ideas, Projects, Programs, Portfolios, Services, Issues, Risks, etc). We need Clarity to be our PPM business process standardization & communication hub. Our tool in the toolkit to do this are Processes. It's good - but it needs be great.

 

Here are Process Engine needs and ideas.

Here are Action Item needs and ideas.

[Robert_Ensinger]

Good to Great - Challenges & Inhibitors

 

  If a Customer Journey Map in the application tells us about the most used features, can looking at the other side of this coin tell us something as well? What are the under-used features and why? Are there any 'good' features that leaves Product Management scratching their heads as to why they're not in greater use? What are the barriers?

  - Ease of use?

  - Maturity of user's organization?

  - Technical show stoppers?

 

  Product Management can't affect an organization's maturity - but ease of use and show stoppers should be discussed.

 

  Example: We do a good part of our Demand Management process on the Project Object. This has many complications and we wish to roll much (all) of our process back to Ideas. It's awesome that 13.2's new Portfolio Planning Features can so seamlessly intermix investments and we want to gain value out this new planning capability by intermixing Ideas and Projects in Portfolios - but there are some functional pieces missing from Ideas that are inhibiting this from taking off for us:

Provide ability to Copy Team (Resource Plan) From Idea to Project at Conversion

Risk Assessment at Investment Level

Risk added to the Ideas /Investment Objects

 

  In this case, Product Management has delivered a Great feature with the new Portfolio Planning capability, but it's the Idea Object functionality that's holding up our ability to gain value from it. Projects are the execution tool, Ideas are the planning tool. The new Portfolio Planning features have a dependency on Ideas and for us, Ideas are capping 'Great' Portfolios at 'Good'.

 

  I'm certain others have similar experiences around other pieces of functionality. If the feature is still of value & relevance - look for what's holding it back then work to solve those problems.

[Anon Anon]

You're really on a streak today Rob.

 

This one is really interesting to me. I recently gathered the most voted on ideas from the PPM community and decided to do a card sort or affinity diagram exercise on the idea. Basically trying to freely associate ideas together to see what people are requesting and what the common themes are. An interesting theme I noticed was that there are a number of request that I titled "Help the flow". Which really look at the whole world or journey of project management and help me connect the steps better.

 

Another theme I noted from the exercise is that many of the most voted on requests benefit the ppm administrators. Probably an obvious side effect of the people who are using the community. Does anyone have ideas how, as a researcher, I can reach out to and talk to other types of PPM users?