Do your days start like mine, with one challenge after another? Some of you may have to streamline how you get the kids ready for school, others on getting to work on time, and all of us with finding balance and carving out time for a social life. As project professionals, we may be ahead of the rest of the world in how we learn to manage these challenges, but CA PPM can present challenges, too. Just like with our personal lives, knowing how and when to streamline processes makes the difference between starting—and ending—the day with a smile, or with a big headache.
When you’re looking for ways to manage projects and portfolios more efficiently, an intriguing place to begin is to use CA PPM for extracting data from - and integrating data with - other systems. It’s a common practice—in fact, many CA PPM customers have integrated the solution with multiple systems. Here’s the challenge, though: for the integration to work well, an experienced skilled professional must review the environment and take in consideration many variables.
For example, every time a new outbound integration or large-dump extracts are needed in excel, csv, XML or flat delimited files, here are just a few of the many questions that need answers before you can even begin:
- How many process engines exist, and how many pipelines have each one of them?
- How many GEL scripts are running concurrently?
- What JVM is assigned to background service?
- Do I need to split the background service? Do I need an additional one?
- How much data needs to be extracted? In what format? Do I need to serialize the files?
- How much CPU is used? How fast is the script?
- How many days and hours of coding are needed? How much debugging?
- And many, many more…
As you can see, a lot of factors need to be considered so that data is extracted with the right resources, and in a timely fashion, to avoid performance issues. If you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, your day is going to start and end with a big headache, and you’ll be asking yourself, “Why isn’t there a better way?”
Good news! There is. You can use a PPM component—the Data Extraction adaptor—to simplify this process, and it’s so awesome and user friendly that it saves thousands of lines of code, eliminates a lot of the challenges, and reduces the risk of performance issues. Curious? Click here to find out more about this packaged work product (PWP).
But before you do, I will answer what are likely to be your top three questions:
Is it compatible with and supported in SaaS environments?
Yes, it is. In fact, all PWP global delivery components are SaaS compatible and supported.
How user friendly is it?
It requires SQL skills to write queries for extracting data, but the rest is intuitive and very user friendly. Also, the manual is very helpful.
Can I download it from support.ca.com?
No, but you can get it quickly by contacting your CA sales representative or account manager for a quote.
Readers interested in more detail can check out DocOps. I encourage you to participate in the best-in-class site, where you have access to your peers, events and support. You can also reach out to CA Services for information about CA PPM release 15.3 upgrades/implementations and individualized business outcome references and analysis.
What kinds of headaches has data extraction given you? Feel free to post in the comments section of this blog or contact me directly via email and Twitter @aurora_ppm.