OpenText Project and Portfolio Management Reviews

The bank purchased PPM in 2016 because our system was out of support. We decommissioned that and switched to Micro Focus PPM. We have the full suite covering project management, work plans, risk management, and project issues. We've done a lot of customization to the bank's requirements.

We work with a PPM vendor partner and their developers. When we want enhancements or new features, we work with them to deploy the changes. We work closely with the developers for preliminary testing and user acceptance testing. After it goes live, we do another round of testing. 

We do a lot of financials as well. When we work with the project managers to manage their resourcing requirements, it's built into the staffing profile of each project record that we load into PPM. They translate to a labor forecast calculation automatically. The project managers can also manage their forecasts so they can manually update them directly into their project records. 

Before Micro Focus PPM, we had three separate systems. One held project information, another held resourcing requirements, and a third managed timesheets. They weren't integrated, and we had to support each system. Now, everything is in one tool, improving visibility and integration. Dashboard reporting is also easier. We have another tool integrated with PPM that extracts the data from it and refreshes the dashboards instantly. 

PPM helps us translate strategic plans into actionable investment strategies because our executive committee uses it in their investment decisions. Information in PPM can be used to decide which initiatives to prioritize and which to delay based on the bank's strategy. It helps them determine which initiatives require more funding and which need to be trimmed down.

We added a new PPM feature in the last year or two. For each initiative or project loaded into PPM, the project managers must raise what we call "value measures." In these metrics, they need to indicate the actual value being delivered. It's mandatory. The value measures are used for a lot of the assessments being done. If someone asks for a certain amount of project funding, the decision-makers can do a cost-benefit analysis. You must demonstrate the project's estimated value when you ask for funding.

Regarding PPM's ability to help us achieve goals, I would rate it a nine out of ten. All the project and portfolio management features are in one tool. It provides real-time information to support decision-making, and it's easy to integrate with other tools. 

At the bank, some delivery teams do agile while others still do the traditional waterfall. PPM is suitable for both methods. PPM has helped us save resources by consolidating teams. Before PPM, we had three teams providing support for three systems. Now we only have one support team for the tool the entire bank uses. 

Planning and budgeting are vital to achieving our organizational goals. It's a ten on a scale of ten. Our leaders are focused on resourcing because they want to use the funding for projects that matter and are aligned with the bank's strategy. They are looking closely at costs and trying to bring the funding asks for our projects down to a certain amount. 

PPM has sped up project delivery because we have a process where everything has to go through checkpoints. The projects that are delivered are those that have been thoroughly vetted. PPM has helped determine which projects will be delivered. 

I like the automated calculations, especially on the resource side. When project managers enter their resource requirements into their staffing profiles, they are automatically translated into labor forecast calculations. PPM automates a significant portion of the forecast calculations. Timesheets are also built-in. We automatically process time sheets and bill them accordingly. 

PPM provides a consolidated view of our teams and their progress toward goals, which is essential. The bank has invested a considerable amount of funds into these projects. The executive committee must have an overview of the value that these projects bring to the banks. They need to ensure that each project is aligned with the bank's strategy and brings value to our customers, stakeholders, or employees.

All the information decision-makers need can be found in PPM. We've integrated PPM data into other tools that provide real-time reporting to create dashboards. The audience for those dashboards is the executive committee. When they need to know what's happening, they have instant visibility. The bank uses information in PPM to decide on which initiatives to prioritize. PPM has several built-in dashboards, but we also build customized ones.

I haven't worked with the Kanban feature, but we use the other portfolio views. It's helpful, especially now that we are driving the portfolio views. Each portfolio manager uses dashboards to manage the collection of projects in their portfolio. There are many dashboards available that I am still unfamiliar with because I don't use all of them. 

The portfolio structure was set up a long time ago, and PPM allows us to have a wide-lens view of our portfolios, and we can drill down into a specific portfolio and see all the objectives within it. And within each goal, we can also drill down to see particular initiatives that belong to the objective. The hierarchy is quite clear. We also have a portfolio to view financials. 

We have "theme backlogs," initiatives that have already been incorporated into the portfolio but are waiting for the funding to be approved. Theme backlogs have their own project information, including staffing profiles, financial summaries, and forecasts. Those are used in decision-making. There's a consistent quarterly review of these backlogs, and the executive committee uses the information inside those backlogs to decide which ones will proceed through to becoming actual themes.

It's easy to integrate agile tools and synchronize the execution layer back into PPM. I work with the support team providing first-level support to all the bank users end to end. When we need changes or a new feature, we raise them within PPM. That's one customization we did. We submitted our internal change requests within PPM and worked closely with the Micro Focus partner vendor, which does much of the development.

We assess which ones we can do, prioritize them, and they roll out the changes within a month or a few days for a minor change. We do a lot of enhancements. There are at least a couple every quarter. The partner vendor quickly deploys changes and new features. It's one of the features we could "sell" to the internal users of the tool. 

We tell them, "If you find something that you think would be useful that isn't in PPM yet, let us know, and we will place a change request." It's one of the most important features because our users are demanding. They want certain features. Micro Focus regularly rolls out significant upgrades and new features, but we don't necessarily use all of them. 

Our boss is satisfied with PPM, and I don't think the bank will replace it with another product soon. It is constantly evolving, and they have been responsive to our customers' feature and enhancement requests. They often come out with features we had never considered, but when they roll them out, we see how useful they are. That's one reason we are staying with PPM. It's adaptable. We're bringing in other departments and customizing it according to their requirements. 

Sometimes features in PPM don't work as expected, or our users request a new feature. Typically, our partner vendor can deploy those changes. But there have been a few instances when we had to raise it with Micro Focus because it's beyond the ability of our partner vendor. When we raise the issue with Micro Focus, it sometimes takes time because it needs support from other customers using PPM, not just our bank. It goes through a voting system. Other customers need to vote for the feature. The features that get the most votes will possibly be added. 

I have been using PPM since 2016, so it has been six years.

After six years of providing end-to-end support to our users, I can say PPM is highly stable. Our vendor partner addresses bugs quickly, and we can discover the cause if there is an outage.

The scalability is excellent. We have at least 10,000 users working with PPM, including employees who use it for timesheets and project managers. We plan to increase usage. For example, only technology teams use PPM for timesheets, but they plan to get the business project staff to use the timesheet features, too. It hasn't been deployed yet, but it's under discussion. The user base will most likely increase. 

I rate Micro Focus support a nine out of ten. The support we receive from Micro Focus and their partner vendor has been immensely helpful. They're highly responsive, and their partner vendor has a high degree of technical expertise. They understand the product. Each time we have a change, they can perform an analysis and provide recommendations.

Positive

We were experts in the old systems, so it was easy to transition to PPM in terms of understanding the concepts. We know concepts like resource management, staffing profiles, labor forecasting, etc. However, we had difficulty supporting the old system while transitioning into the new one. We needed to understand the technical aspects of the new system, but we didn't have step-by-step training. 

It was just hands-on and going with it and then slowly building up our knowledge about it and us defining the process, which was great because we had control over explaining the process. It's just that it was a bit difficult at the beginning because we needed to get the technical knowledge part, and there wasn't really step-by-step training.

For deployment, we had three people from the vendor and two from our support team. The remaining team members were supporting the old systems at that time. The core team had five people, but there were ten people altogether on the PPM project team. 

The partner vendor developed the tools based on requirements from different departments, including finance and technology teams. The support team was there to understand the technical aspects because we were the ones who brought it to the service center team, and we would eventually provide BAU support. We had to understand the system, the tool, and the features. The project team had a business analyst and project manager coordinating with various departments because we had to include people from the finance and technology teams to define that requirement.

We worked with a Micro Focus partner vendor called BPM. They were highly skilled experts with a lot of technical and process knowledge.

I rate Micro Focus PPM a nine out of ten. To implement PPM, you need a dedicated team to learn and provide support. They need to build knowledge and work hand in hand with the partner vendor. In our case, its configurations and other highly technical aspects stay with a partner vendor because they are the experts. We left the development and configuration to them. Our support team, which I belong to, focuses on the end-user experience, and we support them. 

We act as consultants to the end users. I think that's a good model. If we take on the technical part in-house, we would need to build those technical capabilities again when there are changes within the team, like people leaving or moving to other roles. Instead, we rely on the partner vendor for expertise.