Which application portfolio management solution do you use and why should (or shouldn't) others?
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From just a straight tooling standpoint, we manage the full portfolio in a hybrid world using Microsoft Projects Online and we have an add-on called OnePlan. OnePlan does all the resource (labor) planning and Project Online does all the project planning and administration. We have Jira for Kanban boards and MS-Project for Work breakdown structures.
Like most companies, everybody complains that we don't have enough money, but the reality is we don't have enough technical staff (people). And so the OnePlan tool is how we prove that we have plenty of money and we don't have enough people – and it's not people in general, it's the right skills for the work. There's always two or three types of roles that are in high demand, and we just do not have the capacity to take on additional work until later in the year.
This gives us the runway and visibility to say, for example: “OK, you wanna do another warehouse project? Fine, but you're already running two, and we don’t have any more people who have warehouse experience until September. So what do you want to do?”
It turns the whole argument upside down, and so all of a sudden it's not a financial conversation.
We were long-time users of Project Server, and more recently Project Online with a UMT360 plugin for budgets. However, due to the lack of innovation, we felt we were missing essential features, prompting us to seek alternatives and ultimately choose OnePlan. Interestingly, several articles on LinkedIn have highlighted the lack of innovation in Project Online, validating our decision to transition.<br><br>OnePlan integrates seamlessly within our Microsoft environment and offers a robust resource module. We have just begun using OnePlan and are pleased with its performance thus far. Additionally, we are utilizing the budget and financial module, which UMT360 excelled in, ensuring we didn't have to compromise on this feature.<br><br>For scheduling, we use native OnePlan, and for some projects, we utilize Planner (Project for the Web). Some of our teams prefer the Planner interface, and one of OnePlan's strengths is its integration capability with other tools. Finally, we are also leveraging their status report module, which helps provide consistent status updates to our stakeholders.<br><br>
For approximately 10 years, we've been using Casewise as our APM. All our applications were put in the inventory managed within Casewise.
Since last year, we moved to BizzDesign Horizzon.
It all depends to which extent you want to manage your application portfolio. Each application has a business owner and an IT owner.
In my understanding, managing a portfolio isn't linked to manage the actual projects. But rather to give a view on:
- Knowing what we have
- Knowing who's responsible for what
- Categorizing applications leads to finding duplicates
- Adding values such as 'criticity', 'health/obsolescence score', 'target state if any',etc.