A top priority for most IT organization's today includes the implementation of processes that enable the measurement and management of the business value of IT. To facilitate this, many are looking to IT Governance decision-making frameworks and processes that define how all IT investments decisions will be made, where accountability lies for those decisions and the ongoing management of investments and technology standards

Compuware Changepoint is an integrated solution that supports the ongoing alignment and management of all IT investments, and helps enterprises to maximize the value of the entire IT portfolio. Changepoint also facilitates the management of end-to-end business processes associated with the business of IT, from capturing all demand for services to prioritizing and selecting portfolios to continuous monitoring of project and application health. It also automates key IT processes that affect an organization and drives relevant data up to portfolio views. Changepoint provides total visibility into all IT portfolios, so that the right information is available to the right people at the right time. With Changepoint , anybody can gain control over not only projects but also non-project work. In other words, Changepoint helps you manage all the work of IT.

Changepoint solution has been recognized as a leading innovator within the market, setting the standard for new functionality and industry-leading thinking within IT Governance. Intellisolutions is committed to growing and expanding the Changepoint solution to assist its customers in delivering IT value. Changepoint platform builds on our strong foundation to automate governance and business process within IT organizations by offering enhanced functionality and configurability to support the business needs of large organizations. Major enhancements included in this release are in the areas of Budget Management, Project Portfolio Management, Resource Management, Reporting, and Workflow.

Some important Changepoint features are presented below:

Budget Management

Organizations rely on detailed financial guidelines and estimates in the allocation of work. In Changepoint , the budget allocation worksheet has been used and extended to include all areas of the budget, and provide a similar level of granularity as the project allocation worksheet. This provides greater flexibility and financial control for budgeting, specifically to the assignment of effort, cost and charge amounts. The inline worksheet-style interface includes enhancements to allow users to manage the budget for Fixed Fees, Non- Labor , Services and Expenses at a granular level, which includes by fiscal period or month.

Financial Management

When IT departments agree to do “fixed fee” type work, ensuring that the correct assignment schedules and financial association for chargeback is made is critical in the distribution of overall cost. In ChangePoint solution, Fixed Fee Schedule enhancements include the automatic generation of recurring fixed fees. This enhancement will provide greater flexibility and financial control related to assignment of cost, chargeback and fixed fee amounts to fiscal periods. Standard options to build the schedule will include the ability to identify the start date, recurrence cycle (time period), and the number of occurrences. In addition, the ability to prevent the assignment of Fixed Fee deliverables to tasks are available to both the parent and schedule fixed fee items. These options will allow organizations greater flexibility and accuracy when defining and allocating fixed cost/price work.

Project Management

To be effective in project and Initiative management, visibility into dependencies related to ongoing effort or work is critical. For Changepoint , an Inter Project Dependencies Report has been provided to allow project managers, resource managers and executives the ability to understand the implications of the dependencies on effort and the impact when changes are planned or occur. The report will capture two types of dependencies; Inter task (the traditional inter-dependency where one task cannot start until another is finished) and inter requirement type dependencies (in this case, it is the requirements themselves and their inter-dependencies, where one requirement is dependant upon the completion of another, allowing the IT organization to ensure that when selecting requirements to be executed, as well as scheduling the work itself. These dependencies are taken into consideration and items are built in the correct order, and any changes to schedules reflect these inter-requirement dependencies). This report will provide a Gantt view of dependencies between projects, thereby giving management the ability to understand clearly the cause and effect of ongoing changes to effort and timelines, as well as the ability to quickly determine if there are any missing requirements that will affect the successful completion of ongoing work.

Workflow Management

IT Organizations require a controlled stage-gate process when planning, defining, reviewing, and approving potential future work for the organization. In Changepoint , configurable workflow has been enabled for Candidates, to provide an intuitive framework for designing simple or complex workflows to support Candidate stage-gating processes. For example, it can be used to set up Candidate “gates” that are linked to reviews or approvals for funding, resource management estimate reviews, and Committee reviews and approvals; with specific workflow definitions at each gate. Workflow definitions encompass the states (start and end), pathways, responsibilities, actions, artifacts , notifications, and escalations that all define the process. Workflow is configured by selecting the entity and field (i.e. Candidate Status) upon which the workflow is driven, as well as any additional filter criteria that specifically defines the type of records on which the workflow is to be performed (e.g., Candidate type of “Capital Acquisition” may have a different workflow than “Application Maintenance”).

Resource Management

Resource Management is a critical business process for IT effectiveness. ChangePoint extends functionality in this area with the addition of Project Team and Request entities to enhance resource management visibility into the overall demand and capacity of the organization. The single biggest challenge faced by Resource Managers is understanding their resources total availability. Accurate and complete resource demand and capacity information enables resource managers to make the right resourcing decisions. To help with the decision process, in Version 11, Project Team entries have been added as part of the Resource Demand Scenario selection criteria. “Project teams” are used to identify resource requirements at the project level, before task assignment. This addition provides even more flexibility in terms of what is or is not considered for resource demand and capacity analysis.

Resource Demand Analysis

For IT organizations that require greater reporting flexibility around resource demand and capacity, two new resource demand data providers have been provided:

• Resource Demand detailed data provider – provides daily resource demand for all demand elements. Users can select or group by workgroup, resource, function and demand type.
• Resource Demand - demand and capacity data provider – groups demand for each resource, each demand element status by day and gross capacity by da.
• Project Team identification is critical for defining resources who are participating in the overall deliverable. In Changepoint , an option is available to push Project Team information to the resource calendar automatically. A checkbox has been provided at the project team dialogue to allow the project manager to promote the project team resource information directly to individual resources calendar. This enhancement will ensure that resource managers, line managers, executives and the resources themselves have visibility into the current work and schedule that a resource has been assigned to.

Portfolio Management

W hat's in your application portfolio? Chances are it's an amalgam of legacy, distributed and web technologies— patched with incremental add-ons, bug fixes and enhancements— accumulated over decades. For many organizations, the once-bright promise of a one-size-fits-all platform to replace legacy systems has long been proven to be wishful thinking. The future, it turned out, was one where many systems, platforms and technologies coexisted—sometimes happily, sometimes with great difficulty— under IT's ever-expanding umbrella. The challenge for IT organizations is to find new ways to effectively manage an increasing number of applications. Some vital applications are probably on their third generation of IT staff, and the original developers have long since left the building. How can you gain insight into such a diverse and complex portfolio?

In the race to deliver increased business value, IT leaders are beginning to look at a more integrated approach to managing their applications: Application Portfolio Management ( APM ), simply stated, is a discipline in which organizations:

• create a thorough inventory of all their applications
• match each application to business processes and owners
• track key metrics against each application
• leverage this data into their portfolio discipline to make application life-cycle decisions.

APM is a continuous process that is made “sustainable” through leveraging technology;

Compuware Changepoint

Compuware Changepoint is designed to address APM processes involved with gathering, analyzing and presenting data on application portfolios, within a larger IT portfolio view. Changepoint enables IT organizations to inventory, measure and conduct ongoing assessments of their application portfolios. Changepoint allows you to categorize each application and collect key business metrics such as risk, performance, total cost, user satisfaction and overall value to the business. Using a graphical dashboard and reporting capabilities, Changepoint provides insight and analysis culled from a wealth of application portfolio information. With this information, IT organizations can finally gain visibility into redundancies within their application portfolios, catalogued in a single repository.

Compuware Changepoint automates key IT processes that directly affect an IT organization and drives relevant data up to portfolio views. Changepoint provides total visibility into all IT portfolios, so that the right information is available to the right people at the right time. It also helps IT organizations gain control over not only projects but also non-project work. In other words, Changepoint helps manage all the work of IT.

Changepoint's flexible design allows IT organizations to take a phased approach to implementation. Using Changepoint , IT organizations can realize the value of a completely integrated portfolio management solution and manage change within their organization by adopting the capabilities they need, as they need them.

Changepoint's three areas of management parallel the three key elements of ITPM :

• Portfolio and Investment Planning : With Changepoint's portfolio and investment planning capabilities, IT executives and their line-of-business counterparts can select and prioritize proposed IT projects and investments that best support business priorities, balancing risk and value. IT executives can use specific, repeatable criteria to evaluate the cost of a project's delivery, determine whether the project aligns with corporate strategy/ business objectives, and confirm that it meets investment goals.
  
• Project Portfolio Management : Changepoint's Project Portfolio Management capabilities provide unprecedented views into portfolio health through graphical summaries, including portfolio health assessments, project scorecards, bubble charts and portal visibility. Portfolio health can be assessed though leveraging predefined metrics related to cost, schedule, scope and quality. Additional metrics such as risk and satisfaction are easily incorporated. With Changepoint , weighted metrics and thresholds can be easily defined, assigned and tracked to support portfolio management processes and ensure every project brings value to the organization. Because Changepoint helps to provide detailed information on IT spending and delivery, while measuring the overall return on investment, IT organizations can position themselves as a contributor to business goals rather than a cost center .
  
• Application Portfolio Management : Changepoint's Application Portfolio Management capabilities enable IT organizations to inventory, measure and conduct ongoing assessments of their application portfolios. Changepoint helps categorize each application and collect key business metrics such as risk, performance, total cost, user satisfaction and overall value to the business. Using a graphical dashboard and reporting capabilities, Changepoint provides insight and analysis culled from a wealth of application portfolio information. With this information, IT organizations can finally gain visibility into redundancies within their application portfolios catalogued in a single repository. Further, Changepoint helps IT organizations develop a strategic roadmap to investing in, maintaining, replacing, or retiring each application in the portfolio.

- More information about Compuware Changepoint

- Compuware positioned as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT project
and portfolio management

- Enroll for a live demonstration of Compuware Changepoint