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PPM Insights: Surviving-to-Thriving, Let's Upgrade 2017 Together

By Anon Anon posted Jan 02, 2017 10:56 AM

  

It has been an eventful year for PPM Practitioners: for me, it started by transitioning from a CA PPM and Agile customer to a CA Services Architect. Having initially chosen and implemented CA PPM (then Clarity) at my former employer in 2008, I was proud that before leaving the company, I led the efforts to upgrade to the latest release, as well as enable some cutting edge and insightful project dashboards. As many of you have experienced, it is so rewarding to watch the maturity of processes and systems within an organization – truly seeing the outcomes delivered!

 

Now that I’m at CA, I can focus on CA PPM even more. In this post, I’ll look back on what I consider 2016 highlights and preview some of my future content. I usually don’t schedule topics too far ahead, as I prefer to focus on what I see in the field at any given moment, but after talking with so many clients at CA World, I’m brimming with hot topics.

 

First, the excitement around the latest CA PPM release and its new user experience has been strong, and I’ve already implemented three upgrades. A couple of months ago, when the new release was announced, I published two posts, focusing on why I believe customers will find value in the release. I’m now witnessing that value firsthand. For more intel, check out those posts:

 

PPM Insights: Surviving-to-Thriving, New CA PPM 15.1 Functionality Improves User Adoption and Builds Business Value (part 1)

PPM Insights: Surviving-to-Thriving, New CA PPM 15.1 Functionality Improves User Adoption and Builds Business Value (part 2)

 

I always keep in mind that in addition to processes and software, people acting as advocates—people like you and me—are the keys to value enablement for our organizations. Speaking of advocates, I would like to announce that I have a new CA Services blogging partner, Janet Ulrich! She will introduce herself in an upcoming blog.

 

As a customer and now as an Architect, I value artifacts such as whitepapers, Community discussions, posted presentations, etc. Knowing you will also find value in them, Janet and I will direct you to what we believe are the most useful tools available to the community. Here’s a quick preview: Some of you may not be aware of the additional functionality available in our Packaged Work Products (PWPs). You can find more details here.

 

 

In 2017, I will also start a multi-part column on Resource Management, a consistently compelling topic because when it’s done wrong, it causes "pain" throughout the solution, and when done right, it generates a lot of value. At CA World, we previewed some very advanced system updates that will make Resource Management even simpler, and I will discuss process, policy, cadence and health measurements that leverage existing and upcoming functionalities.

 

Access to the latest software releases is important for several reasons, including capability enhancements, advanced reporting and support, but equally indispensable to success is a community of experts working and building maturity together. When I was a CA customer, the goal of half of my PPM projects was to increase functionality—Portfolio and Financial Management, technical upgrades and KPI dashboards . . . The other half were all about simplification of usability, and adoption. In my experience on both sides of the fence, working together as a community of experts to align tools to streamlined use cases is the difference between surviving and thriving.

 

Finally, looking back on this year, I am a bit nostalgic, so below is a link to the presentation that I gave at CA World as a customer a few years ago. Some of the topics I have discussed in previous posts, but in my customer interactions, we continue to come back to many of the themes, and I have seen them resonate with my fellow Practitioners:

 

 

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. 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.

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