07 November, 2006

Why do we not find yet links between Enterprise Architecture and Project Portfolio Management?

A Project Portfolio Management governance process should start when a business user requests or suggests a new capability. The request is automatically routed to a gatekeeper, then to a business analyst or team for an initial business case before being routed to the operations council and the architecture standards committee for review and scoring.

The business team then evaluates the prioritized, ranked projects to determine the proper portfolio mix and whether to accept the recent request.


Project Portfolio Management is:

• A categorization model
• A common language for business and IT to …
• Support Business strategy
• Organize investments
• Evaluate and prioritize IT projects
• Govern and manage applications portfolio
• Decide when and how to make changes (opportunities)
• Understand what can and can not be changed
• Provide real-time visibility into resources, budgets, costs, programs,
projects, and overall IT demand

• A hedge
• “What if” scenarios enable us to analyze
the portfolio and assess the business
contribution of each proposal, project,
or application to the entire portfolio

• Triggers, Thresholds

The Enterprise Architecture steering committee should be part of this governance process and be able to measure the impact at various level of the architecture:

- What is in the impact in terms of Business Procee
- What is the impact at the information level
- What is the impact at the application level
- And finally what is the impact on the technology

Assuming that a company has an Enterprise Architecture in place and an associated governance, the PPM process should be linked to the first one.

None of the existing solutions related to PPM have considered yet this type of integration. On one side we do have PPM tools such as Mercury ITG (now HP), CA Clarity Niku and on the other side EA platforms such as Mega, Casewise, and Telelogic (Doors can be considered as some sort of Demand/Requirement Management solution but can not be considered as a PPM) among others.

I’m still wondering why a company such as HP has not yet been considering an EA tool integrated with their future PPM product, or even IBM which has a PPM product with rationale but no EA solution neither.

There is a high change that the next wave of acquisition after Service Management and SOA platforms will be Enterprise Architecture tools as this would make sense to deliver a full IT ERP.

4 comments:

James McGovern said...

There are separate tools for application portfolio management which connect to EA...

Anonymous said...

You are quite right, Serge! None of the mentioned tool vendors provide these links. However there is a EAM solution called planningIT from alfabet AG ( www. alfabet.de) in Germany which actually is delivering this bridge between the 2 worlds. One of reasons why non eof the vendors has been able to link between EAM and PPM so far was that the concepts of EAM and PPM products are so different. EAM is "diagramm drive" and PPM is "data and process driven". planningIT is process and data driven as well which is the prerequisite to have an "ERP" for IT.

Unknown said...

Actually, with the purchase of Telelogic (and their EA tool System Architect) by IBM, this might be the first attempt to integrate both EA and PPM. Let's see how IBM will manage this!

Anonymous said...

There are more tools now that provide this bridge. QPR provides a modeling/diagramming/artefect management tool called ProcessGuide (yes, they come from the BPM space) - http://www.qpr.com/enterprise-architecture.htm - that can be linked with their metrics tool. The metrics tool also supports PPM. It comes down to it that objects in the repository (artefacts) can be directly linked with projects in the PPM tool plús the environment delivers a good online collaboration environment.