Your Business Challenges
Clear, accurate and comprehensive insight is essential for business and financial planning, yet companies rarely achieve it. A new paradigm of enterprise-wide visibility is required that consolidates relevant project data, helps identify activities
that degrade the delivery of customer value and provides real intelligence—enabling businesses to sense and respond to both competitive threats and market opportunities.
The next wave of business technologies will include new solutions that help organizations make decisions rooted in real-time facts and analyses.
An Adaptive Enterprise is Built on clear Business Visibility
A key step in the process of becoming an adaptive enterprise is ensuring that all data associated with individual project portfolios resides in a central system. Consolidated, accurate and easily accessible information is necessary for the business insight that enables adaptability.
Business leaders must ask themselves:
- Do I know who’s working on my company’s most critical initiatives?
- Do I know what’s funded and how spend is tracking on each initiative so I can quickly respond to unexpected changes in the market?
- Do I have my finger on the pulse of value delivered to the business?
- Can I easily see whether we’re tracking to deliver on time?
For many, the answer to most of the questions above is “no.”
That’s because most organizations today lack a system that allows business stakeholders to understand the intersection between what initiatives are being funded, what staffing is committed to those initiatives and the status of the value being delivered.
In many companies, stakeholders meet to fund initiatives or products on an annual or semi-annual basis. Agile teams then go off to work their initiative backlog with full autonomy, which helps to keep team members engaged. Business stakeholders are assured that agile teams are working fast and efficiently, but visibility into delivery and the actual consumption of the funding is unclear.
As a result, emergency meetings must be scheduled and spreadsheets circulated in order to answer questions such as, “What are we getting for our money?” and “Is it as important as this new opportunity presenting itself?”
For organizations with a single product, or a simple structure of dedicated teams that never switch from one product to another, there may not be a major problem.
But if your organization is running dozens or even hundreds of initiatives with cross-functional teams—with some team members being regularly pulled off to support other projects—you have no real clarity of vision. And without clear visibility, it’s impossible to achieve an effective organizational structure around funding, delivery and value.
Making informed choices in such an environment is highly problematic.
Analytics Enables Autonomy
Information at the fingertips of your decision makers is essential in empowering them to act with agility. Only with precise data can budgets be closely managed, costs monitored and funding commitments understood. If a divergence from plan is required, reliable information will be crucial in providing insight into what your people are working on and where additional/emergency funds can be derived.
Moreover, readily available information can help you to respond quickly and easily to competitive threats or even take advantage of unforeseen opportunities like acquisitions—exactly what most businesses and agilists strive for. Without a centralized system that provides a deep understanding of what’s happening inside your organization, the ability to sense and respond to events in the marketplace is limited.
Most companies today are impaired as a direct result of splitting their optimization efforts into two distinct categories that, while highly effective at producing value individually, lack cohesion—creating a blind spot that constrains effective decision making.
Two Principal Areas of Business Optimization
Work Management
Enabling the delivery of highest-quality products faster and with fewer resources through persistent teams
Work management is typically codified through software development tools that provide a hub for teams to collaboratively plan, prioritize and track work on a synchronized cadence. They measure productivity, predictability, quality and responsiveness with real-time performance metrics and are designed to enable agile development practices. They’re effective tools that help to execute and optimize work delivery.
Investment Planning
Optimizing funding and headcount to achieve the best possible return on investment and please stakeholders
Investment optimization is provided through a business-focused tool that enables you to manage your entire innovation lifecycle and make informed, strategic investments. These tools help you track and prioritize market requirements and make informed decisions on how to invest limited resources to optimize your enterprise, IT, service and product portfolios. Their project management capabilities assist businesses in delivering quality initiatives on time and on budget.
Two Disparate Categories of Business Optimization
Work Management
A tool for short-term, agile planning and detailed execution
Work management tools typically provide a bottom-up approach, laser-focused on empowering and optimizing teams to keep projects collaborative, synchronized and on track. Inside an organization, you may find as many implementations of these as you have teams of developers.
Due to their flexibility, each team can customize each instance of this tool to reflect its specific needs, which makes it highly effective. However, when tools are only optimized for the team, challenges are created at the business level. In fact, team customization without business uniformity can lead to chaos.
An organization with dozens of disparate teams may have 10 different instances of this tool running simultaneously—each with its own syntax and semantics. While the value to the teams is undeniable, the business stakeholder has no systematic visibility into the value being delivered. They only see a quagmire that’s virtually impossible to navigate, which leads the business to acknowledge, “We agree they’re delivering faster, but we’ve lost insight into what’s being delivered.”
No business manager can sift through dozens of instances of an execution management tool to find answers. The manager would need to ask (and manually record) each team’s status, and with that information attempt to calculate the state of the overall project.
What’s needed is a solution that:
- Allows teams to work in whatever way they feel is most optimal.
- Enables visibility into the progress on the value being delivered to the business.
- Allows users to ascertain how that value relates to the funding being provided.
Investment Planning
A tool for long-term business planning
At the other end of the spectrum are business-focused tools that provide relevant information to business leaders. These tools are designed to create and manage strategic portfolio plans across the organization. They help to efficiently deliver new products and services to market using best practices and governance and, importantly, to gain insight into business demand, headcount planning and funding.
In every organization, the executives, as well as everyone below them, must be held accountable for reaching financial and business goals. This tool helps in the process of achieving those goals, but its effectiveness depends on the ability to accurately capture the right data and meticulously track costs, funding and forecasts.
Visibility into available funding, tracking of costs and understanding whether current spend levels can continue are critical success factors for every initiative. And precision is important, as business stakeholders are often required to deliver while remaining within (or close to) their initial funding.
That means continuous monitoring of all things related to initiatives is necessary. Without real-time analysis of financials, organizations can find themselves dealing with budget constraints that may require the resetting of business expectations. For example, your teams may be on track to deliver value, but if a significant portion of them are subcontractors and it suddenly becomes apparent that you’re tracking over budget, you may need to end some contracts, putting delivery at risk.
Funding and execution are inextricably intertwined. Without reliable information about what’s being delivered for the funding available, the business is blind to the insights needed to make critical tradeoffs.
“The adaptive enterprise is one that not only successfully weathers change in the environment, but one that leads the charge through the change and comes out on top.”
CIO Magazine
A Valuable Solution for the Adaptive Enterprise
Being an adaptive enterprise means having the ability to rapidly respond to changing conditions. As the market changes, you adapt. As customer feedback comes in, you adapt. As your competitors shift their focus, you adapt.
But an adaptive enterprise doesn’t mean it’s only reactive or nervously struggling to survive. The adaptive enterprise is leveraging real-time visibility that allows it to proactively embrace changes and transform negatives into opportunities that move the business forward. It is prepared to respond to nearly every possibility with speed and agility and to take advantage of every circumstance.
By using work and investment tools in unison, adaptive enterprises get a holistic solution that combines work management for the execution teams and business optimization for the stakeholder/planning organization. Together, they construct a hierarchy of funding and work across the organization. They inform all members of the business what is being funded and what is being delivered, and they provide the related data necessary to drive agility.
In terms of specific functions, the business tool is used to fund the initiative, define the headcount and prioritize this work for the business. Incurred costs such as contractors and software datacenter charges are taken into consideration and provided for. The work execution tool provides a mechanism to map funding to a business increment, define quarterly planning increments and initiatives, define the business value delivered (features) and provide a detailed roadmap including team capacity planning and execution.
Insights for the Adaptive Enterprise
Enterprise Studio professional services are widely recognized for their ability to help teams manage complex projects.
They have worked to integrate Clarity PPM and Rally Software into a comprehensive solution that provides holistic visibility across the entire project spectrum, from ideation to delivery. Today, customers use the Clarity PPM dashboard to understand exactly where each project stands—in business terms—based on reliable, real-time data that, in part, comes through its integration with Rally.
By using the combined solution, agile teams can work with autonomy, understand how their work is aligned with the overarching business strategy and clearly see how they’re impacting the business. They can provide data to senior leaders without disruption to the team, remain focused on strategic rather than unplanned work, and pivot quickly when business strategies change. Perhaps most importantly, they can enjoy continuous validation for the funding of their projects.
Business users can leverage data consolidated from across the enterprise to overcome the confusion that comes with a lack of visibility into the projects they’re funding. They can evaluate how teams are completing projects, see what people are working on, identify when funding requirements change and be alerted to issues that might impact projects. This ability to sense and respond to issues in real-time, and the ability
How Clarity PPM and Rally Software Work Together
Clarity PPM pulls relevant data from Rally Software and translates it into comprehensible business terms that drive stakeholder engagement and inform financial management.
As an example, Rally is used to manage the teams made up of product managers and owners, architects and team members executing on development. Information about those employees is imported into the Clarity PPM tool, where it’s combined with the headcount plan (including management and non-team resources) to define the total headcount and associated funding required for the initiative. Clarity PPM then contains the entire extended staffing plan in one location and provides the ability to assess, manage and allocate the whole team.
Similarly, Clarity PPM’s time management module integrates directly into Rally’s user experience so accurate data is captured at the point of work. This provides more accurate data for PMOs to manage their portfolio and can save developers time—in some cases, as much as five hours a week in time entry—in effect, spending less time capturing “work about work.”
Rally’s unique Portfolio Items capability enables a direct connection between the funding and agile initiative management. The features being delivered in each initiative are imported into Clarity PPM to enable stakeholder visibility into the value being delivered for the funding provided.
The benefits of 360-degree Insights
Being an adaptive enterprise means having the ability to rapidly respond to changing conditions. As the market changes, you adapt. As customer feedback comes in, you adapt. As your competitors shift their focus, you adapt.
But an adaptive enterprise doesn’t mean it’s only reactive or nervously struggling to survive. The adaptive enterprise is leveraging real-time visibility that allows it to proactively embrace changes and transform negatives into opportunities that move the business forward. It is prepared to respond to nearly every possibility with speed and agility and to take advantage of every circumstance.
By using work and investment tools in unison, adaptive enterprises get a holistic solution that combines work management for the execution teams and business optimization for the stakeholder/planning organization. Together, they construct a hierarchy of funding and work across the organization. They inform all members of the business what is being funded and what is being delivered, and they provide the related data necessary to drive agility.
In terms of specific functions, the business tool is used to fund the initiative, define the headcount and prioritize this work for the business. Incurred costs such as contractors and software datacenter charges are taken into consideration and provided for. The work execution tool provides a mechanism to map funding to a business increment, define quarterly planning increments and initiatives, define the business value delivered (features) and provide a detailed roadmap including team capacity planning and execution.
Ready to talk about how we can help your organization?
Our team is ready to start the conversation with you about your organization - and how we can work to create a successful future together.