Clarity

I’m very excited to bring you highlights of new PPM and Agile content, hot on the heels of a terrific CA World. This is my second post on the topic, and it will focus on the powerful relationship between CA PPM and CA Agile Central. Please also check out the many CA World presentations about PPM and Agile here:

From my perspective as a PPM and Agile Practitioner, the engaging presentation by Steve Demchuk and Kurt Steinle, who are both CA Technologies Product Management VPs, was very impactful. Steve and Kurt brought to life the journey that companies embark on when they integrate all of their initiatives into a single management platform. This is a new frontier, and I have heard some skepticism, but Steve and Kurt showed us how PPM and Agile work together to create cooperative management solutions that deliver incremental value, rather than competing with each other and reducing relevance. As a quick review, here is the live Periscope that I posted as part of part one of this blog:

Next-gen PPM and Agile management are here to stay. An article by Actuation Consulting, “2015 Study of Product Team Performance,” stated that 45% of organizations choose a bi-modal Waterfall project management/Agile approach to development; and what I find especially insightful is that this number has remained constant for the four years that the study has been conducted. With these thoughts in mind, here are some key takeaways from Steve and Kurt’s presentation, all of which focus on the concept of “better together integration” and echo my assertion in part one of this blog; that PPM and/or Agile Practitioners must stay up to date on the latest opportunities to enable our organizations’ desired outcomes.

The goals of integrating PPM and Agile are to:

• Create useful and practical connection points between work execution and financial accountability.
• Enable each stakeholder to “work where they work.” 
• Create natural touchpoints between funding decisions and the roadmap.
• Provide an out of the box framework on which to build the future.

Here is some content from the presentation that I found especially impactful. The first slide discusses Integration - Mapping Agile Initiative to a PPM Project:

This leads to Integration - Mapping Work Performance and Value:

Next we discuss Understanding Feature Value Delivery. Each feature task in PPM is continually updated with metrics from the Feature in Agile Central:

We move to Team Sync – Feeding the Team from Agile:

CapEx / Opex Learnings are key to this approach:

Engineers can now stay in Agile Central for all work.  They access the PPM timesheet from a menu option in Agile Central.  The PMO gets an integrated time platform with all the controls needed to manage cost allocations across the business, and the team members can remain in the tool they work in; Focus – Keep Engineers in the Context of their Workspaces:

The next few sections show the system. Here we can see Time Keeping Task Template:

Full Featured Labor Accounting in Agile:

Agile Dashboards in PPM:

For readers interested in more detail, CA World content has been published here. I also encourage you to participate in the best-in-class CA Communities site, where you have access to your peers, events and support. If you’ve read my blog series, you know I view community involvement as indispensable to success.

You can also reach out to CA Services for individualized business outcome references and analysis. Feel free to post in the comments section of this blog or contact me directly via email and Twitter @PPMWarrior.