Beteo Blog

Category: Project Portfolio Management

  • Three Phases for Project Leadership Success

    The article Efficient and Targeted Project Execution describes how on time and on budget execution and successful completion of complex projects can be realized. It requires clearly defined leadership process covering all people involved supported by software-based leadership systems.

    Basically, the process of managing and driving project execution has three stages

    • Leadership Initiation
    • Leadership execution management
    • Leadership Closing

    Drei Phasen im Führungsprozess

    Fig.: The three stages of the leadership process

    1. Leadership Initiation

    The execution of every project should be marked by a clearly defined initiation. Setting up the process on an intelligent, elaborate and accurately described base concept can save a considerable amount of time and money.

    Initiation provides the project framework and defines the project guidelines, giving the project the actual go-ahead. A successful project start is crucial to the whole course of the project. Initiation particularly includes an exact definition and approval of the project. If the project scope including the individual goals is precisely and consistently defined, initiation is the valuable foundation enabling targeted work all daily leadership activities.

    2. Project Leadership – Project Execution Management

    The main phase is the actual phase where the project execution is managed. To ensure a highly efficient, proactive, and targeted leadership, it is recommended to base the leadership process on a standardized approach, a repetitive leadership process of measuring, evaluating, defining measures based on software-based project leadership system. Using both, leadership process and leadership system, has proven to significantly add to the chances of project success.

    3. Leadership Closing

    Every project must end with a closing phase. A deliberately scheduled closing resulting in an approved closing report avoids subsequent interventions. Apart from the closing report, the closing phase includes the acceptance by the client (e.g. customer, management), documented «Lessons Learned» and results that can be reused in next releases of the project or by other projects.

    A proper closing phase is an important and highly beneficial activity in the organization’s Lifecycle Management process and discipline.

    About the author:
    Robert Sutz is CEO of TimeWinner AG , Wallisellen, Switzerland.  TimeWinner AG develops and markets the Internet-based Leadership $ystem TimeWinner.

  • Advantages of Using a Project Leadership System

    The articles Efficient and Targeted Project Execution describe how project leadership systems support project and portfolio managers. The following list summarizes the advantages of the use of a Project Leadership System.

    • Modern project leadership systems provide fast and efficient access to all leadership information for the leadership team – from project manager to steering committee.
    • All leadership information is merged into one system, making the project leadership system the central source for leadership information for all project team members.
    • The project leadership system maximizes the transparency of project leadership across all activities, times and open issues. Particularly, this lays open repeated inefficiencies. Transparency is also important when project leaders change; for Handover it saves time and money.
    • Standardized, tool-supported and tool-enforced processes improve the attention of all people involved in and responsible for leadership and simplify the leadership task of driving execution.
    • Intelligent interfaces allow relevant leadership data (e.g. master plans from MS Project or Open Workbench) to be imported into the leadership system.
    • By using the possibility to connect leadership information and to define causal relationships, significant leadership scenarios or parameters can be traced back to the sources – a perfect instrument for modern risk management and internal control system.
    • Formalized, documented and precise sources in the leadership system, make statements more reliable and secure. Project leaders are able to make precise statements referring to possible requests.
    • All information is immediately indexed and permanently recorded. Redundancy is avoided.

    About the author:
    Robert Sutz is CEO of TimeWinner AG in Wallisellen, Switzerland. TimeWinner develops and sells Internet-based  Leadership System TimeWinner.

  • Efficient and Targeted Project Execution (Part 2)

    To support project and portfolio managers in their daily management of project execution work, Leadership Systems are used more and more frequently. Modern Project Leadership Systems offer predefined project execution processes which support the activities and decisions of the leadership team. In addition, they allow all relevant information (requests, decisions, risks, provisions, changes) to be centrally stored, contextually interrelated and preprocessed to support information needs of different steakholders.

    Leadership System – Core Features

    The most significant benefit of a Project Leadership System comes from mapping, complementing and supporting the leadership work. This includes all project tasks during the different phases, from efficient initiation, to complete documentation, to closure. Providing a basis for leadership, the Project Leadership System stores all leadership-relevant information including milestones (e.g. imported via an interface from MS Project), or goals and execution management cycles.

    In the process of running the execution of a project, coping with an awful lot of decisions, provisions, changes, risk assessments and notes is one of the leadership team´s tasks. The total of this information is not only stored in the Project Leadership System, but also indexed. So causal and restricting relations are recognized and visualized, resulting in reliable statements as to the target and result scores.

    From Leadership Meeting Support to Risk Management

    The range of features of a Project Leadership System covers all phases from the support of leadership meetings, active change management, progress quantification, conclusive reporting, uninterrupted documentation, traceability of the leading activities, up to a sophisticated risk management.

    Proactive risk management is gaining importance. Regulations have come into effect which call on enterprises to improve risk management and establish „internal control systems“. Such legal instructions can be comprehensively met by a Leadership System.

    Can Leadership be Quantified?

    Where is the project right now? What about target and result scores? Quantification is a significant factor in project leadership work. But can leadership be quantified? Modern Project Leadership Systems prove it! They include features offering business management and portfolio managers a variety of alternatives for assessing and comparing. They allow the definition of project leadership parameters relating to quantifiable criteria such as progress, cost, performance, motivation, and change management. Cross-enterprise benchmarking of project execution management is enabled.

    Project Leadership Systems – Summary

    A Project Leadership System is not only able to map the complete process of running a project or project plan to a single system, but supports all people involved in leadership with automated processes comprehensively, directly and flexibly. The resulting significant work relief and time saving can easily be verified. In addition to an increase in efficiency and project information value, there is more time to focus on the essential: the proactive, targeted leadership of a project.

    About the author:
    Robert Sutz is CEO of TimeWinner AG in Wallisellen, Switzerland. TimeWinner develops and sells Internet-based  Leadership System TimeWinner.

  • Integrating HP PPM with HP Quality Center – As Simple as It Looks?

    Very often, the processes of change & transport and quality management in the IT organzation are technically not very tightly integrated. Although organizationally, they are well coordinated, with both processes being clearly defined, digitized, automated and constantly improved, I doubt if their integration is tight enough.

    Integration von Change Management und Quality Management

    HP Software, a significant vendor not only of the process engine for change and transport management HP PPM, but also of HP Quality Center as the leading test management solution, provides a basis for an integrated solution. I was asked to carry this over into practice – an exciting as well as seemingly simple task.

    The first step was to technically join both environments together and logically merge them into one platform.

    The Search

    Well, searching for information in the Internet was not very fruitful or, to be exact: there is none. So I was forced to utilize my good connections to HP to get holf of the documents I needed. Thanks to the competent people I addressed, it was a success.

    Compatibility with versions

    An overview of the compatibility of versions was particularly important and helpful. Our PPM versions required that we used the PPM extension Application Change Lifecycle (ACL 2.0) for the intergration with QC. The newer tool Managing Application Change Tool (MAC) does not yet work with our customer´s version.

    Integration guide

    The procedure of integrating PPM and QC is documented in the Integration Guide of HP and described step by step. So it was my job to work out the 200 pages of this guide one page after another.

    Mappings

    Applying the technical procedure to our actual environment and system landscape was a challenge, particularly with regard to the mappings. The intergrated standard workflows and interface definitions may be a good basis for implementation. But to meet all requirements, the mappings of data, stati, and processes must be elaborated. Careful attention must be paid to the change of stati in the workflow in order to avoid uncontrolled process steps.

    What next?

    So far, I have made a huge step towards the integration aimed for. But I am sure there will be more problems to be sorted out. In due time, I will report on my experience with the ongoing implementation. Comments and further hints from fellow sufferers or sympathizers are welcome.

  • HP BTO Software Centers – Overview

    HP offers a number of BTO Centers. These software packages support in the context of a BTO strategy specific phases of the application lifecycle. The following overview is meant to shed light on the HP BTO jungle.

    HP BTO Centers

    IT STRATEGY

    • Project and Portfolio Management Center (CIO Office)
      The IT management solution enables control and documentation of the enterprise processes, particularly with regard to an optimization of priorities, staff members and processes in IT organizations. For this purpose, modules for the management of portfolio, demand, time, changes, projects, resources, finances and programs are available. Upon coordination with business processes and enterprise requirements, the distribution and use of resources are optimized and processes are standardized (IT Governance).
    • SOA Center (CTO Office)
      The HP BTO solutions for governance, quality and management of service-oriented architectures (SOA) are designed to help customers to minimize economical risks in SOA project phases and to create a comprehensively controlled, business-oriented SOA basis. HP SOA Center enables registry/repository, policy management, consumer management, policy enforcement, performance monitoring und problem solving.

    APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

    • Quality Center
      With HP Quality Center, a cross-enterprise exchange of information about test requirements, test planning, test execution and error reporting is possible, as well as checking for web security issues covering the entire testing and development team. Through functional test runs, GUI interfaces are automatically tested in applications and various release cycles.
    • Performance Center
      HP Performance Center features a real-time simulation of the maximum access demanded by customer requests using active virtual user input of the applications. This enables system optimization before „going live“ and ensures the desired steady availability. A required optimization can be controlled and accomplished under system load by help of an analysis program. Thus, new web or SAP applications are made secure before going into production.
    • Application Security Center
      By using the technologies of HP Applications Security Center, security gaps in web applications can be identified and judged all across the lifecycle: from development and quality control up to operation. Also applications that are already running in a productive system, can be checked for security gaps. In addition, audit and compliance requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIP AA or PCI can be met.

    (IT) OPERATIONS

    • HP Universal CMDB
      HP Universal CMDB is a configuration management database for IT organizations planning to implement business service management and ITIL-based initiatives. This software allows you to take up, document and store – in addition to physical configuration elements – logical elements. It also provides extended functionality such as an effects analysis and access control for building up and maintaining CMDB.

    Business Service Management

    • Business Availability Center
      This solution allows you to monitor the availability and performance of applications in operation for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Business processes, service levels, applications an the underlying infrastructure are coordinated to one another. The infrastructure is visualized by a graphical view with the traffic light set of colors red, orange and green showing the state of operation. A drill down is available for detailed view and error analysis. BAC is used to ensure the active operation of all business-relevant applications and to verify internal or external SLA agreements.
    • Operations Center
      This solution features a comprehensive, service-oriented access to IT management. Information is integrated and synchronized across management silos, IT and business are connected to one another. This distributed, scalable management solution which also includes security features allows you to monitor, control and record the status and performance of different IT environments, covering network, system, databases, applications, services and Internet.
    • Network Management Center
      This network management solution is considered a strategic and particularly important investment. In the last few years it has been established as an indispensible component of error and event management as well as visualization of network topologies. Network configuration, network events, application performance, and network analysis are the main areas involved.

    Service Automation

    • Data Center Automation Center
      Process automation in IT centers can be effectively supported by HP Data Center Automation Center allowing IT organizations to easily increase cost efficiency and to better meet quality and compliance requirements.
    • Client Automation Center
      More and more security risks, increasing availability requirements, and the rapidly growing number of mobile and remote staff members make it more difficult to effectively and efficiently manage client computers – a requirement, however, which every modern success-oriented enterprise should focus upon. HP Client Automation Center allows you to automate relevant IT processes across the lifecycle of the client computers, no matter where their physical locations are.

    IT Service Management

    • Service Management Center
      HP Service Manager is a comprehensive, fully integrated IT service desk solution targeted to reduce the time spent on problem solving. Thanks to ITIL-based best practice processes and a scalable, service-oriented architecture, consistent, integrated processes can be rolled out all across IT organizations. Event, problem, change, and release management processes can be automated. Service level management and catalog-based service requests are supported. All processes are coordinated by means of configuration management.

  • Business Technology Optimization (BTO)

    The New Role of IT
    For many years, all IT departments seem to have taken up the cause of cost reducing. This has changed. Business managers more and more consider IT a lever for boosting growth. Particularly, this means for IT departments to implement new business models and concepts as fast as possible.

    In most cases, IT departments are not prepared to cope with rapid changes. They utilize a major part of their capacity, sometimes 90 %, for routine work such as the operation of the data center. Very often, this means that no capacity is left for implementing the ideas and business processes the CEOs have in mind (source: Handelsblatt April 14, 2007).

    BTO Solutions
    Business Technology Optimization (BTO) solutions support enterprises in optimizing the business value created by IT. The goal is to consistently extend – by using suitable methods and tools – IT´s contribution in areas such as securing competitive advantages, increasing customer satisfaction and minimizing risks and costs.

    The combination of Business and IT perspectives may raise new questions as to the benefit, quality and reliability of an IT service.

    The focus should be on taking into account and improving the effects of IT on business results. The most important issues are: How flexible, fast and effectively do we want IT to react on enterprise decisions, corporate mergers and changed market situations? In which way do we want it to support the control of the product portfolio or the implementation of marketing strategies, and what should IT´s role of a communication platform for enterprise an customers be like?

    These requirements reach far beyond the conventional IT goals: Accounting for a number of bugfixes in development, reaching defined project milestones, or efficiently utilizing the helpdesk may be evidence of successful IT, but not necessarily of a successful business.

    BTO solutions are meant to support the enterprise with methods and tools to plan IT´s contribution to the business more accurately, to increase it efficiently, and to make it visible.

    By no means, BTO is just a project to be applied to one area of IT. Using BTO successfully means to consistently take into consideration the effects of business on IT operation, IT strategy, IT controlling, IT revision, IT process optimization and IT risk management, and, likewise, observe the influence of IT activities in these areas on business. To reach this goal, new methods and technologies must be introduced and efficiently applied.

    About the author:
    Klaus Otto is Sales Manager HP Software Commercial Accounts at HP Germany (Hewlett-Packard GmbH). This article only contains personal comments on the subject.

  • Lifecycle Management – no Pain, no Gain!

    Successful IT Planning & Control must include not only IT Service Management and Project & Portfolio Management, but also Application Lifecycle Management in order to be of lasting benefit. The following illustration by Gartner clearly demonstrates this.

    IT Planning- & Controlling

    Considering the support of the various areas and, above all, of the interfaces between them, it is obvious that helpful methods and high-quality tools for Service Development (Project & Portfolio Management, Design, Development and Testing) and Service Delivery (IT Service Management) are available and in use.

    On the other hand, tools and methods supporting the interfaces between the different areas and to Application Lifecycle Management in general seem to be rather scarce.

    At the same time, Application Lifecycle Management promises attractive benefits like:

    • a noticeable increase in developer productivity
    • “best practice” in development and service roll-out
    • a clear focus of developers on business instead of technical requirements
    • largely improved collaboration between development and business area
    • improved time-to-market by repeatable and partly automated processes and generally improved resource planning

    The software manufacturers priding oneself on their solutions that are supposed to reduce either project or operating costs are getting a bore. To them, the direct interdependencies between business and development are rarely of central concern. Statements as to the benefit of the solutions usually refer to either of the two aspects, and very often, improvement on one side is combined with a dramatic rise of costs on the other. This is why this topic is often referred to as the general “IT dilemma”.

    A relevant issue of “good” software engineering is a comprehensive requirements management, covering diverse influencing parameters. However, there are few cases where with each requirement all depending lifecycle objects are taken into account right from the start. But without this, recognizing competing requirements as what they are is impossible. What is more, hardly ever consideration is given to changes that are being implemented. Thorough IT Planning and Control across all fields of activities including their interfaces also comprises referencing and versioning of the describing, organizational and technical objects and their relation to one another. IT Service, and IT as a whole, is regarded and referred to as a complete system.

    The same is often true for business: IT Service Management (ITSM) includes Trouble Tickets without a clear reference to the concerned objects in Application Lifecycle. Information about the newest changes is not passed on to either the present development or the planned projects. This results in duplication, inconsistencies and considerable effort put in subsequent coordination. Any kind of re-use following the change or the newest project release is moving beyond reach.

    “Comprehensive” process frameworks and methods such as ITIL, PRINCE2, PMI and COBIT or SOX audit and compliance standards are just as unsuitable to overcome the “IT dilemma”, because they all disregard the interdependencies between the Service Lifecycle objects, meaning between processes, services and all technical objects. Although it is the intent and purpose of all these standards to diminish risks, I doubt if they can half-way reach this target without taking these dependencies into account.

    To me, the only solution in sight is introducing a professional method- and tool-supported Application Lifecycle Management.

  • BTO – Application Development as a Lifecycle Process

    An enterprise applying a BTO Strategy principally strives for three goals: to increase the benefit of the strategic business applications, to better align functional IT projects with these strategic business applications, and to generally manage all enterprise applications with the aid of an efficient end-to-end (E2E) process which is digitized and largely automated, while process information is available to all persons involved in the process.

    HP BTO Lifecycle

    • The BTO Lifecycle starts with strategic and operative information and decision finding, the Project and Portfolio Management, in the CIO office.
    • The existing application development process is extended to include a consistent requirements management, the targeted control of quality and performance as well as the continuous integration of due changes.
    • Experts department and IT operations are included into the BTO Lifecycle. The operation is permanently controlled, and checking for availability of the application components is possible at any time. This also creates transparency as to which components are running on which servers.

    From this list, it is obvious that in addition to software which support the individual BTO tasks some technological requirements must be met. Some of them are the use of process management software, a universal CMDB with auto-discovery and real-time dashboards.

    Summary
    A comprehensive view on applications covering IT strategy (CIO office), application implementation (IT development) and use of applications (department/IT operation) is important when it comes to making an enterprise more successful via IT. A consistent BTO Lifecycle Management supports the enterprise IT and – based on suitable BTO technologies – helps to make the right decisions and to put them into action.

    About the author
    Klaus Otto is sales manager for HP Software Commercial Accounts at Hewlett Packard Germany. This article contains personal statements only.

  • HP PPM Best Practices – From an Idea to a Specification

    Optimal preparation for development
    The blog post “HP PPM Best Practices – The Key to Success” deals with the preparatory steps which are necessary to develop a solution based on HP’s BTO tool suite. These steps are a prerequisite for working out a specification. The present blog presents a best practice approach to the transfer of ideas into real specifications for development and configuration of HP PPM solutions.

    HP PPM consists of several modules which amongst others cover the following business areas:

    Requirements – digitizing the processes
    In the phase of gathering ideas it is recommendable to digitize all processes that will be involved in the realization of the project. This requires that all processes are identified, indexed and specified. As a best practice method, the following approach has proved to be successful:

    • Mapping the total process in a BPMN (business process modeling notation). This includes the individual process activities and the roles involved.
    • Defining the status transitions by means of a state diagram in UML (unified modelling language). This represents the individual statuses and their interdependencies with the upcoming decisions.
    • Defining use case diagrams (UML) which support the activities and statuses from the above concepts. This involves the description of a defined process from the users´ perspective, written down as a continuous text. It must be ensured that all terms used in the concepts are synchronized.
    • Defining a service catalog. The service catalog facilitates the modularization and consolidates business-oriented services.
    • Summarizing the above concepts in a product requirements document.

    Preparing implementation
    After mapping the requirements by following the above steps, the implementation must be prepared. In terms of PPM this means:

    • Evaluation and transfer of the preparatory steps described above
      Evaluation in this context means to project the business-oriented requirements onto the level of the tools which are used. The focus is on the interconnection between the individual business processes. Status transitions and interfaces should be specified. To map process as a whole, BPMN has proven useful. In addition in this step automated activities are mapped.
    • Definition of request types and attributes
      Processes in HP PPM are controlled by forms. The definition of these forms (request type) must be related to the business processes. This implies to keep a field list including the attributes required for implementation.
    • The state diagram must be adapted to the technical conditions
      Statuses in HP PPM are not mapped in a 1:1 relation. On the one hand, they serve to control the information displayed in the form, on the other hand to analyze the progress of the involved business process. In most cases, some “technical” statuses must be added.
    Business Process Parameter Information Notes
    ↓ Input Information Field List Defined fields must be filled before the activities are started
    Activity Process Information BPMN, Field List The fields to be displayed and automated processes
    ↓ Output Information Status diagramm, field list Results of activities, maybe controlled by information in the fields


    Summary
    Sound preparations lay the foundation for the definition of the requirements. For changing ideas into requirements it is recommended to digitize the involved processes, which means identifying and describing them by means of BPMN and UML. Afterwards, the concepts can be evaluated, the request types (forms) and the attributes can be defined and the status diagram can be adapted to the technical conditions. Experience gained from successful projects has shown that this is the best possible way of describing the specification and of preparing the subsequent implementation of HP PPM.

  • HP PPM Best Practices – The Key to Success

    For a promising start of HP PPM projects, there are important requirements to be complied with, rules to be observed and system configurations to be carried out, right from the beginning. In the following, the most essential best practices are listed, gathered from a large number of HP PPM projects.

     

    General Requirements for the Configuration and Development of HP PPM Applications:

    – Development guideline
    The development guideline includes all standardized rules for the development process, the applied methods and all tools to be used. Additionally, the development guideline is used to document the experience made during the development phase.

    – Glossary
    In the glossary, terms and abbreviations used in the context of development are explained. It is a means of standardization of terms used in conjunction with the development of HP PPM projects.

    – Role concept
    The role concept defines the roles of the development team members. It rules communication, escalation and responsibilities.

    – Development environment
    All tools used in the process of development are defined here. The developers have to be familiar with the used devices and the connection parameters.

    – Up-to-date patches and fixes
    The newest patches and fixes must be installed on all devices used for development and subsequent testing. You will find the newest patches on HP’s PPM Patch download page (HP passport Account required).

    – Best practices
    We recommend to continuously compile and document best practices. They can be derived from the software producer and, above all, from own experience. The results can be incorporated into the development guideline.

     

    Specific Requirements for the Configuration and Development of HP PPM Applications

    – Installation and configuration
    All necessary commercial software must be installed and configured on the system planned to be used for development according to the system manual.

    – Testing the development platform
    The development platform must be tested using the best practices provided by HP. The HP Quality Center offering automated tests may be a helpful support. It implies the advantage of re-use.

    – Testing the SSH connection
    Testing of the connections between the servers defined in the development environment is a must.

    – Setup of the computers of the developers
    The required development tools such as Eclipse, SQL Developer, WinSCP,… should be identically installed on the computers of all developers involved.

     

    Required Authorizations – Special Configuration for Starting a Development Cycle with HP PPM

    – User management
    Implementing a security group comprising the members of the development department who are meant to be authorized to user management. Reference to an organizational unit facilitates the administration of this group.

    – Developers
    Implementing a security group comprising all members of the development department. Assignment of the required access authorizations to change request types, request header types, workflows and validations.

    – Object owner
    Implementing a security group with all members who become owners of objects.

    – Package transport
    Implementing a security group with all members who are in charge of the transport of the development packages from the development system to the test system.

    Basic Settings – Special Configuration for Starting a Development Cycle with HP PPM

    – Required environments
    Setup of all necessary environments for all defined systems. Testing the connection to the environment checker.

    – Validation with global parameters
    By this measure, a globally applied parameter can dynamically be changed during development, all references being based on the up-to-date parameter. These parameter references are used in all objects. This avoids errors with the referencing of transported objects.

    – Transport workflow
    Definition of a workflow for the transport of the developed commercial software. This workflow maps the complete process of deploying the developed commercial software.

    – Change management packages
    Definition of a change management package which includes all developed objects of a version (labeling). This package is used as a medium of controlled transport of the developed packages.

     

     

    Summary

    These guidelines are an excerpt from the best practices compiled from many HP PPM projects (formerly Mercury ITG). They contain a rough overview of the experience and the insights gained from HP PPM configuration and development. If these basic requirements are met and the recommended rules are followed, the first step towards a successful HP PPM project is done.

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