TECHNOLOGY AUDIT
IBM Rational PPM Suite
IBM
SUMMARY
IMPACT
The portfolio-based management of business projects has become a corporate necessity as modern organizations become increasingly subject to a variety of pressures and constraints. Portfolio management tools are targeted at organizations that need to “do more with less” and keep pace with increasing business demands for greater corporate agility and rapid business change and the increasing demands of governance and compliance. The IBM Rational Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Suite delivers against these needs through the combination of four separate but integrated Rational solutions: Rational Focal Point 6.4, Rational Project Conductor 1.0, Rational Team Concert 2.0, and Rational Insight 1.0 to deliver capabilities to portfolio-manage projects, products, services, and applications.
Four integrated solutions that combine to make an enterprise-level portfolio management offering.
Organizations can reconcile corporate strategy and critical resources to facilitate betterdecision-making for strategies, projects, products, applications, and IT services.
KEY FINDINGS
Strengths:
Integrated suite of portfolio management functions.
True extension of portfolio management to the project-team level.
Supports different flavors of portfolio management via configurations. Weaknesses:
There are mixed architectures in the suite.
IBM Rational is operating in a crowded portfolio management vendor marketplace. Key Facts:i
Can be implemented in its entirety or in combinations of individual components.OVUM VIEW
The IBM Rational PPM Suite is made up of four integrated solutions that combine to make the suite an enterprise-level portfolio management offering that enables organizations to reconcile corporate strategy and critical resources (human and financial) to facilitate better decision-making for strategies, projects, products, applications, and IT services. The suite is engineered to support the IBM Rational PPM value proposition of:
Driving strategic change with project portfolios.
Increasing flexibility and maturity in software and systems delivery.
Product management.The IBM Rational PPM suite can be implemented in its entirety or in combinations of individual components. IBM says this enables customers to avoid lengthy and complex projects that try to deploy monolithic PPM applications that impact a high percentage of the IT community simultaneously. By breaking down the problem, customers are able to focus on high-value process areas while constraining costs and limiting the impact of change. A key feature of the suite is that the portfolio management capabilities are integrated with IBM’s new-generation software development lifecycle tools that provide end-to-end process support. The project plans and activities of project teams can therefore be tightly coupled to provide more accurate project schedules and forecasts.
IBM previously offered Rational Portfolio Manager (RPM) as a comprehensive solution for project and portfolio management. It included capabilities for portfolio analysis and planning, financial management of IT investments, resource management, process management, and project management and tracking. The core of its replacement, Rational Focal Point, comes from its acquisition of Telelogic. It is designed for business leaders to support top-down decision making, while Rational Project Conductor and Team Concert are used by teams to manage work and report progress. Rational Insight provides dashboards and measures for transparency into and control of risks, status, and trends to all business stakeholders. As a complete solution, the suite allows for a product/service and architecture view of the portfolio, as well as a traditional project view. This enables organizations to understand how their project portfolio is supporting changing business requirements and new capabilities required for business applications, products, or services.
IBM has a very strong vision for what it terms “true” enterprise-level portfolio management, and it is very aware of and vocal about the pitfalls that cause many portfolio management implementations to fail. These are often project management office (PMO)-driven implementations where the emphasis ends up being a bottom-up rather than top-down approach to portfolio management – (the proverbial “tail wagging the dog”) that can make PPM technology appear little more than a glorified timesheet system.
Recommendations
The IBM Rational PPM Suite should be considered by any enterprise-level organization that needs to reconcile corporate strategy and critical resources (human and financial) to facilitate better decision-making for strategies and project, product, IT service, and application management.
The third-party-delivered SaaS version of the IBM Rational PPM Suite is valid for smaller enterprises or those that want a low-risk introduction to portfolio management.
Individual components of the IBM Rational PPM Suite deployed in isolation will be beneficial to organizations that have already invested in Rational products.
IBM’s approach to PPM is suitable for organizations that are struggling to identify value from existing, possibly PMO-driven, portfolio management adoptions.FUNCTIONALITY
SOLUTION OVERVIEW
The IBM Rational PPM Suite is made up of four solutions: Rational Focal Point, Rational Project Conductor, Rational Team Concert, and Rational Insight. Using the capabilities of the suite, organizations are able to achieve a number of portfolio management goals, including:
Measuring cost, benefits, and the impact of risk.
Working within financial resources and time constraints.
Operating a process of continuous portfolio-adjustment and optimization.
Connecting business value to delivery outcomes.IBM Rational Focal Point: helps organizations to make the right investment decisions to deliver business, customer, and market value. Specific capabilities include capturing inputs from stakeholders and prioritizing those that will provide the most business value; visualization, prioritization, and road-mapping and planning capabilities that can help ensure that plans are a balanced mix of innovative, valuable, and achievable; centralizing the storage and availability of information key to decision-making, status reporting, and portfolio reviews (escaping the information islands caused by the storage of data in emails, documents, and spreadsheets to help speed the organization’s ability to respond to changing market and business conditions); reducing risk and improving cost estimations by modeling financial and business impacts, and by performing scenario, statistical, and financial analysis; and integrating enterprise architecture plans and project execution into portfolio management to ensure enterprise and project-level decisions are aligned with financial and business needs.
IBM Rational Project Conductor: is a collaborative project and resource-management solution aimed at improving project delivery. It is designed to help teams adapt to continuous change through an integrated approach to lifecycle execution through process support. IBM lists some of its key benefits as reducing delays and mistakes through real-time “in-context” collaboration across disciplines or the entire application lifecycle; guiding teams on best-practice processes for increased consistency and predictability; increased visibility to manage and optimize project execution; the ability to continually validate cost, scope, benefits, and risks; enhanced governance through project accountability; and improved decision-making through integrated project management.
IBM Rational Team Concert: is an agile collaborative development environment that provides flexible planning, source-code management, work-item management, build management, and project health capabilities, along with integrated reporting and process support. Team Concert can be implemented in either a unified or modular way to connect geographically dispersed development teams and help them increase individual and team productivity, compress development cycles, and rapidly deliver high-quality software. IBM says key benefits of the solution include building better software by enabling and accelerating full agile practice coverage from work inception through to planning, development, and building of business applications; supporting geographically distributed teams through features such as communication-in-context, event feeds, integrated chat, and automated traceability; and the potential for a lower TCO for development by exploiting a common scalable infrastructure that provides common processes and security with open integrations and services.
IBM Rational Insight: offers organizations measurement best practices to help reduce the time to market, improve quality, and take greater control of software and systems development and delivery. It provides dashboards and measures for transparency of and control of risks, status, and trends, allowing for corrective actions where necessary. It can automate the collection, measurement, and analysis of real-time data, reducing errors and providing more complete information for informed decision-making. Measures and metrics can be tailored to specific roles to provide visibility into relevant data across projects, products, and geographical boundaries. IBM says Rational Insight also allows organizations to assess, measure, and improve results with continual process improvement with the adoption of best-practice frameworks.
Figure 1: IBM Rational PPM Suite in the context of the Rational product portfolio
Source: IBM O V U M
All of Rational’s PPM tools, with the exception of Focal Point, are based on the Jazz architecture. This allows data to be shared between lifecycle applications such as requirements management, testing, project management, and change management (see Figure 1) to ensure the seamless collaboration across the end-to-end software-development lifecycle. The architecture also allows for access via browser, Eclipse, and visual studio-based tools as well as being extensible through the open services for lifecycle collaboration interface (OSLC).
SOLUTION ANALYSIS
IBM Rational Focal Point
Rational Focal Point v6.4, released in December 2009, is designed to elicit, analyze, prioritize, and plan demands according to business value to allow organizations to make value-based decisions. It can improve investment visibility by enabling organizations to manage and monitor software and systems projects, IT services, and products as investments. IBM provides different configurations for the various flavors of portfolio management, and information can be compared across individual use cases. This holistic approach can help to ensure that an organization’s total portfolio is aligned with both business and market needs by making value-based selection and trade-offs based on changing demands.
Rational Focal Point software provides an organization with the insight it needs to manage the entire development and delivery lifecycle from ideas to retirement (see Figure 2). It supports consistent decision-making by enabling organizations to capture and prioritize business and marketplace needs in a central web-based repository using input from customers and internal stakeholders along with marketplace research. It bridges the gap between the business and development by centralizing information that is key to decision-making, status reporting, and portfolio reviews. It also automates tactical activities such as request capture and can therefore provide consistency and an audit trail to the evaluation and approval processes.
Figure 2:
Source: IBM O V U M
Rational Focal Point helps organizations to execute their investment decisions via integration with project management applications, allowing work items to be scoped and prioritized in alignment with key stakeholder requirements to ensure a value-driven execution. There are also integrations with IBM Rational System Architect software, allowing organizations to support their enterprise architecture initiative, and Rational DOORS to deliver comprehensive requirements management capabilities. It delivers visualization, prioritization, roadmapping, and planning capabilities to help organizations assess the effect of their decisions and create plans that are achievable, value-based, and balanced against internal constraints on resources.
In terms of more granular capabilities it offers business-case planning and follow-up, high-level resource planning, the ability to manage through score cards and stage gates, and allows customers, communities, and internal stakeholders to vote on the value of features or products for selection/prioritization for which pair-wise comparison is a popular method.
IBM Rational Project Conductor
Rational Project Conductor v1.0, released in November 2009, is designed to help organizations better manage projects using web-based collaborative project management capabilities. The solution offers automated workflows, deliverable transparency, and built-in process awareness to help ensure that teams are functioning at peak productivity levels. Its seamless “in-context” collaboration with Jazz-enabled social networking can be leveraged to reduce delays and avoid mistakes. Rational Project Conductor also provides guidance for project teams with best practices and processes to help increase consistency and predictability, supporting both traditional and agile methodologies and best practices. Project management performance is enabled by strong reporting capabilities with real-time deliverable-driven progress and quality measurements based on the actual work performed (the team’s artefacts) or what IBM calls “development intelligence”.
IBM Rational Team Concert
Rational Team Concert was the first product to be built on IBM’s Jazz server-side collaboration platform. It is a tool for collaborative development that mainly maps to three traditional application lifecycle management (ALM) segments: software change and configuration management (SCCM), build and deploy (including continuous integration), and project reporting. However, it is the complete integration of these functions that adds significant productivity benefits such as tracing work items across the lifecycle and facilitating collaborative work, particularly for distributed teams.
IBM positions Rational Team Concert as the foundation element in ALM services for supporting globally distributed project teams to collaborate in real time in the context of their specific roles and within well-defined processes. Given that the scale and volume of projects that are distributed has grown through greater adoption of offshore/nearshore and outsourced work, it is important that developers can download all the necessary artefacts to participate in joint coding or testing. Because all source code resides in a central repository, it is easy for one developer to pick up where another has left off, run a task, and then hand back to the original developer as if they were co-located working on the same workstation. In Ovum’s opinion, this level of collaborative support is necessary in a fast-paced development environment such as agile and other practices.
IBM Rational Insight and Measured Improvement
IBM Rational Insight is built on the IBM Cognos BI platform and can be described as a practical performance-management framework. It can be used to measure, monitor, analyze, and trend project and process performance, accessing data across the entire application lifecycle through the open Jazz architecture. It also offers the automatic collection of data using built-in collectors (from both Rational and third party tools such as HP Quality Center) to complement the built-in library of industry best-practice metrics and dashboards.
Continual process improvement can be used to improve organizational outcomes. Process improvement and best-practice guidance is delivered through the IBM Rational Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF). This offers a structured approach to helping software and systems-delivery teams drive business innovation through measured and continuous process improvement. IBM says MCIF encapsulates its 25 years of experience helping teams to incrementally improve their practice maturity to deliver business results. The MCIF can also help an organization gain competency in the core development practices that most impact business outcomes. Although optimized for agile teams and methods, MCIF can automate the implementation of any method. It is product-independent, but can be supported by IBM Rational Jazz offerings that help teams collaborate, automate, and report more effectively.
Jazz Foundation
The architecture behind all but Rational Focal Point is the Jazz Foundation, a set of team collaboration services designed to provide integrated support for the various tasks of the development lifecycle. It is extensible and scales from small to large team installations, and it also has a Team Process component for tool-supported process guidance. Process specifications are stored in a combination of declarative form and Java code and are compiled and executed, which instantiates the process rules. IBM provides out-of-the-box templates for popular processes, and as developers work with the solutions the appropriate process guidance is provided. A process can be altered even as the project is in progress, such as tightening the code-approval process around release points as a project matures.
The architecture of Jazz is client-server with the server usually running on a secured machine and hosting a set of services and the data repository. Remote clients, which can be browsers or Jazz-supported integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Eclipse, connect to the Jazz server using HTTP. There is also client support for Jazz-specific command-line tools including Ant. Clients are stateless, which means backup is only necessary on the server side.
PRODUCT STRATEGY
As with most PPM solutions the Rational PPM Suite is vertical-agnostic. The installed customer base covers all industry sectors, with strong representation in both telecommunications and financial services. Customer sizes vary significantly from the largest consumer electronics companies and financial institutions to smaller software development companies and managed services providers. IBM has approximately 30,000 seats of Rational Focal Point deployed across between 300 and 400 discrete customers.
The wider IBM sales organization has had little exposure to the Rational PPM suite since the acquisition of Telelogic’s Focal Point product and the release of Rational Product Conductor, and the marketing plans for 2010 are therefore based largely around internal IBM enablement. IBM will then leverage existing customer relationships to increase market awareness and adoption of its PPM offering. Rational PPM tools often replace manual methods that are largely based around spreadsheets and word-processing tools. Further growth is expected by continuing to develop the PPM tools so that they are even more tightly integrated with ALM and IT service management tools as well as providing a continued focus on process maturity and business value management. IBM also plans to enable its strong partner community to gain a larger footprint with its small-to-medium-sized customers, and to leverage the growth of Rational’s Jazz-based ALM-tool adoption to cross-sell to the PPM suite.
IBM’s global presence means it is able to support all worldwide locations through either local resources or central teams. It has a strong presence in North America and Northern Europe, as a result of historic customer demand, but this profile is changing as it continues to enable internal teams worldwide. IBM Rational brand services provide a significant percentage of the deployment capability required to support IBM’s PPM customers. However, if PPM deployments form part of larger change programs, IBM Rational is able to partner with IBM Global Services or with specialist channel partners that operate at a local level. These include Decision Focus in Denmark and ImTech in the UK. The direct channel, supporting enterprise customers, accounts for 75% of revenue with the remaining 25% coming from small-to-medium businesses, served by channel partners. In terms of technology partners, IBM Rational Focal Point integrates with Microsoft Project for the import and export of project plans, and Galorath’s SEER and QSM’s SLIM project tools to improve the cost and resource estimation of projects.
Licensing can be perpetual by named or concurrent/floating user, or term (again by named or concurrent/floating use) negotiated as a part of a wider enterprise licensing agreement. CloudOne, which is based in Chicago, offers IBM Rational technology via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) license model with cloud-based delivery of software from its data center. This can speed up the deployment of IBM Rational solutions with no up-front capital investments for hardware or software, and allows organizations to benefit from a monthly subscription model. It also makes IBM Rational technology easier to deploy and more affordable for small and medium-sized organizations.
For the on-premise version, an entry-level deployment (likely to be a pilot) costs about $20,000 with a 60%-40% software-to-services split. An average deployment to approximately 100 to 200 users costs $100,000 with a 50%-50% software-to-services split. The largest deployments, which are usually part of larger transformation projects, cost between $5 million and $10 million, with a 40%-60% software-to-services split. The next major Rational PPM releases are Focal Point 6.5 and Rational Team Concert 2.0. Both are due toward the end of 2010. IBM’s vision for Rational is to provide tools and techniques to support the business of systems and software delivery. As a result, IBM is focusing on developing capabilities to better support both IT and the embedded systems environments. IBM is also looking to address difficulties that organizations have had with traditional IT PPM tools. Through linking portfolio management more closely with the business of software and systems delivery, it feels that the value of a portfolio management function will increase dramatically by:
Increasing the accuracy of planning and improving an organization’s ability to understand trade-offs.
Allowing better visibility of the outcome of projects, emphasizing a focus on deliverable quality andvalue.
Ensuring improved process adoption and improvement so that organizations become more flexible and able to respond to changing business demands.IMPLEMENTATION
The Rational PPM Suite is most commonly adopted in its premise form. It can also be deployed as on-premise (managed) delivery if part of a larger services contract, or as a hosted (dedicated) delivery in conjunction with partners. IBM also has its own SaaS delivery option on its product roadmap.
In terms of deployment resources, a pilot project takes approximately 10 days using one or two internal FTEs. No specialist skills are required. For a 30-user departmental deployment, three to five internal FTEs with project management, business-case management, and resource-management skills are required for 20 days. For a 500-user enterprise-wide deployment, 10 internal FTEs with program management, project management, business-case management, and resource-management skills are required for 100 days. IBM Rational can include training, consulting, and premium support services in its client engagements where appropriate. A typical professional services-assisted deployment project will include stakeholder analysis, design, configuration, and documentation work followed by a rollout of training, mentoring, and then longer-term user support. The size of the engagement will depend on the customer needs and constraints and this is discussed and agreed early in the customer engagement. The IBM Rational brand services team has many artefacts to accelerate the project and facilitate adoption. These include but are not limited to project plans and documentation, process templates, tool configurations, infrastructure sizing guides, training manuals and materials, and user guides.
Training requirements are dependent on the capabilities being deployed and the roles of the individuals to be trained. Training for team members usually takes less than a day unless they are software developers that want to use broader capabilities within Rational Team Concert such as requirements management, quality management, and software configuration management. Training for project managers is typically in the range of one to two days. This is delivered as part of a deployment project and is always provided using the customer’s specific deployment to allow training to cover how to use Rational’s PPM offering to support the customer’s specific PPM processes.
Post-deployment, IBM offers two levels of support and maintenance. Standard support includes helpdesk via phone, website, and email, as well as software updates for a 12-month period. Support is available 24x7 and 365 days a year and costs approximately 20% of licensing costs. IBM is also able to provide a higher level of support via its Accelerated Value Program where it can partly or fully dedicate members of its support team to an individual customer either within its IBM support center or on the customer site. The cost for this depends on the customer’s needs.
The Rational PPM Suite can run on a variety of platforms including Microsoft Windows Server 2003/8, Linux Red Hat 4.0 or 5.0, Solaris 9 or 10, and AIX 5.3. The application server requirements are IBM WebSphere 6.1.0.23 or 7.0.0.7 and later, or Apache Tomcat 5.5.23. Database server requirements are IBM DB2 Express, Workgroup, or Enterprise Server; Microsoft SQL Server Express or SQL Server (Rational Team Concert and Rational Project Conductor), Oracle 10g Standard or Enterprise Edition, or PostgreSQL 8.1,8.2,8.3 (Focal Point only).
Swedish financial institution
A financial institution headquartered in Sweden and one of the largest banking groups in Scandinavia with over 9 million private customers and more than 500,000 corporate customers, had an existing project portfolio management tool focused exclusively on administrating project proposals and establishing a common repository without support for decision-making, measuring value, or maximizing return on investment. It selected Rational Focal Point for its integrated approach to supporting and automating the collection, revision, analysis, and overview of project information, as well as to enhance overall decision-making. Hundreds of users across the organization now have access to Focal Point, which helps them to propose ideas and follow up on them, with actual market requirements quickly transformed into project proposals focused on business rather than technical aspects.
European telecommunications service provider
A European telecommunications service provider headquartered in the UK with more than 400 staff, 40,000 customers, and a large footprint in the provision of services to the financial services industry, wanted to be a dominant player in the emerging managed services market. It recognized that to achieve this it needed to establish an environment that would help it make the paradigm shift from product to solution/service-centric delivery. The company selected Rational Focal Point to help capture the current service catalogue, product capabilities, customer requirements, and service development plans to define strategies, commit resources, manage dependencies, and outline delivery schedules. It is now benefiting from faster and more accurate decision-making, resulting in improved and timelier product delivery while making better use of internal resources.
Large US manufacturer of industrial products
The architecture and software business unit of a large US manufacturer of industrial products had a strategic initiative to become more agile, nimble, and responsive to market issues and customer needs. Although it had a well-defined process for capturing “voice-of-the-customer” data related to its 1,000 SKUs it lacked the ability to execute the process. It also lacked an automated mechanism to facilitate the collaboration, analysis, and prioritization of data, and could not feed the priority of that data into product requirements definition, planning, or management. The company engaged the IBM Rational Focal Point Team to model an idealized software-development lifecycle process based on IBM Rational Focal Point software that linked voice-of-the-customer data to product-development teams across the enterprise. The client now has a high-level business-case system where multiple stakeholders collaborate and develop business cases for funding projects to identify the highest value projects to pursue and manage risks, manage traceability from prioritized business strategies or use-case scenarios to detailed functional requirements, manage the effect of changes in requirements to feature definitions, and increase the visibility of all requirements and voice-of-the-customer data through the development lifecycle and across all product lines.
Swiss financial services software company Swiss financial services software company
A financial services software company headquartered in Switzerland and a leading provider of banking software systems for the retail, corporate and correspondent, universal, private, Islamic, microfinance, and community banking markets needed to replace its home-grown development systems used for defect tracking, requirements management, and source control. With more than 3,500 employees in 56 offices worldwide and approximately $370 million in revenue in 2009 the company had been growing rapidly for some time, both organically and through acquisitions, and had 43 newly-signed customers and 50 new go-lives in 2009. By leveraging the IBM Rational technology, it gained an integrated solution that helps to reconcile project management activities across the development organization, including over 400 developers and 350 technical support staff. The benefits include ease of use that helps improve documentation through increased entry of work items, greater transparency that helps improve productivity by enabling developers to easily link items and support better-informed decision-making, and a role-based solution that allows the company to reallocate planning responsibilities to team leaders.
A financial services software company headquartered in Switzerland and a leading provider of banking software systems for the retail, corporate and correspondent, universal, private, Islamic, microfinance, and community banking markets needed to replace its home-grown development systems used for defect tracking, requirements management, and source control. With more than 3,500 employees in 56 offices worldwide and approximately $370 million in revenue in 2009 the company had been growing rapidly for some time, both organically and through acquisitions, and had 43 newly-signed customers and 50 new go-lives in 2009. By leveraging the IBM Rational technology, it gained an integrated solution that helps to reconcile project management activities across the development organization, including over 400 developers and 350 technical support staff. The benefits include ease of use that helps improve documentation through increased entry of work items, greater transparency that helps improve productivity by enabling developers to easily link items and support better-informed decision-making, and a role-based solution that allows the company to reallocate planning responsibilities to team leaders.
Table 1: Contact Details
IBM Corp
1 New Orchard Road Armonk New York 10504-1722 USA Tel: 914-499-1900 www.ibm.com
IBM (United Kingdom) Ltd P.O. Box 41
North Harbour Portsmouth PO6 3AU Hampshire UK Tel: +44 (0) 23 92 56 1000 www.ibm.com/uk/en/ Source: IBM O V U M
IBM – IBM Rational PPM Suite Published 10/2010
Headquarters Shirethorn House, 37/43 Prospect Street, Kingston upon Hull, HU2 8PX, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1482 586149 Fax: +44 (0)1482 323577
Australian Sales Office Level 46, Citigroup Building, 2 Park Street, Sydney, NSW, 2000,
Australia
Tel: + 61 (02) 8705 6960 Fax: + 61 (02) 8705 6961
End-user Sales Office (USA) 245 Fifth Avenue,
4th Floor, New York, NY 10016,
USA
Tel: +1 212 652 5302 Fax: +1 212 202 4684
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