21st Century CIO

Resource Management 101, Part 1: People and Calendars

  

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By: George Shaheen, Sales Consultant & Product Evangelist at Innotas

So you’ve done it.  You’ve decided you’re going to implement some sort of resource management within your organization to get a handle on what everyone is working on, if your people are doing too much, too little (yeah right), and whether or not it’s relevant to your overarching business objectives.

That’s great!  But what’s the first step?  At Innotas, we believe that begins with building a strong foundation of what kind of capacity you actually have from a people perspective.  In this first part of a three part series, we’ll discuss the foundation upon which you’ll build out your resource management process.

So first, how do we define true capacity?  Here’s a simple equation to figure it out:

True Capacity = (Overall Hours Available) – (Holidays + Administrative Time) – (Out of Office)

Let’s work through each of those pieces.

Overall Hours Available

This is the sum of all hours available for a specified time period (a week, a month, a quarter, etc).  Each person in your organization typically has a set number of hours they work per week (typically 40 for the US).  But this includes part-time, contract, and other types of people in the business.  In order to do this math, you’ll need to capture some key resource profile data:

• Resource Name (John Doe)
• Type of Resource (Employee, Contactor, etc)
• Business Unit (IT, Sales, etc): This is to determine capacity per business unit
• Department (within the Business Unit, are they in development? Are they in sales engineering?): This is to determine, within each business unit, how much time is available in each department.
• Resource Role (Project Manager, Business Analyst, etc): This is to determine capacity per role across departments or business units
• Capacity Hours Per Day/Week/Month (40 hours per week, for example)
• In addition to the above baseline, any other meta data you’d like to use for reporting and filtering purposes

Innotas comes standard with the above fields and provides the capability to add an unlimited number of additional fields for reporting purposes.  We also provide detailed skill profiles, and many other fields for contact and location information.

Holidays + Administrative Time

Now that you’ve documented your people and a few of their attributes, we need to subtract some time for standard corporate holidays and regular administrative overhead.  This can be a painful experience sometimes if there is no bulk way to do it.  In Innotas, we provide corporate calendars (pictured above).  With these you can:

• Create as many corporate calendars as you like (if your company is international, there will be different calendars based on different holidays)
• For each calendar, add exceptions for standard holidays and non-working days (some companies shut down for the last week of the year, for instance)
• Set working hours by day to take administrative overhead into account
• Apply these calendars in a bulk fashion to different groups of resources in your organization

Focus on the Utility Player in IT

  

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By: Kevin Kern, CEO at Innotas

In Baseball, no one knows what to call the player who stashes several gloves in his locker, shows up each day oblivious to where he'll be on the field, if he plays at all.  Is he a utility player, a super-utility player, a super sub, or simply multi-dimensional?  We think a recent article written by PCWorld’s Lucas Mearian supports the point why utility players are so valuable within IT. We think the multi-dimensional tag is appropriate for IT professionals with more than one skill set.  One of the issues that IT organizations are facing today is how to manage not only time of a resource, but how to catalog the various skill sets of each resource so that one can appropriately match time and skill set to project or task. The article points out several examples of how companies invest in training for multi-domain expertise in order to fulfill the incoming demand from the business.  Additional pressures for cross training arise from the increased requirement for well-trained IT professionals.  Simply put the market is hot. Hiring and retaining talent is becoming substantially more difficult.

The role of utility players in baseball requires a special set of attributes: from a physical standpoint, its athleticism, a nose for the ball, and baseball instincts. But perhaps more relevant is the acceptance of the role. Nobody would argue that it’s more comfortable knowing what position you’re playing each time you take the field. IT work is no different because as Bob Dylan writes “the times they are changing.”

If one considers the fast pace at which IT and business move today, it’s almost a requirement that we train, foster, and promote utility skill sets within IT shops. Additionally, tools that support and highlight proficiency levels regarding application expertise, programming language expertise, and business skills will become increasingly more relevant to IT organizations as it pertains to project management. Cost constraints on the business are no different that salary caps in baseball. Hiring specialty players is a luxury in sports, and we submit the same goes for IT.  Players increase their value by developing multiple skill sets and IT should take notice.

Winning teams require teamwork. Utility players typify the notion of teamwork and here at Innotas we continue to build products that support the changing landscape and personnel requirements within IT.

So how many gloves does your IT team stash in their locker?

Pump up your PMO with Project Portfolio Management

  

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By: Joerg Koehler, Director of Marketing at Innotas

According to a recent report from PM Solutions (The State of the PMO 2012), the sheer number of PMOs and their power within an organization has risen dramatically since 2000. 87% of all surveyed companies and organizations (large and small) have a PMO in place in 2012. However, there is a huge difference in results and effectiveness between high and low performing PMOs (see graphic below).

So what do high-performing PMOs do differently than low-performing PMOs? The report and the above chart offer a simple answer for that:

1. High-performing PMOs do a better job at managing project schedules and budgets.
2. They actively engage in resource management, including forecasting, demand and capacity management.
3. And they make sure that they prioritize the projects that deliver the most value to the organization.

Aside from better project management training and consistent PM processes and practices, high-performing PMOs rely heavily on Project Portfolio Management solutions as an enabling technology, which empowers the PMO to effectively manage resources, govern process management, and monitoring of project performance through functionality such as what-if resource scenario planners and dashboards. The latter is one of the top 5 priorities of PMOs in the next 12 months according to the PM Solutions’ report.

We recently interviewed Sara Holmberg, Director of the PMO for the New York State Worker’s Compensation Board, who is one of Innotas’ customers. According to her, Innotas’ cloud-based PPM solution has helped the Boards’ PMO organization to put structure around an existing governance process while implementing extensive dashboards and reporting. As a result, the PMO dramatically reduced the reporting preparation time to the Office for Technology (OFT ) from several weeks to less than a day, which is quite a noteworthy accomplishment (read the full case study here).

As additional reading, we recommend our whitepaper “Project Management Office: Seeing the Whole Picture”. Download it here.

JIRA and Innotas Integration - Common Questions

  

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By: Tim Madewell, SVP Services at Innotas

We’ve received a bunch of questions about our JIRA integration in response to our recent partnership announcement and our webinar with Kyle Miller from JIRA/Atlassian.

Question #1: In the integration, where is request management handled?  If you're getting requests from both JIRA and Innotas, where are they managed?

Answer: It can be configured either way or bi-directional.  Innotas could be the request management approval engine, which sends approved projects or tasks (issues) to JIRA.  Or an issue could be created in JIRA, which could send to Innotas based on data parameters, issue type, or project in JIRA.

Question #2: Can I manage non-software development projects in Innotas that do not use JIRA?

Answer: Innotas PPM has comprehensive project management capabilities. Non-agile projects would be best managed within Innotas. The biggest value of JIRA is directly for agile teams and app maintenance teams that are better served outside a structured project environment.

Question #3: Can you tell me a bit about resource synchronization between JIRA and Innotas?

Answer: Resources are linked by email addresses in the two systems. Resources in Innotas will need to be setup to reflect resources in JIRA if one wants to bring in individual issues into Innotas and see overall resource allocation. This requirement can be automated during the integration process to lookup resources and create a new resource if one does not exist. Resources are separate from licensed users in Innotas, meaning you can have unlimited number of resources setup in Innotas.

In case you missed our webinar with Kyle Miller from JIRA, you can register for an on-demand webcast to watch the webinar at your own time.

For any additional questions about our JIRA integration and partnership, please contact our Partner team at partners@innotas.com.

Healthcare IT: Facing a Flatline.

  

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By: Brian Wilson, VP of Sales / East

Flatline. We all know what it means. The point of no return.  The Healthcare industry may be staring a flatline in the face.  With overwhelming burdens due to legislation, regulation, and an aging population, there are serious problems to solve: the HI-Tech Act, EMR and meaningful use requirements, ICD-10 coding changes, and the Affordable Care Act. The list goes on. Tremendous strain will be placed on IT organizations within healthcare to deliver solutions that will meet these requirements, and the penalties are very real and financial if abdicated. Posit this against a shortage of 55,000 qualified Healthcare IT workers (as estimated in 2011 by Accenture) and an estimated 25 million new “customers” by 2021 and you have a recipe for a real flatline. 

So the stage is set and technology projects will take flight managed by in-demand and expensive practitioners.  How do you manage these massive initiatives and undertakings that must deliver ‘can’t miss’ solutions?  The answer from our perspective is sound IT Governance driven by portfolio management with a focus on execution and delivery. How do you plan, manage, execute, and measure? With IT projects for healthcare at an all time high in terms of relevance, expense, and impact, CIOs are reaching for a mechanism to drive accountability and visibility into these endeavors.

We’ve seen it, the huge uptick in demand from healthcare organizations to get their arms around this hurricane of an IT spend.  Innotas gives these organizations the ability to understand the delivery trajectory of vital initiatives, and how they might impact others against future capacity.  And let’s not forget, these IT projects are really a derivative of business process changes. Whether that’s expanding diagnosis codes by 5X in the case of ICD-10, implementation of EMR systems to reach meaningful use guidelines and prevent penalties from Uncle Sam, or the 15 remaining business process deliverables over the next 30 months in the case of the Affordable Care Act, now CIOs can connect this activity clearly to business processes they support.  When accountability is king, status is the currency – and Innotas can provide.

FedEx for IT

  

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By Brian Wilson, VP of Sales / East at Innotas

Recently, I read an article on the psychology of IT personnel. A few key elements in that article struck me as particularly interesting, and more importantly, true. IT workers are typically very good at interacting with things, primarily technical things.  They’ve been that way since childhood, asking why without caution, and solving problems incessantly. They thrive on discrete components, empirical evidence, and real data to solve complex problems, which often require complex solutions.  As they move into IT management, the challenge for them is to shift their focus from interacting with things to interacting with people – an area that may be out of the core skill set for these gifted people.  It is here where the challenge begins for CIOs, project management offices, and organizations in general.  There is a major difference in this analog world of egos, initiatives, and business outcomes where simple solutions are desired.  Now they’re working in a world of disconnected data points, projects, requests, and tasks coming at them from every direction – a tidal wave of “asks” from a fickle business.  It’s hard to say no when you don’t have the data to show current workloads or point to common priorities.  And then it happens: deliverables are missed, scope creeps become commonplace, timelines slip, and the business becomes unhappy with the performance of the IT organization.

IT Governance, specifically applications that manage multiple IT processes, connect diverse data sets, and package them into meaningful information for decision-making, is a natural choice for IT organizations to return to a well-organized, data-driven world.  From a business perspective, this is quickly becoming a critical requirement for IT in order to transform IT into a value center, instead of a cost center.  As a value center, IT not only delivers technical support, but the technological underpinnings for growth, productivity, and innovation.  Standardizing intake and demand management processes, establishing clear communication pathways, identifying real inventory of projects and operational activities, accurately managing capacity, and delivering real-time status and visibility in execution is a return to IT’s competence.  Most importantly, this gives IT the ability to speak the language of business on their own terms.

With this in mind, I see an opportunity for IT to not only manage the delivery of projects, products, and services but also to manage information about that activity, which is just as important.  To reinforce this point, I’d like to draw an analogy to the industry of logistics. Take the US Postal Service in the 1970’s: For the most part, people accepted that they would place a package in the mail, and hope it would be delivered to the correct address in a timely manner. There was no data about the current location of the package, whether it has been delivered, and to whom. No accountability, no visibility. All this changed with Federal Express (FedEx) as a better alternative to the status quo.  FedEx transformed an industry by accelerating and placing accountability on the delivery of packages. More importantly, it also created an entire ancillary marketplace on the information “about” packages.  It would be unimaginable today if we couldn’t get tracking information on a valuable product that we’ve shipped. It’s unthinkable to imagine a world without the data that FedEx provides. So the next time you think about IT Governance and PPM and why any IT organization needs it, think about my FedEx analogy. We are FedEx for IT - not only managing projects and applications but delivering tracking data for your projects and applications. Innotas is driving a roadmap for accountability and communication that goes beyond the physical.  Innotas is a tracking label for IT projects. That’s chicken noodle soup for those gifted personnel who really like data.

Different is Better

  

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By Kevin Kern, CEO of Innotas

One of the questions that “C level” executives often get asked is what keeps them up at night?  What are the addressable critical components for the role that ostensibly determine success or failure?  Careers are made or vaporized if these questions aren’t contemplated, answered, planned, and then executed. The question that keeps me up at night is how we can be different and stand out in a crowded marketplace.

I recently read a fantastic article by Christopher Lochhead on behalf of Sandhill.com

In the high- tech business, it’s always easy to rely on the conventional fallback position of feature/ function, or who builds the better mouse trap. Clearly, a defensive position, but not always the right strategy for success.  If that were all there was to it, Sequent, DEC, Wang, and Pyramid Technologies would certainly still be in business.  They were fantastic technologies loaded with rich functionality. Unfortunately, each of them perhaps failed to realize that the basic problem they were solving was not simply speeds and feeds but the creation of a new paradigm for computing technologies. Technologies that shouldn’t simply cater to the Fortune 500 firms, but to all markets. 

Pardon the over simplification, but they failed at becoming different instead they focused on being better.  They sold to the same companies that HP, IBM et.al tried to sell to in the same fashion. The world of the mouse trap was enticing.

The real challenge becomes how to market and sell any disrupting technology and vision, rather than simply the company or a product.  Lead and you will find followers.  Today, with so many choices for IT to evaluate, how can any “C level” executive determine which move to make unless the choice is positioned differently?

From our earliest days here at Innotas, we have been consistent with our belief that IT Governance was a concept that that was different from simple PPM or APM.  Project management was one stop on the road to IT Governance and this concept is non-negotiable to IT personnel if they wish to revel in the accolades that the business users want to garner them with.  

The Innotas market perspective from our beginnings was always to be different, relevant, and supportive of the process for IT Governance.  Our multi-tenant architecture was disruptive; our support model and subject matter expertise culture is known throughout our industry. We have always, and will continue to understand the challenges of working towards the holy grail of IT governance.  This is what keeps us awake at night.

Now you can sleep.

The Zen of Portfolio Management

  

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 By George Shaheen, Sales Engineer at Innotas

The Zen of Portfolio Management

Hot on the heels of Tim Madewell’s post, Are there clouds hanging over your enterprise?, where Tim discusses the direction cloud solutions are heading with regards to integrations, we at Innotas continue to rapidly pursue building our ecosystem of integrations with the intent of providing best-of-breed solutions to our customers.  Along with our integration with JIRA, today we are announcing our partnership and integration with Zendesk.

Zendesk is the proven cloud-based help desk that is the fastest way to enable great customer service. It is so easy, support teams love it.

The bi-directional integration with Zendesk enabled by the Innotas Integration Platform  will provide complete visibility into IT operations.  With this integration you can:

• Provide a single point of entry for any IT request

• Promote tickets from Zendesk into projects in Innotas for proper governance and resource management, and keep them in and enjoy true visibility into both sustaining and strategic work as well as costs associated with both

• Send tasks from Innotas project plans to Zendesk to be worked as tickets, and keep them in sync

These capabilities allow different teams to work in their respective work systems, while maintaining a 360 degree view of work and activity happening in the organization.

For more information see the Zendesk partner page.

Along with Zendesk, we will be announcing a few more help desk partnerships in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for future announcements.

If you have a suggestion for a help desk integration you’d like to see from us, contact partners@innotas.com

Happy Valentine’s Day – 10 Reasons Why IT Departments Love Innotas

  

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By George Shaheen, Sales Engineer at Innotas

Valentine’s Day is a great time to express your appreciation for all your loved ones.  Love can come in different shapes and forms. Here at Innotas, we love our customers.  We work hard to keep them happy and smiling. Over the years, we’ve been lucky enough to have that love reciprocated. 

Here are 10 reasons why our customers love Innotas:

ONE: ALL PROJECTS, RESOURCES, AND APPLICATIONS IN ONE SPACE
“Managing our projects with Innotas has facilitated our ability to accurately track and communicate the status of each project through the Project Life Cycle. Because Innotas is available through the Internet, it provides ease of access to all projects and project artifacts in one system repository allowing for quick navigation to project information.”
- Larry Wilson, PMP, City of Memphis 

TWO: INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY AND EFFICIENCY IN IT
" The greatest efficiency that we've gained from Innotas is in financial reporting. We used to spend ten to 15 hours a month just putting the reports together. Now with Innotas, it's all done automatically in real time."
- Huma Sohrwardy, Director PMO and Policy, Broadlane

THREE: IMMEDIATE ROI THROUGH IMPROVED PROJECT EXECUTION
"Innotas has been key to our ability to deliver major projects that are expected to achieve a 5 year savings of $10M."
-Marcia Stanfield, Strategic Initiatives, Open Technology Solutions
 
FOUR: FOCUS ON THE RIGHT PROJECTS THROUGH SCORING
"Innotas has helped us quantify the business' demand for IT projects, understand the status of the resources we have available and work with the business to make sure we're focusing on the right projects."
- Hamilton Beach Brands, Inc.

FIVE: VISIBILITY ACROSS ALL PROJECTS, APPLICATIONS, AND RESOURCES
"We're supporting an application that keeps breaking that we're actually going to be sun setting over the course of the next two months. Why are we spending forty hours a week supporting break fixes on that app?  We've never had that data before.  Now we have that data."
-Daryl Lubin, Digital Project Portfolio Manager, Harper Collins

SIX: FACILITATE AND IMPROVE PROJECT COLLABORATION
"Innotas truly aids cross-team collaboration by centralizing our collaboration communication. The communication is no longer hidden away in an individual's email or voicemail."
-Jeff Falk, Director of Product Development, The Members Group 

SEVEN: REPORTS AND DASHBOARDS ON-DEMAND
"It is a huge benefit being able to produce reports on-demand with Innotas for senior management about what we are working on, instead of having to go through emails to find the necessary information"
- Jim Cook, IT Project Manager, Ferris State University

EIGHT: PPM BEST PRACTICES AND THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
"We were looking for a tool that would help organize and structure information that was easy to use. We wanted a company that provided guidance for PPM best practices. We found it in Innotas." 
- Jenny Walsh, Director, Web and Administrative Services, University of Portland

NINE: STRONG COST SAVINGS THROUGH CLOUD PLATFORM
"We chose Innotas because it was the best overall value.  It really gave us the most functionality, scalability, and support in comparison with the other vendors we evaluated. And because Innotas is cloud-based, we save on infrastructure costs-which is crucial when budgets are going down"
- Robert Pietras, Manager of the Project Management Office, State of North Carolina

TEN: HIGHLY EXPERIENCED ENGAGEMENT MANAGERS & FASTTRACK IMPLEMENTATION
"Innotas unique service delivery and support model has been and continues to be outstanding" 
- Lee Blue, Senior Project Manager, Christus Health

When you see all of the functionality that Innotas offers, you'll understand why our customers love us.  Sign up for a mini-demo today and see what the PPM love is all about. Simply email us at salesdev@innotas.com with subject line ‘Valentine’s Day Demo’.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Are there clouds hanging over your enterprise?

  

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By: Tim Madewell, SVP of Services at Innotas

We have had a number of conversations with customers and prospect that mentioned having a corporate or IT-driven “cloud initiative”. After hearing this, we’ve reflected on the rapid change of cloud solutions from the early adopters and point solutions to broader acceptance of cloud solutions within enterprise IT.

We now see purpose-driven initiatives toward cloud solutions for the enterprise. Cloud software for the enterprise has rapidly matured and gained acceptance, which is exciting and validates how we’ve built our business model. So it comes as no surprise to us that we see increasing demand for cloud integration.

According to a recent article by InformationWeek titled “6 Reasons SaaS May Mean A Return To Silos “, a survey showed that 43% of SaaS users are very happy with the ability to deploy applications quickly, but are much less satisfied with the complexity of integrating hosted apps with on-premise systems and data sources (see: InformationWeek Analytics 2011 Enterprise Applications Survey). While we don’t agree with the assumption that SaaS (cloud) means a return to silos, we do find the survey results consistent with conversations that we have had with IT executives. The requirements for easy data availability and timely information for decision-making have not changed. Cloud solutions have introduced new integration points, and computing devices have introduced new platforms. We argue that the rapid adoption of cloud initiatives will drive the advancement and development of cloud integration strategies, solutions, and interfaces.

We have witnessed enterprises becoming more thoughtful toward integration and interoperability in their evaluation of cloud solutions, recognizing the need to have ubiquitous access to their data. This is especially true when more enterprise systems are moving to the cloud. Data access should make no difference in a cloud-to-premise, cloud-to-cloud, or any other hybrid model. Additionally, rigid system integrations are giving way to loosely coupled integrations that share data and enrich applications from other data sources.

A relevant example of this need for integrating enterprise applications and tools with the Innotas IT Management solutions has been the increasing number of customer integrations that we are seeing with other work management and project tracking tools such as Atlassian’s Jira . Jira is one of the most trusted and leading project tracking tools that has seen great adoption from small workgroups and expansion across the enterprise. Innotas has been building integrations to reach beyond the borders of work management in Innotas to incorporate data from complimentary tools such as Jira. The goal is to bring work activity back to the enterprise project and application portfolio. The challenge of any IT Management solution such as Innotas is how to capture work across the entire enterprise to provide governance and decision making as it relates to time, people, and money across the entire organization, not just IT. IT leaders recognize that departments and teams across the enterprise have different work management requirements. Providing these groups with access to the best tools to do their job yields better results than forcing everyone to use a single, one-size-fits-all work management system to serve top management’s need for visibility and governance. Enterprise cloud integration solutions enables enterprises to use tools such as Jira, any on-premise, or cloud solution as best-of-class system in areas such as operations and product development, which feed activity, resource, and time data to an enterprise IT Management system for IT portfolio governance.

It is time to look at the clouds overhead and then a thorough view at your corporate data and integration strategy.