By: Ajit Mishra

In our attempt to review PPM Tools, today, lets focus on one of the prominent PPM products available in the market. It is HP PPM (Formerly called Mercury ITG, Kintana). HP is a leader in the project portfolio management (PPM) market, offering across-the-board robust functionality. With the acquisition of Mercury Interactive, the company built its PPM product suite around the integration of two powerful solutions — its own OpenView IT service management software and Mercury's portfolio governance offering. The integration of Mercury into HP's Business Technology Optimization (BTO) software offering makes the vendor particularly well positioned to offer an integrated IT management (IIM) solution. Although HP cannot publicly disclose employee headcounts, they dedicate a very significant percentage of their resources to PPM.

How HP PPM Portfolio Management works?

HP PPM Portfolio Management provides the processes, entities and analysis for managing your IT portfolio. Quantitative information, such as financial budgets, resources and schedules, along with qualitative information, such as strategic fit, alignment and complexity, is collected for apples-to-apples comparisons across “What-if” scenarios.

HP PPM Portfolio Management “what-if” scenarios let you analyze your portfolio and assess the business contribution of each proposal, project or application to the entire portfolio. the portfolio. Automated processes enforce when information is required, so that information is available and consistent across pending or proposed projects, active projects and production applications. And instead of manual data entry or expensive integration, a portfolio status flows seamlessly in real time from an IT transaction system for both project information and operational activities. Your CIO and portfolio decision makers frequently see the portfolio’s real-time status and get immediate access to detailed information for decision making.

Key features and benefits

• Real-time management: captures real-time IT status automatically, so that accurate, up-to-date information is frequently available for difficult portfolio decisions
• Enforced, automated processes: governs the entire portfolio lifecycle from proposal initiation, justification and review to project initiation, execution, deployment and benefits realization
• What-if scenario planning: automatically or manually creates an optimal mix of projects, proposals and assets to meet your organization’s goals by modeling unlimited scenarios
• Improved IT guidance: aligns your IT portfolio to support your business strategy

Strengths:

• Stood Number one PPM tool in Magic Quadrant for IT Project and Portfolio Management, 2007
• Former corporate and financial viability issues that plagued Mercury have been washed away by HP's acquisition of the company.
• In marketing its acquired PPM product into the HP installed base, HP may be able to employ such tactics as discounts in broader deals to leverage existing relationships.
• Enhanced resource handling and project scheduling capabilities in a product not known for its strength in these areas were delivered in the latest version of the HP Project and Portfolio Management Center.
• PPM's position in the HP product line, along with such complementary products as Quality Center and HP Service Management Center, have enabled it to begin realizing an ITPC vision.

Overall, HP Software's Project and Portfolio Management Center:

• Provides your PMO with visibility into strategic and operational demand as well as in-flight projects and programs
• Offers top-down planning capabilities that are supported with bottom-up detailed project plans
• Helps your IT organization quickly adapt to unforeseen changes and still maintain alignment with business objectives
• Enables execution of work in a manner that delivers business results

Enhances visibility and enable controls to maintain compliance Products in Project and Portfolio Management Center are:

Product Name:

HP Deployment Management moduleOrganizations can accelerate the deployment of changes to their applications portfolio using HP Deployment Management software. LegacyLegacy Name: Mercury Deployment Management

Product Name: HP Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Demand Management moduleOrganizations can consolidate, prioritize and fulfill routine and strategic demands placed on IT using HP PPM Demand Management software.Legacy Name: Mercury Demand Management

Product Name: HP Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Financial Management moduleOrganizations can manage their IT portfolio with real-time visibility into financial performance using HP PPM Legacy Name: Financial Management software.Legacy Name: Mercury Financial Management

Product Name: HP Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Portfolio Management moduleOrganizations can govern their entire portfolio of IT projects, application, and opportunities in real-time using HP Portfolio Management software.Legacy Name: Mercury Portfolio Management

Product Name:

HP Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Program Management moduleOrganizations can collaboratively manage programs from concept to completion using HP PPM Program Management software.Legacy Name: Mercury Program Management

Product Name: HP Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Project Management moduleOrganizations can integrate project management and process control to reduce project complexity and reduce costs using HP Project Management software.Legacy Name: Mercury Project Management

Product Name:

HP Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Resource Management moduleOrganizations can effectively manage resource capacity and allocation using HP PPM Resource Management software.Legacy Name: Mercury Resource Management

Product Name: HP Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Time Management moduleOrganizations gain real-time visibility into the dynamic relationships between applications and the IT infrastructure using HP PPM Time Management software.Legacy Name: Mercury Time Management

Cautions:

Although opportunity abounds, HP's acquisition of Mercury is still being sorted out, and HP has yet to demonstrate a long-term commitment to PPM as a market category. In a fast-growth market, leaders like HP may face greater than average staff challenges in post-sales through customer service and post-implementation support. HPPPM comes up with a huge price tag that many organization may not afford to even think of buying except those who have a huge budget alllocated for IT Governance!!

Weaknesses, Comparison with other PPM Tools, Pricing Informations:

This section is available on request and we are not publishing keeping the product vendor's interest. However, independent reviews, price comparisons & potential buying/implementation risks can be availed upon a request to epmguru@epmguru.com

Reference: vivid, hp

Also read What is HPPPM? (HP Project and Portfolio Management Solution)