OpenText Project and Portfolio Management Reviews

As an administrator in our organization, I use it for provisioning, configuring different request types, workflows, and making adjustments therein; things on the higher-end side. 

As an organization, we use it for project management and defect tracking. 

We also use it for time tracking. That's one of the reasons we rolled it out to the cloud. We are also starting to get into program and portfolio management, which are things we hadn't done in the past.

The first advantage is that it helped us get away from using spreadsheets for time sheets. Also, many of our request processes that used to be paper-based have now been automated. We're also able to automate notifications to users to take away a lot of the busy work that teams were having to do to communicate with each other. And it has definitely helped our cross-team coordination and the handoffs that we have within our processes. It has also assisted with bottlenecking.

In addition, we have an integration with our help desk that allows tickets to be processed on the front end and in PPM in a much easier way than they would be on the help desk side and it allows notifications and SOAP messages to go back and forth between the applications. As a result, it has really streamlined our defect tracking process, and we're really hoping to see the same as we roll out into the future with the program and portfolio management aspects that are new to us.

On top of that, at a high level, it enables us to translate strategic plans into actionable investment strategies. We have our KPIs and business strategies in PPM and that's the way that management moves forward with our portfolios and programs. They are only willing to move forward with projects that line up with our strategic plans. The solution has definitely helped us flush that out. It gives us a place where everybody can see those things and be aware of what our business strategies are. Within our projects, we're able to see the strategies and end goals that are important to the organization. We can actually track which business objectives different projects are adhering to. That's a really cool feature that our management likes.

It gives me one place where I can do pretty much everything. If there is a project or portfolio, or even a request that I'm working on, I have the ability to charge time to each of them in PPM, instead of going through different systems. Even though we have the ability to integrate with Microsoft Project, I really like that PPM offers a one-stop-shop for everything. It saves a lot of time because I'm not going between different places or using paper forms to get information to management.

With PPM allowing us to streamline processes, get them all in one place, and automate handovers and notifications, it saves us between 15 and 20 hours a week on things that we would have otherwise had to do ourselves in emails and other types of coordination. It's made our processes a lot faster.

I have been a developer using this tool since the beginning, working for various clients. All my clients have used all the modules of this product for project management.

PPM helps an organization translate strategic plans into actionable investment strategies. It gives you the correct current picture of how the investments are being utilized and what their current state is. We are looking for the budget against which the money is invested and the actual cost involved. It gives you an end-to-end picture of that and we are happy with that feature.

It has helped us in tracking where money has been spent and the areas where it has not been accurately spent, so we know in which areas improvement is needed.

It gives us the flexibility to set our own goals, business objectives, et cetera, and then align our portfolio or projects along with them. It gives us what we need. That is very important.

I use the tool for resource and financial management. 

The solution helps with tech management. It has a work plan similar to Microsoft Project for tracking progress anywhere. It can synchronize with Microsoft Projects for updating and rebooting tasks. They can also assign tasks to team members who can update progress using timesheets without a sheet. 

It includes a Project dashboard for managing multiple projects simultaneously and program management for overseeing groups of projects. It offers various data metrics. It has project entities for controlling risks, issues, and protections. It can calculate costs based on resource tasks and compare actual and planned costs.

The tool has features for scenario comparison, allowing us to optimize scenarios based on various factors. Additionally, we can manually optimize by managing resource availability, creating staffing profiles, and making payments to optimize in any situation.

We have activated multiple modules of the solution, such as Demand Management, Resource Management, Time Management, and Project Management. We have done some customizations on the workflows for all of the modules.

Project and Portfolio Management has helped us save on resources and time. For example, we had an old solution for demand management in which we need to get approvals via email. But with the Demand Management module in PPM, we have all approvals in the system itself. Over the course of a week, it saves us two working days or about 15 hours. It used to take a lot of time to get approvals through email and on paper.

Overall, it has helped accelerate our organization's delivery by up to 10 percent.

We don't use Micro Focus PPM, but we implement it for our clients. It is primarily used for project management, but some of my customers use it to manage sales processes and service requests. 

Micro Focus PPM helps our customers translate plans into strategic investments. It enables clients to anticipate their needs and mitigate risks. We configure PPM for clients to help them upgrade their workflows and manage their risks. Our customers benefit the most by centralizing their processes. Previously, they did everything using Excel or something like SharePoint. 

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. 

The use cases are mainly around project delivery and managing the whole project control and governance at a project and program level. We are using it for investment management or the whole demand management pipeline prioritization. We also use it for:

• Resource management and capacity and utilization 
• Value and benefits management to assess business cases or initiatives
• Reporting management

So, we use it across the whole life cycle.

PPM provides a single place where our teams can track and measure progress toward their goals. This consolidated view is important for our organization because we are able to see what's coming through the pipeline, what's in-flight, and what's our current resource capacity, as well as the financial burn rate. When it is all in one place, we are able to slice and dice information and look at it in different ways. That helps in the real insight into what's happening. It also helps in shaping our decisions to make sure we achieve the goals and outcomes of the organization.

When you start doing things in a structured way, you get consistent reporting. With that consistent reporting, you get things that are not working properly in a much more time-efficient way, which helps in decision-making to pick up things that are not working as per expectations. Whether it is a project, whether it is a risk, whether it is an issue, or whether it is a financial burn rate, it is all about getting the right visibility at the right time, which helps in the right decision-making to avoid any pitfalls.

PPM’s portfolio management dashboard provides the flexibility to have a list view or even a financial view. It has standard views, and on top of that, we have configured other views based on our needs. The standard views are good to start with, but when we have more information, we want to look at the information in different ways. We can configure dashboards and views, which is a plus point. We're not restricted to just what comes out of the box.

It comes with a Kanban view, which you can configure. It also provides the flexibility to create a backlog by having stage gates. So, we can do backlog management, and we can configure Kanban boards. The good thing about it is that we are able to capture that information. Once we're able to capture that information in a simpler way, then we can report it. What we have seen in some of the tools is that capturing information is not that easy, or they do it a standard way, and that's it. You don't have the flexibility to change them in a certain way or in the way the organization works. PPM allows you to adapt to best practices. Every organization is unique. If that flexibility is there, then you can have best practices along with some of the good things that the organization does. That's where the flexibility of PPM is very good.

Every organization, small and large, uses the whole portfolio structure for the hierarchy or the whole organization model. With the flexibility of having portfolios and sub-portfolios, you're able to model a hierarchy. Once you do that, the roll-up can happen from the bottom, and you can also have a top-down effect. This flexibility is good to come up with a portfolio hierarchy. This capability is good in PPM.

It has been helpful for resource consolidation. It does give us a picture of resource capacity and utilization. It has been absolutely helpful in managing our resources.

It has helped accelerate our organization’s delivery.