Guide

Guidelines to eliminate the PMO information scavenger hunt

Being responsible for the smooth running of all business projects, the Project

Management Office (PMO) is often the linchpin of any successful organization.

The department doesn’t just have their fingers in multiple pies, they ensure

that all the pies are exactly what the customer ordered – prepared efficiently,

cooked to a high standard and delivered on budget and on time.

To perform their job to the best of their ability, the PMO needs to be

omniscient and have a clear and in-depth understanding of the company’s

entire project portfolio. Critical to achieving this high level of visibility is having

unfettered access to all data from the teams and tools involved in a project.

Through this information, a PMO can accurately build a real-time picture of a

project’s status to greatly improve and inform decision-making.

This end-to-end visibility and traceability throughout the workflow enables

them to make important decisions on a range of matters such as resource

capacity, labor headcount, project budgeting, portfolio performance and IT

strategy. And of course, project managers heavily rely on PMOs for a holistic

overview of the project portfolio, as well as key insights throughout the

product’s journey from concept to delivery.

Obtaining such data can be a very time-consuming and cumbersome task for

a PMO, especially when the data is siloed across teams and tools. Without an

intuitive system to gather the valuable information from these different tools

and store it in one place, they have to spend many hours on a laborious

scavenger hunt chasing down reports from individual teams, logging into

various tools, duplicating data and merging spreadsheets.

A connected software lifecycle is the best way to capture and share all this

cross-team, cross-organization information and enhance collaboration.

Without a linked software workflow, communication between teams breaks

down and a PMO is faced with an almost impossible job, as well as being

undermined by a work methodology that is not conducive with a modern

operation that applies agile and DevOps principles.

And as the below statistics demonstrate, business suffers greatly as a result:

On average, a 1/6 IT project costs overrun by a staggering 200%1

US economy loses $50-$150 billion per year due to failed IT projects2

75% of IT executives believe their projects are doomed from the start3

COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN It’s absolutely vital that everyone across the software development lifecycle

(SDLC) is on the same page. This statement may sound obvious but you would

be surprised to learn how big and how common an issue miscommunication

is a common issue faced by many organizations, especially when IT

infrastructures begin to scale. A study by Project Management Institute found

1 Project Management Institute: Pulse of the Profession 20152 Accenture, Digital Density Index – Guiding Digital Transformation, 20153 Accenture, Digital Density Index – Guiding Digital Transformation, 2015

Introduction

that ineffective communication is the primary contributor to project failure one third of the

time, and has a negative impact on project success more than half the time4.

Even with the technological advancements in software tools to help employees work more

effectively – from managing schedules to internal communication to improving how they do

their job – disconnects still regularly occur between teams. Sometimes down to human error,

sometimes down to no connectivity between tools, sometimes a combination of the two.

Teams typically work in their own best-of-breed tool to enable them to do their job more

effectively i.e. a project manager may use CA PPM (Clarity), a developer may use JIRA and

a tester may use HPE QC. While these tools equip teams with the functionality that they

need, it also means that vital information may not be shared across the value chain. Most

individual tools have their own reporting capability but they don’t tend to include upstream

and downstream data (without significant manual effort to consolidate).

What this means is that between what a customer requests and the product’s delivery, a lot

of assumptions have been made and requirements misinterpreted, meaning the customer

doesn’t receive what they asked for. The below diagram demonstrates this clearly:

4 Project Management Institute, The Essential Role of Communications, 2013

* Source: www.projectcartoon.com - ‘How projects really work’

You can see why it’s so important to tie activities together when we take a

closer look at the delivery chain from start to finish. There are two key areas

across the workflow to consider:

Demand capture: clearly identify what the customer requires – in their

own words – to lay foundations for an accurate collaboration and to

ensure seamless elicitation.

Requirement traceability: take the business demand and decompose it

into specific measurable features that can be tested, validated and then

delivered.

The capability to track defects back to the feature is instrumental in delivering

what the customer asked for. By connecting demand capture with requirement

traceability, a project manager is able to track activities to ensure the right

product is being created. They can also spot any potential bottlenecks and

keep testers informed in order to optimize quality assurance.

Going one step further, it’s important to consider the software architecture

and the data flow between tools. Ask yourself:

What tools are involved and touched during the project?

Where are the data depositories and where is key information stored?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you begin to clarify how you will

connect the datasets across the workflow.

THE BENEFITS OF SLI IN ACTIONTo illustrate how a connected lifecycle can enhance your business processes,

let’s imagine a typical organization’s value chain. There are three characters in

this story:

Name: Paul

Role: Project Manager

System: CA Clarity PPM

Responsibilities: Accountable for capturing the needs

of business and delivery of projects.

Name: Betty

Role: Business Analyst and Developer

System: JIRA

Responsibilities: Takes features, breaks them down into

user stories and tasks, makes necessary product changes.

Name: Quinn

Role: Tester

System: HP ALM

Responsibilities: Takes requirements, builds test cases,

execute tests, passes on defects to Betty to be tested.

As you can see, all three of them work in their own best-of-breed tool.

However, these tools do not talk to each other, meaning Paul has to spend a lot

of time and effort to pull together a project’s status before he can manage and

address any issues.

In an ideal world, Paul would be able to gather information from JIRA and HP

ALM without leaving his tool. With Tasktop, he can do just that:

Tasktop integrates CA PPM (Clarity), JIRA and HPE QC, enabling Paul, Betty

and Quinn to see any changes or actions required across the lifecycle. With

PROJECT MANAGERPAUL BUSINESS ANALYST & DEVELOPER

BETTY

TESTERQUINN

Using CA Clarity PPM, Paul is able to capture business needs and track the project, including costs, risks, labor resources and time management, as well as create a feature for Betty to begin project development.

In Jira, Betty sees the feature and can break them down into user stories and tasks before assigning work to developers, as well as making product changes herself.

Through HP ALM, Quinn will receive requirements from Betty and other developers, build and execute test cases and flag any defects to Betty so the necessary fixes can be made. Back in CA Clarity PPM, Paul is automatically notified of the project status.

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everything connected and communicating with each other, he possesses the end-to-end

visibility required to make key decisions that will affect the success of the organization.

Do you resonate with Paul and want to know more? Contact us today to discuss how

Tasktop can dramatically improve the way your PMO and organization operates.

After a discussion about your software development and delivery workflow, we can then

provide you with a Software Lifecycle Architecture map that is tailored to your business:

For a more in-depth look at this topic, please check out our webinar of the same name.

To learn more about how Tasktop can help your business email us at: info@tasktop.com or call us at: +1 778-588-6896

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