Outlook Series | ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING ARCHIVE

Better Business Outcomes with PPM

The need to bring order out of chaos is nothing new to organizations. Technical complexity, increasing demand for new applications and services, and proliferating systems crowding the data center floor are routine. So is the need to juggle ever-changing management priorities—and deal with the vagaries of the quarterly budget. What’s new is the fact that project and portfolio management (PPM) now impacts business success in a visceral way. The efficiency and effectiveness of PPM are directly related to bottom-line financial results—and poor PPM practices are not an option for business leaders. Equally important, new trends and business conditions are increasing the pressure to implement better PPM practices. We interview Bruce Randall to gain HP's perspective IT financial management. Bruce is Director of Product Marketing for HP. 24 Minutes

Bridging PPM & EA

Today’s IT planners face tremendous challenges. A chief planning challenge is to integrate technical know-how from the architecture management arena into portfolio management to reduce operating expenses and facilitate innovation. This can be achieved with an integrated planning process that delivers full visibility of the dependencies in skills, resources and the architecture.
We interview Dr. Ulrich Kalex to gain alfabet's perspective on bridging Project and Portfolio Management and Enterprise Architecture for successful IT planning.

Ulrich is the VP of Product Line Management at alfabet. 31 Minutes

Portfolio Management for All Efforts

Most organizations lack the resources to effectively deal with the work at hand. To get ahead of the curve, you need to prioritize work, control how new initiatives are evaluated against current efforts, assign resources efficiently, and accurately track progress and performance. However, your best strategy may not produce optimal results unless you leverage an integrated approach to planning, tracking and managing ALL your efforts, including support, projects, and new initiatives. Furthermore, just good project management won’t cut it when your resources are involved in day to day operational and support efforts. We interview Rich Murphy to gain the EPK Group's perspective on IT Project and Portfolio Management.
Rich is a founding partner of the EPK Group. 55 Minutes

Microsoft Project 2010

In today’s challenging environment, teams and organizations of all sizes must select and deliver the right projects on time and on budget. Furthermore, reducing costs by enabling smarter and more informed decisions about budgeting and resource allocation is critical. Consequently, more and more companies are relying on project and portfolio management tools to analyze their current and future project performance. Also, it is important to leverage flexible work management solutions and the right collaboration tools for occasional and professional project managers, but you also need a pathway to more advanced project and portfolio management capabilities as your business needs evolve. We interview Seth Patton to gain Microsoft's perspective Project and Portfolio Management. Seth is a Senior Director with Microsoft. 30 Minutes

Work Intelligence with PPM

To stay ahead of the curve, it’s critical to leverage real-time insight into the everyday work that’s going on across projects and teams, and to ensure that work is fully aligned with business priorities. Furthermore, companies need to be able to efficiently capture a portfolio view of their organization so that they can make smart, informed decisions on-the-fly. In particular, increasing visibility is crucial when you are developing new projects by collaborating across multiple international offices. Also, it is often best to keep on eye on your bottom line by leveraging an on-demand solution that provides the ability to easily conduct a pilot and then quickly scale it up and roll it out company-wide. We interview Timothy Low to gain Daptiv's perspective on on-demand project management and collaboration software. Timothy is the Vice President of Marketing with Daptiv. 25 Minutes

EA Road Mapping

Road maps are essential for aligning business planning with your technology strategy. Furthermore, to drive agility, road mapping manages the time dimension so you can react to predictable and unpredictable events. Moreover, and particularly for complex organizations, road-mapping enhances governance and collaboration. While the manual construction of road maps can help, they are a costly maintenance headache at the end of the day. Fortunately, this exercise can and should be automated.
We interview Dr. Ulrich Kalex to gain alfabet's perspective on EA road mapping.

Ulrich is the VP of Product Line Management at alfabet. 40 Minutes

Asset and Workforce Management

Having the ability for a device or machine to talk to one other is vital. Indeed, the emerging market of machine-to-machine solutions is key to gaining the competitive advantage that drives your profitability. Furthermore, M2M (machine-to-machine) solutions and tools support the exchange of real-time information between hardware assets, mobile workers, back-office management and key stakeholders in mission-critical departments. The result is an efficient and intuitive system that better manages employees and devices, regardless of their location. We interview Mike Stramaglio and Ramiro Trevino to gain MWA Intelligence's perspective on asset and workforce management. Mike is the CEO, and Ramiro is the VP of Engineering both with MWA Intelligence. 37 Minutes

Business & IT Alignment with PPM

It’s easy to tell when your business is overcommitted, over budget and overwhelmed. It’s not so easy to prevent it from happening. Step one is to gain insight into your business activities and ask the hard question, are they translating into business results? With multiple operational and strategic activities under evaluation or underway at any given moment, you need the ability to step back to see which ones are truly aligned with business objectives. The question is, how? How will you get a better view of what’s going on, put better controls in place, prioritize investments and implement consistent quality practices—without breaking the budget or further burdening the staff? We interview Ken Cheney to gain HP's perspective on Project and Portfolio Management. Ken is HP Software's Director of Product Marketing. 30 Minutes

EA Governance

IT planners face a tough challenge when it comes to project tracking and investment management. Fail to meet this challenge, and you will have an ineffectual enterprise architecture, and a poor alignment between IT and your business strategy. Application backlogs, outsourcing and off shoring tasks, and new government regulations can exacerbate your planning challenge. However, the successful management of all aspects of your activity cycle will balance the proportions of your IT budget that support operations and innovation. We interview Dr. Ulrich Kalex to gain alfabet's perspective on enterprise architecture governance. Ulrich is the VP Product Line Management at alfabet. 45 Minutes