Oct 11, 2016 - Polarisoft, a British consultancy and software firm that ... software has been designed to assist with pi
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SOFTWARE REVIEW
PPMAnywhere Steve Cotterell finds that he’s impressed by several clever aspects of this portfolio, programme and project management application.
A cloud-based portfolio, programme and project management system suitable for use in managing many types of project, both IT and non-IT.
Polarisoft, a British consultancy and software firm that began business in 2006, has customers all over the world, including some that are household names and include hotels, supermarkets and a wide range of other business and financial services organisations. The company offers their clients its business practice expertise and supports many PMOs in its client base with project management. Polarisoft’s portfolio, programme and project management software has been designed to assist with pipeline investment decisions, the preparation of project proposals and business cases, preparing forecasts and converting all that into project delivery. It’s intended to be suitable for use in managing many types of project, including IT projects and non-IT change management projects. It also provides operations and business as usual functionality. PPMAnywhere is an SaaS-based application. It’s accessible on desktop PCs and laptops via a browser and supports Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. The company partners with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Microsoft and Oracle with PPMAnywhere’s underlying engine being provided by HP PPM. The HP platform has been preconfigured and extended, with Polarisoft adding their own user interface. It uses Amazon Web services as its hosting provider with EU-based customers’ data being hosted in Ireland whilst US customers’ data is held in the US. The solution can either be based on the public cloud or on a V P C Virtual Private Cloud. Polarisoft has created a wide set of standard templates for use when configuring the system, suitable for different types of customers. Polarisoft does all the installation and initial configuration of the software mapped to their business processes but, thereafter, customers can 30 www.pmtoday.co.uk | October 2016
maintain and manage it. Alternatively, Polarisoft offers a managed service. Signing on to the system, which uses a project, programme and portfolio hierarchy with reporting available at each level, can be achieved via its integration with Active Directory, using Single Sign-on or its native Polarisoft system. That accomplished, the application opens to the user’s landing page. Everything to do with the look and feel of the product, including the landing page, can be customised. Every user has a landing page and, especially for more senior people, this is likely to be a dashboard - of which there are two types - either a user-created personal dashboard or a centrally created shared dashboard. Each dashboard is made up of a set of “portlets”, which are views of the data. All portlets have drill down capabilities, allowing a progressive drill-down to the raw data. When the users are building their dashboards, using a standard form provided, they can choose which data to feature. They can filter it and control how it is to be displayed. Project proposals are collected using a form that is configurable in respect of the fields to be completed. Each proposal has two main ingredients, firstly, an estimate of the generic resources required and secondly, an automatically calculated cost of those resources based on rate cards already held in the system. (Rate cards can be set up for individuals, roles, regions, locations, and departments, and can also be project-based). All these costs are fed through to a financial summary holding five key fields: approved budget, total forecast cost, actuals to date, estimate at complete and financial benefits.
A Dashboard report
Workflows allow you to manage the business process and every project has a workflow behind it that defines the project gates and the required data to be captured. Preconfigured workflows are available or customers can create their own. Standard forms are used to capture all sorts of data throughout the system, such as details of risks, issues and scope changes. All can be controlled by customisable workflows. Security can be built into a workflow, so that you can control who can do what at each stage of the workflow. At each step of the workflow you can build in email notifications.
Alignment of the project to the company business objectives is entered into fields on the proposal and details of risks to be taken into account can be entered. Projects can be scored and weighted according to a set of configurable rules. When you have completed all the mandatory fields on the project proposal, and assuming that you have the necessary rights to do so, a button appears that lets you move onto the next workflow step. More about workflows later. PPMAnywhere provides what-if capability and you can create scenarios containing proposals and existing projects. You can then compare the scenarios from a resource availability and financial point of view, a set of tabs enabling you to compare the scenarios by budgets, cost/ benefits, project classifications and business objectives. When you have decided which scenario to go ahead with, you click the “Proceed” button on the proposal screen to move things to the next stage. When converting a proposal to a project, you decide on which template you want to use to control the project. The information from the proposal gets copied across to the template. The system supports multiple methodologies. There is a range of out-of-the-box templates that includes both
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waterfall and agile projects as well as for small, quick projects.
If the organisation already has a document management system, this can be integrated, for instance by including the URL of an appropriate SharePoint folder. You can attach documents to any entity in PPMAnywhere. In the workflow you can specify which documents must be attached to what entity. The Project Summary page displays the details and status of the project, whilst the Work Plan screen holds the details of the schedule. This can be displayed as a table and as a Gantt chart. PPMAnywhere can be integrated with Microsoft Project and the plan can be synchronised with a plan in Project to enable the planning to be carried out in that application. At this stage the generic resourcing outlined in the project proposal is replaced by named resources with the financial information being automatically updated as the resources are assigned. The organisation’s resource pools can be organised hierarchically and, within pools, resources can be organised by teams. When you display the resource pool details, you can see the composition of the hierarchy and of the team members. Choosing the “Manage Pool Capacity” option, you can see the availability of each person and you can drill down to individual level to see that person’s calendar, holidays and capacity. The company has developed two particularly neat wizards that run, within the main software, to enable the quick, easy entry of project status and resource management data. Running the “Project Status Report” allows the project manager to use a wizard to enter the project progress information. It allows the project manager to update, add, remove or edit the details of milestones, risks, issues, change requests, resources and financial details, all from the one place. When completed, the project fields and financial details are automatically updated and the Status Report is produced for you to see. The report includes a RAG traffic light system which is controlled
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The Resource Balancing Screen
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activities such as holidays, sickness and training can all be recorded. Rules can be written to specify which projects a person can add time to and the minimum and maximum number of hours a person may enter can be fixed. A configurable list of miscellaneous items that time may be recorded against can be created. When creating your timesheet, you state the week that you are reporting against. The timesheet has a column for each day and you enter the times in hours. You can use a list of the items that you frequently record time against and the system will also suggest items that you have assigned to in this period. You can also add projects for which you have permission to your timesheet.
manually or automatically according to entered rules. You can add comments and edit the information shown and publish the report in PDF or PowerPoint format. Customers can have the report template configured to reflect corporate logos and design guidelines. There’s also a “multi-slide” option which allows project managers to publish greater detail on each report item, such as issues and risks, on separate slides rather than as part of a more consolidated view. The other wizard, the “Resource Balancer”, is available to help resource managers keep their information up-to-date. The first screen displays the information about each resource in the team, including contractors, with their start and end dates. Here you can add and remove people and edit the details of their information. You then see an availability calendar for all the people in the team and their availability can be edited here. All the information can be exported to Excel or integrated with a Human Resource system. The “Resource Balancer” screen shows who is under and over assigned and the details of the demands coming in from the different projects. From this screen, each person’s details can be drilled into for more information and you can commit resources from here (using a drag-and-drop process) and also “Soft Book” people, when the assignment is not so binding. You can display heat maps to show which projects are resourced adequately and which are short of resources. This neat wizard can then update the system and produce reports. Actuals are tracked, captured and booked to projects using PPMAnywhere’s integral timesheet system. Time spent working on projects, proposals, business as usual and some miscellaneous, unplanned and not forecast 32 www.pmtoday.co.uk | October 2016
Timesheets can be saved (to return to) or saved and submitted. This sends them for approval or rejection, when they are returned to the originator for more attention. Once approved the hours recorded on the timesheet are assigned to the schedule. A mobile timesheet app is available that allows timesheets to be submitted via a mobile device. This app is available for both iOS and Android systems. There is a “Compliance” dashboard that shows who has and who hasn’t submitted their timesheet; a “Delinquent Timesheet” report shows a snapshot of who hasn’t completed a timesheet at any given time and Polarisoft also offers a service to chase missing timesheets on behalf of their customers. Both the timesheet and resource management aspects of PPMAnywhere are fully integrated into the financial area of the system which can integrate with financial systems such as SAP via an API, which can also connect with other systems such as Agile tools using standard (HP with Polarisoft connectors) APIs. As I mentioned earlier, PPMAnywhere supports portfolio management and all of the projects, proposals and business as usual elements in the system can be grouped into a hierarchal system of portfolios. Once you’ve done this, the system can amalgamate the costs of all the components of a portfolio. PPMAnywhere contains set of automatically produced reports, static (snapshot) reports and real-time reporting dashboards. The Portfolio Report gives details and shows the status of all the projects in a specific portfolio and also forecasts how costs will mount compared with the available budgets. You can drill into the report for more detailed information about each project. This report can be produced in PDF or PowerPoint output. You can also display a resource dashboard for the portfolio.
A Status Report
How much does it cost? The price of PPMAnywhere varies according to the volume and types of users. As a SaaS-based solution, it’s priced on a per user per month basis, although there’s a minimum twelve-month contract term. There are various types of licence available matched to the type of access and role the user has, so that they only pay for the level of access that they need. The Portfolio Status report shows the comments from the managers’ projects that have submitted status reports for a specific period and shows which projects are missing status reports. You can also see, of the risks added to projects, any that have been flagged as risks at portfolio level. A graphic chart displays the key milestones against each project in the portfolio. This report can be printed or exported to PDF. The purpose of the strangely named “Resource Export” is to allow the export of resource data to Excel for further analysis. This report shows a list of resources with the times they have booked and the work they have been assigned and forecast to do in any given period. This helps you establish that the forecast is as accurate as possible and understand the rate of work of the people involved. This report is in a tabular format and needs a lot of reading. How much better it would be if it were RAG colour-coded. The tool contains a set of export capabilities to Excel, PDF, Microsoft Project, PowerPoint (via a Polarisoft slide template into which the data is fed). If a client requires a report not supported by the system, Polarisoft can build it for them. A regular customer forum provides feedback for upgrades and, over the next eighteen months, a series of enhancements is planned. Due later this month are fundamental changes to provide “a fully responsive design” that’s fit for the device it’s being displayed upon. I saw a version of this feature, which tailors the screen display according to the screen size in use and was impressed by the way it works. Also due soon is the capability to carry out a natural language search across the whole product, incorporating Soundex capability. This will also be able to link to meta data held elsewhere. Searches can be based on a configurable set of rules and will also be capable of including faster searches in documents held on the system.
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In quarter one of next year, there are plans for a new reporting engine and an interactive dashboard. Later, it’s intended to provide tighter integration with agile tools to create the ability to produce infographic dashboards with a good, crisp appearance.
Right to Reply A comprehensive and insightful review of PPM Anywhere and its focus on process driven collaboration. Polarisoft’s ethos is to listen to our customers and their needs and put the end user at the heart of everything we do, because we know if it’s easy to use, the more likely people will want to use it. As an example of this the review highlights the Project Status Report and Resource Balancer proce ss driven wizards, which facilitate and speed up the process for Project and Resource Managers. We’re excited about the upcoming enha ncements to PPMAnywhere which will make it truly accessible via any device, and the advanced search will make it even easier and quicker to find what you’re looking for. Furthermore, our dynamic reporting will make it easier to collate and personalise essential data. The author’s suggestion for enhancing the Resource Export report will definitely go on to the deve lopment roadmap for a future release! If you’re visiting the Project Challenge Show (11-12 October at London Olympia) please do visit us on stand 99 and see PPMAnywhere for yourself. Othe rwise our team would be delighted to schedule a demo for you. Simply visit our website www.ppmanywhere. com to request one. The Polarisoft Team
Contact Details Polarisoft, Harmsworth House, 13-15 Bouverie Street, London, EC4Y 8DP Tel: 0207 692 5697 Email:
[email protected]
www.polarisoft.com
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