Requirements Management & Analysis

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SaaS (Software as a Service) Based Tools Lower The Barrier To PPM (Project Portfolio Management) Success

Submitted by Hans Lodder on Thu, 01/05/2008 - 07:43

Forrester gives much attention to Project Portfolio Management (PPM) tools. They observed that a PPM implementation provides the Corporate Information Officer (CIO) with means to do more for less: A higher productivity and better allocation of the precious budget.

PPM tools now evolve from a spreadsheet to dedicated tools. This has an impact on cost and implementation. Adoption of PPM in a SaaS form provides PPM with the usual SaaS advantages:

  • Lower cost;
  • Faster implementation;
  • Quicker time to market;
  • No need for infrastructure investments nor maintenance cost;
  • Lower risk of adoption failure.

So PPM in SaaS form is the answer. Or is it? Let us inspect this statement. Implementation of PPM requires 3 ingredients:

  1. Tools;
  2. People;
  3. Approach.

A SaaS form helps you obviously with the first step. You still need trained and coached people with the right competences, and you still need an implementation approach with a proper program. What the SaaS form actually brings you as a 'hidden' advantage is standardization and thus a cheaper and faster implementation. Perhaps this should be the 'lesson learned' from this: As we learned in our analysis course in 1980: If you want to automate some task take these 3 steps:

  1. Formalize.
  2. Standardize.
  3. Generalize.

Because gentlemen (not to many ladies around in the course), the best thing to automate is not to have to automate it at all!

What are your thoughts about SaaS? Contact Hans Lodder at Requirements-Management.nl.

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