This white paper from Digité discusses the limitations of project portfolio management (PPM) tools and argues that application lifecycle management (ALM) tools are needed to provide reliable data to PPM systems from operational processes. PPM tools are best suited for executive-level decision making but do not address process and data issues at the operational level. Successful PPM requires clean, automated processes and bottom-up organizational change. Integrating ALM tools with PPM can provide project visibility, reduce data collection overhead, and increase productivity across the organization.

1. A white paper from Digité, Inc.
Is PPM Enough? Digite, Inc.
om
Lessons from Discussions and Deliberations with Digité customers and partners
Author: Mahesh Singh, Co-founder, Sr. Vice President – Product
Digité, Inc.
82 Pioneer Way, Suite 102
Mountain View, CA 94041
Phone: 650.210.3929
www.digite.com
www.twitter.com/digite
sales@digite.com
© Digite, Inc.

2. Is PPM Enough?
Over the last 10 years, a large number of IT organizations have moved away from the “traditional”
methods of managing software projects to a more centralized and “institutional” method of managing
software projects. An overwhelmingly large number of these companies have evaluated Project
Portfolio Management (PPM) tools as their first option for moving away from their existing ways of
managing projects, which usually was through a combination of using MS Project, email and
spreadsheet.
The promise of PPM tools is enticing! From the ability of management dashboards to unambiguously
tell you whether projects are in Green, Yellow or Red status, to being able to smoothly make Fund/ Kill
or Go/ No Go decisions about a project that is not exactly meeting its objectives, the case for PPM
appears crystal clear. Who would not want such capability?
The reality however has been somewhat different for a number of companies.
Dealing with Organizational Change
When organizations and project teams attempt to move away from managing projects using desktop
tools, office productivity tools and other point solutions, they are not just switching tools, they are very
often changing fundamental processes of how they work and how they manage their work at all levels –
strategic, tactical and operational levels.
Traditional tools at a large number of companies managing IT projects and applications have ranged
from spreadsheets, desktop tools and a few departmental applications. These have spawned a number
of business practices for managing and executing projects and reviewing project and application
portfolios that have been less than adequate.
Organizations struggle to execute projects successfully in this environment more than they realize or
are willing to admit. Skills ranging from basic project planning and monitoring to moderately
challenging areas such as using MS Project effectively to much more complex tasks such as estimating
the effort and cost of a software
project, are hard to come by.
Even with skilled/ trained people on
staff, without having adequate tools
and integration between them to
provide reliable data from project
execution to the project
management layer or from project
management to portfolio
management, the overall task of
delivering projects and application
successfully becomes a herculean
Figure 1. The IT Information Pyramid
task. Managing work at any level,
without reliable information, is
simply not easy.
The change that is needed involves skills, processes and tools at all levels of the IT Project/ Application
Information pyramid.
© Digite, Inc. Page 2

3. Do you start at the Top or the Bottom?
There may be no ‘silver-bullet’ answer to this – after all, if organizations have been able to function so
far with sophisticated spreadsheets, why not get in a PPM tool to do the same?
Many organizations have chosen to go the top-down way; however, evidence suggests that that has
not always worked.
Direction of Information Flow
By their very nature as a decision support tool of the Fund/ Kill type, PPM tools demand a significant
level of data reliability. This translates to process maturity at the ‘operational’ level, as well as
automation to ensure that all aspects of project effort are being considered as well as accurately
reported.
As we have seen at numerous Digite customers, looking at a MS Project file for status is simply not
enough. A Project Manager typically spends between 15-25% of their time simply collating information
and trying to accurately determine project status. Not only task status, but a variety of project level (or
application level) effort simply does not get captured through manual reporting/ tracking processes.
Spread across the entire organization, this effort rapidly expands and deteriorates the overall quality of
data being collected, collated and
reported!
To feed PM systems accurate, reliable
data, that data must originate from
accurate, reliable systems and processes.
This means that execution/ operational
level processes need to be automated so
they can feed reliable data to the PPM
solution. A majority of cases where a PPM
Figure 2. The "Traditional" PPM Implementation implementation has gone wrong have
suffered from this problem – of not
establishing processes and/ or automating project execution systems first. The fundamental problem
has remained, and the spreadsheets got replaced by more expensive spreadsheets!
Lack of Organizational Involvement
A different challenge arises from the fact that the PPM tools typically become available to senior
management and PMOs without a wider participation from project teams in both IT and Business. This
has further fueled the data consolidation and accuracy problems. A lot of PPM efforts have resulted in
failure due to this fundamental problem of lack of automation at the operational level for the project
teams and lack of project team buy in.
Organizational leadership needs to focus on these critical aspects of successfully implementing PPM
solutions that ensures that there is broader participation of the organization and greater focus on
organization change management and process improvement at all levels, especially at the operational
level.
Effective Portfolio Monitoring and Analysis
Is Project Portfolio Management just a set of tools? Is it a process? Is it an entire discipline? Having
worked with a number of IT and Hi-tech organizations and their leadership, we have seen the more
serious/ mature organizations treat PPM as an entire discipline by itself.
© Digite, Inc. Page 3

4. Broadly, PPM can be represented as shown in the chart below:
Figure 3. The Project Portfolio Management Discipline
The critical task in Portfolio Management is of Portfolio Monitoring and Analysis. This is a cyclical task
that repeats every month, quarter, 6 months or a year, depending on the portfolio criticality and the
company’s business practices – and relies on the portfolio analysis team or committee being able to
accurately make decisions on each of the portfolio components.
Portfolio Analysis will typically take inputs of multiple types from standard project performance metrics
such as Earned Value and Budget vs. Actual Costs, Effort and Schedule, but also related engineering
data on application/ product quality, business fit, completeness of vision and so on. Portfolio analysts
may also want to look at financial and market data, when necessary, to decide on the fate of a project
or an application.
In the typical Corporate IT environment, Projects and Applications Portfolio Analysis requires a wide
range of project execution and application lifecycle management data such as total effort being spent
on managing an application, number of defects being reported, the number of enhancements being
requested per month, the release schedule and the total cost for managing that application.
Unless this data is available reliably
and in an online, integrated
manner, doing accurate Portfolio
Analysis on any frequency will
require significant effort to pull
cost, effort and time data from a
variety of project management,
software engineering and financial/
timekeeping systems (or
spreadsheets) – and a large number
of companies continue to struggle
with that.
Figure 4. The "Integrated" Approach to PPM
© Digite, Inc. Page 4

5. Application Lifecycle Management tools that provide an integrated and an integrating environment to
manage the execution/ operation of projects and applications are thus an imperative for effective and
successful Project and Application Portfolio Management for IT Organizations.
The Promise of Application Lifecycle Management
Based on the experience of a majority of our customers and prospects, it is clear that the discipline of
PPM needs effective processes and automation at the operational level in order to be effective and
successful. While a PPM implementation may survive, for it to thrive and truly meet the organizational
objectives of real Portfolio Management, it needs real-time, continuous data input from operational
systems such as Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) systems that help organizations manage the
actual work of executing a project or managing an application.
“Are we in control of the Requirements?”
Project execution in IT projects is all about Requirements and Change management – one of the most
challenging areas for almost all project teams. Integrated/ integrating ALM tools that provide an end-
to-end visibility and traceability truly put the project team in command over this challenging aspect of
managing projects and applications.
Figure 5. End-to-end Integration with ALM
A fully integrated ALM solution should provide a single interface view to Requirements, Design, Code
and Test artifacts, besides Defects and Change Requests with appropriate levels of Traceability needed
for the specific development method being followed by the project team.
An ALM tool thus provides complete visibility to all stake-holders of requirements and impact on
requirements due to change. It helps IT discuss and work with Business to analyze impact of change
and do course corrections without the usual acrimony that can easily creep into such situations. In case
of Outsourced projects, it becomes an invaluable tool for managing contract changes and vendor
performance!
The value of an integrated repository for all project artifacts cannot be measured. We have seen
project teams struggle with the simple task of managing all the information and artifacts of their work
across a combination of email, point solutions, portals, network directories, configuration management
© Digite, Inc. Page 5

6. systems and team members’ desktops – resulting in horrendous loss of productive hours and project
delays. Just to be able to go to a single place for all of that – makes team productivity go up by as much
as 20-35%! PPM tools do not address this crucial business need.
“How can this Task be done when it still has Open Issues against it?”
“Is that project really green? Why are such a large number of requirements still not approved?” Or, for
that matter, “Is the testing task really completed? Then why are all the defects still open?”
The ability to drill down into a project’s ‘real’ status is most important for portfolio management teams.
PPM tools by themselves, do not and cannot provide this visibility and still continue to rely on the
abilities of the project manager and project to ensure that they collect data from all sources and tools
manually before providing that update.
ALM tools with integrated PPM capability make the project managers far more effective by one,
providing the PM a comprehensive view of the project and in fact, proactively alerting them of potential
red-flags; and two, by dramatically reducing the overhead of collecting data from myriad sources and
putting it all together for status reporting, resulting in as much as 40-55% increase in Project Manager
productivity.
“How do I manage Unplanned Work?”
One of the basic challenges of project execution is dealing with unplanned work. Project teams
routinely deal with it in the form of Issues or Change Requests or what might best be termed as ‘Action
Items’ – think of all those emails you get making small requests of your team members!
It is humanly impossible for a project manager to put down every last bit of work as part of their WBS.
On the other hand, filing time in a common “Miscellaneous” task means losing visibility to where 15-
20% of the project effort might be being spent, so that one could plan better in the future!
Very often, PPM tools miss out on all the effort being spent on unplanned work in projects and thus
relying on incomplete data for providing management status update. An ALM tool can allow project
teams to easily track unplanned work based on the actual work done – be it an issue resolved, a change
request fulfilled or an action item carried out. All such effort can get rolled up and shown against the
project budgets for accurate analysis of project costs.
Integrated ALM tools help by focusing on the project team and making them more productive rather
than just providing a dashboard for senior management which may not be fully reliable.
Summary
We believe PPM tools are great management tools for executive decision making. However, they do
not focus on or deal with the operational processes that need to be in place so that PPM tools get
reliable data. In order to have a good executive information system, it is imperative that the
operational processes are cleaned up and automated through a good set of execution/ operational
tools.
In the world of IT Projects and Applications, products and software, ALM tools do precisely that.
Organizations would do well to consider a bottom-up approach or a holistic approach that ensures that
their PPM goals are met. ALM Tools provide organizations the glue between operational and strategic
systems through an integrated/ integrating platform that enables project and application teams deliver
much more effectively both at the Project/ Application level and for the Portfolio.
© Digite, Inc. Page 6