Project Delivery On-Demand- an innovative model to streamline IT processes

November 9, 2009

There has never been a time where a foot forward in business has been more vital. Efficiency is most certainly the key to maintaining a successful business, and through the use of IT solutions, project portfolio management, a key component in business, can be made easy.

For the data center manager dealing with budget cuts, IT process improvement projects can get derailed for being too expensive or of lesser importance.  Additionally as a result of a down economy, IT budgets are being slashed, with the predictability that heads have been cut and non-critical projects have been put on hold or cancelled. In this environment, some management teams have elected to cut funding for process improvement initiatives, including IT project and portfolio management services efforts, which can place them at a disadvantage both during the downturn and especially during the recovery.

What management needs to understand is that having effective and efficient processes aids IT during a downturn and readies organizations for when the economy improves. Efficient and effective processes are needed not just to control costs and risks, but also for IT to consistently deliver services that meet the needs of the business now and in the future.  

The fundamental doctrine of PPM such as visibility and centralization of data will continue to drive value, but there is a new trend is emerging as PPM transitions from powerful concept to real-world practice.

PPM applications have fundamentally altered the project landscape. By integrating project information in one place, PPM changes how organizations approve, plan and deliver projects. From a bottom line perspective, PPM enables organizations to improve their return on project investments.

Project Consulting Group (PCG), a Minneapolis-based project and portfolio management consulting firms, has found that SaaS continues to move from interesting to viable to a competitive threat.  PPM solutions are ideally suited to run as SaaS applications.  There are several reasons why SaaS is so well suited for PPM, including rapid deployment; team collaboration; reduced risk of failure; tighter vendor/customer relationships; reduced cost of implementation and support. But perhaps the biggest reason is the rapid innovation cycle. It's at least twice as fast to deliver innovations to customers in a SaaS model, and as a result PPM using a SaaS model is evolving rapidly.

PCG found that PPM as a SaaS solution has allowed for a new trend to emerge where there is no risk involved for the user.  It embraces new methodology that results in PPM with no risk and is allowing organizations large and small to resume their IT projects that have been put on hold or eliminated entirely due to budget constraints and simply just not having enough sustainable funding. 

The deployment of PPM as a SaaS application can be one alternative to leverage an organization’s resource constraints because Saas solutions have little to no technical implementation (servers, data bases, etc) and get up and running in next to no time.  With a PPM Saas application, the provisioning of new hardware and software is incremental and highly efficient, and means that there will be less overhead to support a customer. Perhaps even more importantly, the human resources required to implement and run any PPM Saas application would already in place, trained and could be leveraged. What this translates to is that once you decide to implement, the entire technical aspect of the implementation should take just a few minutes.  Additionally with a no risk model, the responsibility of funding the IT project falls on the service provider with payback over an extended period.

A key factor in the success of any comprehensive IT project is making sure the project teams work well together. There are many different levels of team collaboration. There are big teams that are broken up into smaller teams; then there are teams that cross boundaries within organizations; and lastly there are teams that cross boundaries across organizations. And it is a well established fact that communication is one of the core factors of project success or failure. SaaS applications are designed from scratch to operate securely over the web, which means that teams within and across different organizational boundaries can easily access the PPM applications and information from anywhere at any time.

SaaS implementations involve virtually no technical component to the implementation, minimizing any risks.  However the technical aspect of any software implementation is only part of the risk. Two other big risk areas are in business process change and end user adoption. SaaS applications are designed to be highly configurable, which makes them more adaptive to the needs of unique business processes. In other words, users don't have to write code to automate business processes. Finally, the SaaS business model depends on end user adoption for financial success. That translates into a laser focus on the user experience, which in turn leads to greater adoption.

PCG understands that while the economy has limited many companies’ financial ability to invest in IT, most are still charged with cutting costs and doing more with less.

PPM is becoming an increasingly obvious choice for organizations faced with shrinking budgets and customers that demand more for their investments.  PPM enables the process of aligning project portfolios with strategic objectives, so that companies will be able to react more easily to rapidly changing competitive environments.  At the same time, IT can be seen as an agent for positive change and not simply a cost center.

PCG also sees companies today adopting an innovative model to streamline IT processes called Project Delivery On-Demand. The model is designed to deliver a range of PPM implementation options which dramatically reduce investment risk and overcome budget constraints associated with getting started and achieving the highest quality, quantitative PPM decision making capability.

Project Delivery On-Demand is considered a comprehensive outsourcing service model that provides a proven framework for assimilating people, process, technology and culture resulting in cost reductions and an improved capability to execute on strategic growth objectives.

The need to achieve a cost savings has historically been a key factor in outsourcing any peripheral service or capability. In addition, outsourcing enables an organization to focus its limited resources on its primary activities.  Traditional "on premise" PPM applications are expensive and they consume valuable resources. Upfront license fees can be substantial, and the costs of implementation, support and upgrades can be daunting. Implementing Project Delivery On-Demand and offering the PPM as a SaaS application is not only less expensive; it allows organizations to focus their limited resources on more pressing objectives.

PPM has emerged in recent years as a next generation practice that builds on the disciplines of project management and program management. With an enterprise wide perspective, PPM incorporates other techniques and practices and fundamentally changes the ability of an organization to manage projects as investments that should have a predictable return. This new discipline requires a new set of tools and technologies, technologies that are leveraging SaaS as a delivery model for PPM.  Additionally it seems that innovation cycles are accelerated, which means that PPM capabilities are improving at rate that is significantly faster than traditional on-premise delivered software.