Systemcorp®
Announces The General Availability of The New PMOffice™
Enterprise
PMOffice™
Enterprise Automates and Aligns People, Projects, And Priorities
San
Francisco, CA., May 7, 2002 at DeveloperWorks Live
-- Systemcorp® today announced the immediate availability
of the new PMOffice™ Enterprise Project-portfolio
Management (EPM) solution software for purchase and implementation
in global organizations across all industries.
Systemcorp®
will market, sell and deliver the new PMOffice™ Enterprise
edition to global organizations seeking to projectize their
core business areas and align their people, projects and
priorities enterprise-wide. Built from the ground up, the
new enterprise edition raises the bar in Enterprise Project-portfolio
Management (EPM) with revolutionary project, resource, time
and integrated workflow management capabilities. The Enterprise
edition is a completely configurable, intuitive and highly
adaptable EPM application that allows for the complete personalization
of all viewing areas. Designed to set new performance and
usability standards, PMOffice™ Enterprise provides
the ability to easily group initiatives and instantly track
all projects, deliverables, tasks, milestones, issues, changes,
risks and documents from one central location. PMOffice™
also incorporates its very own powerful yet intuitive portfolio
dashboard. Bubble maps, multi-dimensional cubes, and reports
all combine to set a new analytical standard in project
portfolio management.
According
to Steven McConnell, Systemcorp's Director of Enterprise
solutions Integration, "Corporate America spends on average
anywhere from 16% to 54% of a corporation's yearly budget
on internal initiatives, representing more than $275 billion
spent each year on approximately 200,000 projects. These
expenditures are distributed across internal organizations
such as IT, R&D, consulting services, marketing and corporate
governance departments. All work, initiatives, cases, campaigns,
or programs, notwithstanding the terminology used, is performed
by these organizations in the context of a project. With
49% of projects adversely affected by cost and schedule
overruns and uncontrolled scope changes, U.S corporations
can no longer afford to ignore the necessity of projectizing
these core business areas. PMOffice™ Enterprise is
a complete end-to-end process projectization and optimization
solution designed to eliminate redundancy and improve project
performance. Extending far beyond the capturing and centralizing
of project and program data, as a core primary function
PMOffice™ Enterprise automates and optimizes the key
processes that are by and large typically responsible for
project failure."
According
to Kathleen Colyar Piontek, practice executive of IBM Global
Services (IGS). "By leveraging PMOffice™ Enterprise
as the cornerstone of our offering, we can further assist
our customers in assessing, applying and deploying project
management disciplines across core business areas, processes
and systems. The breadth and depth of knowledge and experience
provided by IBM combined with PMOffice™ Enterprise
software enables our customers to define their priorities,
align their projects, and then rigorously manage critical
activities across their entire workforce."
CORE
FEATURES
PMOffice™
structures an environment in which all resources are tasked
from within a central, controlled and prioritized system.
This effectively enables a dynamic decision process, whereby
a business's list of new projects can be evaluated, selected
and prioritized. Active projects can be continuously updated
and revised with the ability to accelerate, rescue, kill
or de-prioritize, as required. Resources are constantly
re-allocated to all remaining initiatives, aligning your
project and organizational priorities with your business
strategies.
Portfolio
Management: PMOffice's legendary ease of use facilitates
a scenario approach to (re)prioritizing projects by merging
all project information and scorecard data into one visual
model. This unprecedented level of integration means organizations
will not have to undertake yet another effort to merge Project
Management solutions and Portfolio Management tools.
Built
to manage your entire enterprise project portfolios, PMOffice's
Project Portfolio dashboard is the world's easiest and most
intuitive portfolio management application. It provides
executives with the facility to implement systematic phase-gating
and portfolio review processes, complete with stringent
"save/kill" decision points. Through the use of graphical
displays and pivot tables, key decision-makers can visualize
and achieve the desired balance of projects and people,
tightly align portfolios with business goals and ensure
the entire organization remains in sync with the strategic
objectives. Top managers can also perform detailed ROI,
payback or break-even analyses to determine which opportunities
are their most profitable.
Resource
Management: PMOffice™ Enterprise maintains a complete
model of an organization's capacity, affected resources,
skills inventory, total workload and resource demand. The
capacity and resource-planning module optimizes skill usage
and ensures that all mission-critical resources are productively
aligned with high priority projects.
With
a complete and accurate Enterprise resource system at their
fingertips, managers can now plan initiatives that consider
all of the organization's resource constraints and portfolio
priorities. Beginning with an intuitive and flexible work
break down structure, managers can drag and drop familiar
elements such as projects, deliverables, tasks and milestones
to plan initiatives that reflect realistic resource capabilities
and assignment durations.
Every
assignment search challenges the repository information
to return the best skills and availability match for each
work unit. A placeholder or "profile" can be assigned to
indicate an unmet resource requirement. The final result
is a project proposal that is accurate and aligned with
the organization's true capacity. Once initiatives are approved,
they can actually be realized.
Time
Tracking: The PMOffice™ Enterprise time tracking
module transcends beyond the uni-dimensional timesheet to
a complete, yet simple, team information capture system.
It was designed with a number of innovative timesaving features,
combining activity time tracking, with the capture of forecast
information. Each assignment can therefore include actual
time, estimate to complete and percent complete. Assignments
can also be constrained by including a forecast start and
finish date. Team members can also create steps to breakdown
the task into more manageable pieces. They can break down
the required effort for each step and report at that level
of granularity. This provides the team member with his/her
own "To Do" list for each project assignment.
Project
Accounting: PMOffice™ Enterprise Project accounting
module provides project managers the ability to estimate
capital costs and consumable budgets, and time-phase them
across the life of the project. Because this ability is
actually integrated into Systemcorp's enterprise portfolio/project
management solution, the organization benefits from a single
source of expense-related project performance information.
To
facilitate the capture and tracking of incurred and/or committed
expenses, PMOffice™ enables project participants to
enter expense information against appropriate accounting
charge codes using a straightforward and intuitive entry
and reporting interface. By centralizing project expense
reporting, cost variances are calculated in real-time, effectively
reducing potential project risk and contingency utilization.
As
project participants incur expenses, PMOffice™ calculates
the remaining expense budget for each charge code and displays
the associated budget variance. This functionality allows
for an immediate response capability to mitigate variance
impact and re-align project forecasts.
Project
Collaboration Workflow: Using its integrated collaboration
workflow engine, PMOffice™ manages, automates and
tracks the flow of project work. Project processes are configured
and automated into a fluid knowledge enabled work stream
that is ubiquitously present and accessible throughout the
project lifecycle.
The
PMOffice™ Knowledge Enabled Workflow (KEW) provides
a structured and traceable communication process from request
to closing. All the latest information required for reaching
an informed decision accompanies each message, providing
a reference library to support a formal workflow response
by the recipient.
Organizations
can incorporate the desired flow cycles, gates, typical
phase reviews and approvals that align with your organizational
requirements. They can configure multiple outcome streams
for each cycle with infinite branching alternatives. Each
process can be accompanied by a checklist of activities
to be performed by the recipient prior to continuing to
the next workflow cycle.
Reusable
Methods: By developing standard reusable life cycle
templates and work products, Job Experts can provide managers
with a shared plan of action, constraints, links to important
information, expected results and standards of acceptability.
Just as the software industry has reached an unprecedented
level of efficiency primarily due to the introduction of
reusable objects, similarly, project plans and engagement
models assembled from high quality, robust, reusable and
interoperable work-products will play a defining role in
the competitiveness of a project based business.
PMOffice™
incorporates a framework for asset-based planning. Authorized
managers can publish various methods by dragging objects
to the template workbook area of the application. These
published methods assist practitioners with better work
sequences, as well as sample scope and quality parameters.
Methodologists can also include skills alignment through
the assignment of resource placeholders called "profiles".
Templates can include effort estimates, risk mitigations,
and all necessary documents to help practitioners create
more consistent, higher quality plans.
Exception
Management: The PMOffice™ Enterprise issue, change
and risk modules provide a standard simplified exception
language to ensure all team members participate in change
control, risk and issue management. Reported exceptions
are centralized to ensure all unplanned events are identified
and logged.
The
PMOffice™ Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) serves as
a valuable tracking framework aggregating all variances
and exceptions to help project managers effectively identify
and respond to unplanned events, alleviating their burden
of information capture and redefining their focus towards
more value added effort in variance and exception management.
Document
Management: PMOffice™ Enterprise provides document
life cycle management including document creation, review
and approval. Every element in the repository is controlled
by a check-in/check-out, change brief, and revision control
system. At any level in the WBS, project managers and team
members can create document folders and various document
types as required. Folders may be nested within folders
and documents may be positioned as sub-documents creating
a "document hierarchy structure". This structure
provides a logical, visual and intuitive document association
environment, making it easy to locate and retrieve pertinent
information. All documents attached at any level in the
WBS aggregate to the associated project element and can
be instantly viewed.
Mobile
Reporting: To meet the growing demand for mobile device
usage, Systemcorp has also extended key mobile and wireless
capabilities of their time and expense module to all Palm
OS and Windows CE based mobile devices.
Multi-Lingual:
An important capability available in the new enterprise
edition is National Language Support (NLS). This includes
double-byte support required by complex character sets to
display a multitude of languages.
Multi-Currency:
PMOffice™ Enterprise supports multiple currencies
at the repository and project levels. PMOffice™ leverages
an internal conversion table for the correct calculation
of both cost and budget information. This ability along
with the support for multiple languages truly makes PMOffice™
Enterprise a "global" EPM solution.
FEATURE
BENEFITS SUMMARY
Using
PMOffice™ Enterprise, companies can optimize their
core business areas and align their people, projects and
priorities enterprise-wide. This is achieved by enabling
companies to:
