Product Brochure
Project and Portfolio
Management
Deliver higher value to your business with PPM
Product Brochure
Project and Portfolio Management
Deliver Higher Value to Your Business with PPM
OpenText™ Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) helps organiza-
tions to track business demands and ideas, make better decisions to
invest on the right portfolio of projects that are aligned with strategic
priorities, and collectively manage projects making sure they are deliv-
ered on time and within budget.
However, as businesses grow and technology changes, you may be
facing the following challenges:
■ Lack of visibility and control over the demands on your business
■ Diculty in allocating resources and budget to both strategic and
operational activities
■ Poor alignment with strategic business objectives
■ Diculty in meeting service levels
■ Inability to measure, manage, and report on all the demands placed
on each department within your organization
■ Inability to provide accurate status on requests that have been made
Any one of these challenges can result in delayed projects, bad busi-
ness decisions, budget overruns, and frustrated stakeholders. Taken
altogether, they can mean the dierence between success and failure.
Figure 1. Dierent people in your organization will use PPM to achieve
common goals.
You need to be able to look at your enterprise from the top-down or the
bottom-up, and while dierent stakeholders, teams, and users will have
dierent needs, that doesn’t mean they have to work in dierent tools.
PPM combines consistent, controlled processes with the projects, pro-
grams, and portfolio data that’s needed for organizational governance.
That’s why PPM is built on core feature groups called modules that
interact with each other to form a comprehensive project and port-
folio management tool for everything that’s happening in your enter-
prise—from developing new software for customers to internal change
management—each department, team, and process can use PPM to
achieve alignment with business strategy. In this brochure, we’ll cover
the most important core modules in PPM: Demand Management,
Project Management, Program Management, Portfolio Management,
Financial Management, and Resource and Team Management.
Demand Management
Consolidate and Eectively Prioritize Your Business Demands
Gain visibility into ideas and demands with a centralized system. See
the demand placed on your organization by type, giving you an under-
standing of what kind of work is being asked of your skilled resources.
Address the Most Important IT Demands
In today’s environment of growing demand and tight resources, it is
dicult to track new work and be fully responsive to all new ideas and
requests. How can you know whether your organization is working on
the highest business priorities? How many systems do you use to col-
lect, track, and resolve ideas and demand? How much visibility do you
have into what everyone is working on? If you can’t easily answer these
questions, it may be because numerous “backdoor” requests consume
sta time without delivering appropriate business value, and often, no
automated process exists to evaluate, prioritize, and resolve demand.
Demand Management in PPM leverages a powerful workflow pro-
cess engine that helps automate IT portfolio management and other
business processes. This lets you consolidate, prioritize, and fulll all
requests, including strategic projects and operational activities. With
better visibility and control, you can focus on the highest-priority re-
quests and deliver on your commitments.
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Figure 2. Use PPM for Mobile to review and complete requests.
How Demand Management Works
End users complete a congurable and dynamic request form using a
standard Web browser. Each request type has an associated workow,
which species the process for reviewing, evaluating, prioritizing, sched-
uling, and approving the request. Based on the project and portfolio
management workow, the reviewer can assign the request to a person
or team for scheduling and delivery. Notications dened as part of the
process can be activated at any step to indicate work that needs to be
done, has not been done, or is being escalated, or for any other reason.
A Web-based dashboard delivers the real-time information as needed.
Using a browser, managers can assign tasks, and sta can view and
work on tasks assigned to them while end users can check the status
of submitted requests.
Demand Management at a Glance
■ Shared demand repository: Consolidates and stores all ideas
and demands in a central repository for better reporting, visibility,
and control.
■ Unlimited demand categories: Lets you congure demand
categories, such as business initiatives, business units,
departments, applications, groups, and assignments to users and
others to meet your organization’s needs for reporting, scheduling,
and more detailed management. You can store documents with
demand requests, using built-in document management.
■ Demand scheduling and prioritization: Lets you schedule
requests by priority, date, contribution, or other metrics. You can
adjust priorities to reect current or expected business needs.
■ Drag-and-drop process modeling: Allows you to adjust processes
and create new processes in minutes to meet your specic
business needs.
■ Complete audit trail: Captures every change to every request for
a complete, detailed audit trail.
Project Management
Achieve Real-Time Project Visibility with
Collaborative Project Management
PPM oers a robust solution that integrates project management and
process control, allows your sta to collaborate on project manage-
ment, and provides real-time visibility into project and investment status.
Accelerate Project Delivery
Successful projects can make or break an organization. A recent study
by the Project Management Institute (PMI) found that projects are 2
times more successful when proven project management practices
are used*. PPM provides you with the structure to use these proven
project management practices and increase your project success rate.
Unlike traditional project management software that only plans, sched-
ules, and reports on project status, PPM oers your project managers
robust resource management functions, a task-level workow to aug-
ment the work breakdown structure, and the ability to leverage best
practice processes to accelerate project delivery.
PPM gives team members and stakeholders a platform for project col-
laboration and provides real-time visibility into resources, processes,
status, and interproject dependencies. The software includes out-of-
the-box project management tools and processes that help you ef-
fectively initiate projects; plan and track phases, milestones, and tasks;
schedule and assign resources; and conduct high-level planning. Project
status, milestones, and cost summaries are available from an included
dashboard to keep your stakeholders informed and your projects on
track, as shown in Figure 3 on the following page.
* PMI Pulse of the Profession 2019 (2019)
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Product Brochure
Project and Portfolio Management
Figure 3. Track all your projects and record progress in one place.
As tasks are assigned to resources, they automatically appear on each
user’s PPM dashboard. As users update their status, information is au-
tomatically rolled up through the project hierarchy so that project man-
agers and stakeholders see current project status in real time, anytime.
PPM Project Management also facilitates managing by exception. Color
indicators identify project health by cost and schedule so you can easily
identify problems. The Project Overview page becomes the “one-stop
shop” for managing and assessing the health of the project, with details
just a click away.
Project Management at a Glance
■ Real-time monitoring and control: PPM provides real-time
project visibility into your project resources, processes, status,
and dependencies to improve communication, productivity,
and speed of decision-making.
■ Integrated projects and processes: In addition to standard
baseline, milestone, critical-path, and project-template capabilities,
PPM includes project methodologies to drive project execution,
so participants are engaged at the appropriate time with the
appropriate information. You can use out-of-the-box processes
or create personalized ones to meet your specic needs.
■ Direct integration to nancial and resource management:
Because this module is part of the Project and Portfolio Manage-
ment solution, project management integrates to other key
modules directly, such as nancial management, resource
management, and time management—allowing you to
comprehensively manage your projects.
■ Project collaboration: PPM supports inter-project dependencies
to keep external tasks and projects from pushing deadlines without
informing stakeholders of the changes because project status is
continually updated in real time.
Program Management
Govern the Program Lifecycle
Project and Portfolio Management provides simple, easy to understand
status of program execution with in-depth details just a single click away.
The Program Management module lets you collaboratively manage
your programs from concept to completion. It automates processes
for managing scope, risk, quality, issues, and schedules.
Optimize the Value of Your Program Management Oce (PMO)
Delivering complex programs on time and on budget is a major chal-
lenge for any organization. Having complex but interrelated projects
make it so a program manager is virtually guaranteed to face resource
and process issues. Organizations need to know which programs are in
trouble at any given time and how to get those programs back on track.
The Program Management module is an excellent way to optimize the
value your PMO delivers to your business while reducing risk. From large
programs to individual projects and tasks across your portfolio, PPM
Program Management improves your PMO governance and execution.
Figure 4. Best-practice PMO processes let you model and enforce corporate
PMO standards while keeping your stakeholders and team members aligned
at every step.
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At a glance, program managers as well as business sponsors, program
directors, project managers and other interested individuals can see
how every program member project is executing across multiple critical
success factors.
Status reports are a way of life for project and program managers.
Compiling the data for these reports can be tedious and time consum-
ing. PPM automates this data collection process and frees up time for
more meaningful activity. Project and program participants and stake-
holders each have individualized dashboards that provide real time
information covering issues, risks, scope change and nancial infor-
mation. When additional data is needed a simple, single mouse click
exposes needed details. This easy access to data lets you act directly
on the information reducing the time associated with approvals, status
updates and priority changes.
Projects that comprise a program will have interdependencies. Program
Management helps you track these interdependencies by linking tasks
or even entire projects that aect another particular project or task. A
powerful scheduling engine automatically takes these dependencies
into account to keep project views up to date, letting you make appropri-
ate tradeos, using real-time information across projects in the program.
Program Management at a Glance
■ Automate complex PMO processes: Provide for and enforce
processes for managing programs, scope changes, risks, issues,
schedules, resources, releases and costs.
■ Out-of-the-box best-practice processes: Oer best-practice
processes right out of the box so you can implement them quickly.
You can also adapt and extend these processes using a simple
drag-and-drop interface.
■ Visibility and controls across projects: Provide real-time
information that lets your project managers monitor complex, multi-
project programs and drill into current project details at any time.
■ Collaboration and stakeholder alignment: Provide visibility into
critical success factors across programs, projects and operational-
type activities. Stage gate program and project lifecycles enable
collaborative decisions on what takes priority.
■ Provide the structure and processes for managing scope
changes, risk, quality, issues, schedules, resources, releases
and costs: You select which features to use out of the box, without
losing the ability to adapt and extend these processes as your
business changes.
■ Add and change processes with the drag-and-drop process
modeler of Project and Portfolio Management: PPM includes
an out-of-the-box program initiation process to get you started.
Build forms to specify what data is required, requisite approval
steps, and established program dashboards for visibility and
real-time status. The process then veries that required data
is collected and that approvals and change requests are
appropriately handled.
■ Establish program nancials, schedules and resources as part
of the initiation process: Projects and project plans can be tied to
a program for detailed work breakdown structures, tasks, resource
management or summary milestone reporting.
Portfolio Management
Make Smart Portfolio Investment Decisions
Portfolio Management in Project and Portfolio Management provides the
real-time governance process you need for eective portfolio manage-
ment to reduce costs and increase eciency.
Reduce Costs and Increase Eciency through
Eective Portfolio Management Decisions
Competition for resources is ercer than ever today in most companies—
probably including yours. How can organizations prioritize the needs of
dierent business units and other internal customers? How can they make
tough decisions about what to take on? And how do they share those deci-
sions with their business leaders? From the day-to-day maintenance work
to the new initiatives that grow and transform your business, this module
lets business stakeholders collaboratively govern the entire corporate
portfolio with objective prioritizations and multiple levels of input, review,
and approval.
With the Portfolio Management module of PPM, you can align corporate
investments to business strategy. As projects are proposed and resource
requirements are identied within the portfolio, your business executives
can prioritize their work and provide stakeholders with better estimates
of when the work will be completed. The Portfolio Management module
supports hierarchical portfolios that give executives and managers the
exibility to set up and review the corporate portfolio to reect their orga-
nizational and reporting requirements. Additionally, you can add backlog
items to your portfolio and view those portfolio items in a drag-and-drop
Kanban board or in a timeline roadmap view.
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Product Brochure
Project and Portfolio Management
Real-time budgetary information and program, and project-health status
indicators oer timely visibility into actual status against the forecasted
plan. You can drill into these details to review specic details at the portfolio,
sub-portfolio, program, project, or asset level.
Figure 5. Real-time views: The Portfolio Management dashboard displays
portfolio management information, giving your IT and business leaders real-
time views of portfolio performance to support dynamic decision-making.
Model the Ideal Mix
Determining the ideal mix of proposed projects, active projects, and
operational work to fund in any particular year is dicult. The Portfolio
Management module of PPM lets you dene unlimited what-if scenar-
ios, creating the ideal mix of projects, proposals, and other work. You
can model changes to dates, budgets, or resources to meet your goals,
whether they are strategic alignment, return on investment, net present
value, benet realization, capacity, skill availability, or a combination of
these or other factors.
You can also see the impact of accelerating an important initiative or
retiring a low-value asset. The powerful optimization engine churns
through every combination of portfolio management options to rec-
ommend the ideal mix. You can further dene the optimization criteria
by dening targets for spending against business objectives, project
class, or asset class. You can ag regulatory or compliance projects
so that they are included, regardless of their contribution to the overall
portfolio value. You can also identify project dependencies to determine
whether the ideal mix is achievable.
Once the information is optimized, you can modify the portfolio further
before accepting the recommendation. Visualizations highlight any
discrepancies between an optimal portfolio and the current portfolio.
Portfolio Management at a Glance
■ The Portfolio Management module provides: The processes,
entities, and analysis to manage your corporate portfolio.
■ Govern processes and provide consistency across your
enterprise: Automated processes enforce required information
so that it is available and consistent across pending or proposed
projects, active projects, and applications in production.
■ Collect real-time information: Include quantitative data (such as
nancial budgets and forecasts, resources, and schedules), along
with qualitative information (such as strategic t, alignment, and
complexity) for apples-to-apples comparisons across the portfolio.
■ Hierarchical portfolios give you exibility: Provide business
units with information that map to their unique requirements.
PPM Portfolio Management hierarchies provide exibility to
view the corporate portfolio in multiple ways to meet unique
reporting requirements.
■ Reduce manual data entry in standalone reporting tools:
Your executives can see the portfolio’s real-time status and
get immediate access to detailed information to support their
decision-making.
■ Portfolio Management optimization capabilities: The system
automatically suggests the ideal mix of proposed projects and
other work based on user-dened or constraint-based criteria.
Financial Management
Detailed Financial Management from End to End
Financial Management manages your company’s portfolio with real-time
visibility into nancial performance, from budgeting through the collection
of actual costs.
Track Investments and Realize Benets
Few organizations operate with “blank checks” these days. Limited
budgets require tough decisions on what organizations commit to:
Focused projects that increase business value, optimized service de-
livery, and reduced costs. To make the best decisions, managers need
real-time visibility into budgets and actual costs. But that’s not enough
for success. They also need simultaneous visibility into the project, pro-
gram or portfolio progress, status, and value being realized from these
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investments. In other words, for both projects that keep the business
running and initiatives that grow and transform the business. The PPM
Financial Management module provides all of this.
The PPM Financial Management module helps manage your company’s
portfolio of proposals, projects, applications, and operational activi-
ties with real-time visibility into nancial performance. It gives you the
information and processes required for making eective portfolio man-
agement decisions, from top-down planning of project and program
budgets—that includes forecasted costs—through to the capture of
actual costs as work is performed.
Figure 6. Track planned and actual costs across multiple projects, programs,
and portfolios.
One of the keys to govern nancial controls eectively across your
portfolio is ready access to the budgeted plan of record and actual/
forecasted costs. Financial trending and comparisons are available with
PPM software point-in-time snapshots of the nancial summary infor-
mation. This gives you the requisite real-time visibility needed to analyze
approved spend and forecasted costs, and quickly determine if a whole
portfolio or programs and projects are at risk of going over budget.
How the PPM Financial Management Module Works
The PPM Financial Management module provides real-time visibility
into plan of record budgets, forecasted and actual costs (both labor/
non-labor and capital expense/operating expense), programs, projects,
risks, and overall demand—without costly integrations to multiple data
sources. Costs can be managed in any currency. Budgets are created
for labor costs and non-labor charges as well as capital and operational
expenditures. Financial snapshots are available to track and report on
changes throughout the lifecycle of the investment. Dashboards el-
evate visibility into projects with capital expenditures, clearly identifying
risk and exposure. Actual labor hours from time sheets, project entries,
or stang proles combine with dened resource rates by skill set, in-
dividual, or other rules to calculate actual labor costs, using exible cost
rates by resource, project, type of work, date range, and more.
The PPM Financial Management module not only provides detailed
views of project health, it also helps you establish and manage the
budgeting lifecycle—from project proposal, justication, and review to
project initiation, execution, deployment, benets realization, and main-
tenance. Costs are calculated automatically where possible and other-
wise entered manually through an intuitive interface to take advantage
of existing nancial system investments.
Financial Management at a Glance
■ Visibility and nancial governance controls provide a real-time
investment summary that presents accurate, nancial details
throughout the portfolio lifecycle, enabling your organization to
align IT initiatives with business goals, manage costs by exception,
and improve the accuracy of forecasts.
■ Strategic and operational activities become the touchstone for
monitoring cost performance of all business operations. Business
stakeholders see in real time the value that the Project Management
Oce (PMO) is delivering to them.
■ SOP 98-1 support uses a built-in capitalization method to reduce
capitalization errors and uses built-in portlets to bring needed
visibility and control.
■ Earned value analysis automatically tracks and calculates earned
value, including both labor and non-labor metrics. Because this
analysis is performed automatically for you, your organization can
begin managing by earned value without the time and expense
traditionally required to capture and calculate necessary values.
■ Breadth of nancial coverage establishes and manages budgets
(with both capital and expense items), expected and realized
benets, risks and risk probabilities, forecasted actual cost
calculations, actual plus forecast-to-budget comparisons, and
visual monitors of nancial performance to enable real-time
analysis of cost of service and defendable chargebacks.
■ Real-time, 24x7 information is oered through the PPM dashboard.
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Product Brochure
Project and Portfolio Management
Resource and Team Management
Gain Complete Visibility and Control over
Resource Supply and Demand
Eectively measure resource capacity and eciency, both from top-
down planning through bottom-up execution. Resource and Team
Management balance your resource supply, giving you full visibility and
control over resource utilization.
Traditional, Agile, or Hybrid Resource Management
Get real-time visibility and control over your resources. Skilled workers
are more important than ever to the success of your business. Putting
the right people on the right projects is often the dierence between
meeting the needs of the business and falling short. Plus, tight budgets
punish resourcing mistakes that delay important investment projects
and reduce worker productivity. As the Agile methodology spreads, it’s
also important to be able to have the exibility to manage traditional,
hybrid, and agile projects in the same place.
The Project and Portfolio Management Resource Management mod-
ule responds to these challenges. It helps you answer key questions,
such as:
■ Is too much of my capacity consumed by ad hoc projects vs.
strategic projects or routine operational activities?
■ Am I eectively utilizing my most valuable resources?
■ When will I have suitably skilled resources to start that strategic
project?
■ Do I need to look externally for a short while to ll important
resourcing needs?
The PPM Resource Management module provides a holistic and real-
time picture of resource supply, including resource roles, skills, and
skill levels, across the entire organization. It also captures demands for
those resources from projects and operational activities that drive your
business in real time, providing up-to-date visibility into what resources
and skills are required and when. To fulfill demand, you can allocate
resources by name, position, role, or group, and then track resource
allocations against any work item. And, it supports any development
method that is used: whether Agile or Waterfall.
Plan and Schedule Resources from the Top Down
or from the Bottom Up
The PPM Resource Management module makes it easy to plan and
schedule your resources. Stang proles capture high-level resource
requirements from a position or role perspective, allowing you to fore-
cast demand at a high level before schedule or assignment details are
known. Resource pools are used to model resource supply by company,
division, group, or program. For example, using both stang proles and
resource pools, you can easily identify the need for more Java develop-
ers, marketing resources, or database administrators before you worry
about whom to assign to a project six or 12 months in the future—im-
proving overall planning and decision-making.
Stang proles also help you to evaluate new project requests quickly
(and adjust their scope) without spending weeks on detailed project
planning. And once projects or activities are approved, you can build
detailed assignments that specify the exact resources and dates for a
set of tasks or activities and search for the most suitable resource based
on dierent criteria. The transition from top-down planning to bottom-up
scheduling is seamless. Similarly, in Agile environments, resources can
be assigned to teams that are assembled to complete the projects to-
gether. Agile team leaders then assign resources in stand-up meetings,
within the system, or however they normally make assignments. Then
Agile team members can input time spent on activities to provide accu-
rate nancial reports and milestone updates to executive management.
Figure 7. Quickly assess your team’s assignments and workload with the
Team Management Dashboard.
Resource Management at a Glance
Individual resources with roles, skills, proficiencies, work calendars,
rates, and productivity metrics are entered into the system or main-
tained through LDAP. Resource pools, including Agile teams, reecting
groups of resource supply are created to meet demand from stang
proles, project plans, and operational activities. Easy-to-use resource
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pool search capabilities make it easy for you to quickly identify and
sta the right resources, in traditional or Agile working environments.
Automatic real-time updates and an enforced process help you keep re-
source allocations and utilizations up to date for eective high-level re-
source budgeting and detailed project planning, execution, deployment,
and benets realization. And unlike other systems, the PPM Resource
Management module provides real-time visibility into capacity, assign-
ments, utilization, programs, projects, costs, and overall IT demand in
traditional and Agile environments—without the need for costly integra-
tions to multiple data sources. PPM Resource Management gives you
the power to increase the value your resources deliver to the business.
Resource and Team Management at a Glance
■ Top-down and bottom-up support: forecasts resource demand
by roles for portfolio planning, then transitions through resource
requests to detailed task and request assignments.
■ Resource visibility: provides supply and demand visibility into
resources and resource roles and skill levels across the organization.
■ Agile Team Management: allows you the exibility to create and
manage Agile work teams and capture output in terms of milestones
or detailed work assignments.
■ Resource search: along with resource attributes, helps you nd
the most suitable resource to assign to a specic project, task or
operational activity service request.
■ Optimized resource eectiveness: provides the visibility and
processes to allocate resources to the highest-priority activities
across groups.
■ Real-time transactions: captures the transactions that drive IT in
real time, so resource utilization and status are up to date.
The PPM Platform
A Complete Solution
CHOOSE THE DELIVERY OPTION THAT IS BEST FOR YOU
PPM is oered as a Software as a Service (SaaS) or an in-house project
and portfolio management solution. You benet from the exibility to
jump-start your implementation using our SaaS solution and migrate
in-house when and if you choose to. Plus, OpenText™ best practices are
provided whether you opt for our SaaS solution for faster time-to-value
and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) or for an in-house implementa-
tion backed by an expert team of consultants.
Figure 8. The Team Overview page lets you track team-level metrics with
powerful data portals.
INTEGRATE WITH EXISTING TOOLS
You can integrate PPM with your existing enterprise tools through
Web services or our ready-to-use integrations with solutions such as
OpenText™ Service Management, OpenText™ ALM Quality Center,
OpenText™ ALM Octane, OpenText™ Application Portfolio Management,
and others.
PPM at a Glance
■ Robust data insight: Focus on what matters. From top down or
bottom up data analytics, PPM provides hundreds of portlets with
robust data to align corporate investments with business strategy.
■ Value-driven portfolio: Create portfolios that add faster value to
your business. Monitor with smart KPIs and take advantage
of what-if scenarios to determine the right mix of deliverables
versus investments.
■ Enterprise Agile ready: Manage hybrid projects (legacy or Agile).
PPM integrates out-of-the-box with the most popular Agile tools
including ALM Octane, OpenText™ Agile Manager, CA Rally, Jira,
VersionOne and others.
Comprehensive Training
OpenText provides a comprehensive curriculum of Software and Project
and Portfolio Management courses. These oerings provide the train-
ing you need to realize the full potential of your solutions, increase your
network optimization and responsiveness, and achieve better return
on your investments.
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Product Brochure
Project and Portfolio Management
With more than 30 years experience in meeting complex education
challenges worldwide, OpenText knows training. This experience, cou-
pled with unique insights into Software products, positions us to deliver
the optimum training experience. For more information about these and
other educational courses, visit: https://software.microfocus.com/
en-us/software/enterprise-software-education-services
OpenText Services
Get the Most from Your Software Investment
OpenText provides high-quality software services that address all as-
pects of your software application lifecycle needs. With OpenText, you
have access to standards-based, modular, multi-platform software
coupled with global services and support. The wide range of service
oerings—from online self-solve support to proactive mission-critical
services—enables you to choose the services that best match your
business needs.
For an overview of OpenText software services, visit www.microfocus.
com/en-us/services/alm-consulting-services.
Learn more at
www.microfocus.com/ppm
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