I have seen PPM evolve a lot over the period of time i.e. since v7.5 days.
PPM has come a long way, since 9.X on-wards it has shown massive improvements both at user end as well as functional end. We are currently on 9.40 and are soon going to upgrade to 9.41 as well.
Most valuable features of PPM are:-
- The data provided by PPM is trusted and is available almost immediately; without trusted data there is very less scope of any tool to be successful.
- It provides real-time visibility into all the projects, programs and portfolios; it provides critical information at the right time and helps in taking the right decision at right time; decisions such as finances, resources etc can be taken on the go.
- The what-if analysis (Portfolio management) gives the organisations a futuristic view of how well the organisations are going to fare in achieving their business objectives.
- 9.40 has a massive improvements in the Program Management module, gives more comprehensive view of the programs running in the organisation. The timeline feature of the program show real-time status of all the projects.
- Seamless integrations into the Jira, Agile manager, MSP makes it more powerful - 9.41 on-wards it has been more easier than ever.
- Dynamic out of the box portlets and reports are other excellent features. e.g. the ability to view the capacity, demand of resources across the organisation via Analyze Assignment load portlet makes it more substantial.
- Compare to work plan feature is another excellent one that can be harnessed for decision making.
- The ability to track down every single dollar spent in the organisation makes it more powerful i.e. you can track down which project spent how much on which resources doing exactly what. The costs can be further classified either capex (capital) or Opex (Operating).
- Web Services, integrations to other third party tool like SVN (subversion) makes it more skillful. This helps in automating a lot of things if needed.
Certainly we have had good impact in our organisation.
We have explored all the features of the tool.. we mainly use it for managing programs, resources, projects and time. We do explore some features of portfolio management.
Our organisation has been able to do effective forecasting, project delivery, resource management and time tracking with the help of PPM.
- The financial forecasts comes out from PPM.
- The projects are managed in the PPM
- Resources are managed via PPM.
- Actual time tracking is done via PPM.
- We have developed many reports and integrations that has helped the organisation to save time and money, thereby automating a lot of things.