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Improving IT

Improving IT productivity by aligning business objectives, work commitments and resource capacity.

IT professionals are under increasing pressure to implement cost-effective IT and IS strategies that contribute to the formulation of a company's key business and service objectives. They are undertaking ambitious programs that cover areas such as the renewal of technology, standardisation of IT systems and tools onto strategic products, development of modern techniques to applications development and improving executive reporting etc. As the number of these projects increase and the management of resources becomes more complex, IT operations that leverage best practice in portfolio management, program management and resource management, will achieve far better results; defining the services required and what will be committed to, setting quality standards to be achieved, tracking resources and commitments with regular progress reports and managing procedures and activities for change control.

In this article, Paul Bradbrook, former CEO of Hydra Management Ltd, the program management and project portfolio management specialist, describes how Hydra helps IT organisations to manage their projects, programs and commitments more effectively.

"There is a growing trend of IT organisations looking to purchase new project portfolio and program management software applications to help improve the automation, tracking and reporting of their processes - managing IT project portfolios, effectively deploying resources, selecting and executing the right projects and providing executives with access to up-to-date and reliable project data. Many operate in complex environments with development teams dispersed across locations, managing multiple and resource dependent IT projects that range in scale and investment. They need a system that will allow them to align business requirements with work and resource commitments; therefore you find that capabilities such as saving time, increasing resource productivity and measuring performance are particularly of interest. Hydra provides a very flexible and intuitive system that addresses all of these requirements. We demonstrate how IT executives obtain full visibility of project activity and performance, improve the quality of their management information, eliminate unproductive administrative tasks and achieve cost control through streamlined processes."

Productivity gains

"Productivity drives IT organisations and enables them to increase their ability to respond to customer demands and changing market conditions. Having full visibility of project and resource data across the organisation to help effectively manage activity against the most efficient projects are critical for success. However, many organisations are still using legacy project management systems to define, plan and control each project. They are unable to easily obtain a single, integrated view of all projects and work across the business. They have discrete sets of Project Managers managing unlinked plans, which make it difficult to identify intra-project dependencies and undertake multiple-project what-if analysis. Consequently, their project leaders spend lots of time juggling figures in order to report on the progress of activities, and the quality of data is questionable - by the time it is gathered, it is already out of date. Hydra provides organisations with full access to project, program and resource data across the organisation from all perspectives. Users can track progress, actual costs and performance measures against plans, understand the impact of changes in one project on another and manage project data and its integrity."

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Aligning IT resources with business strategy

"IT organisations chose Hydra because it is very intuitive and easy to use. They like its unique ‘resource-centric' view of activities and performance - being able to convince the guys on the shop floor what they are being asked to actually do is achievable and there is no danger of them being overloaded with work. Hydra uses its patented resource-centric scheduling to manage the complex relationships between tasks, projects and their need for resources, i.e. what resources can accomplish the task quickest as opposed to the task-centric approach adopted by legacy applications that look at how many resources are required to accomplish the task in the stated time period. Hydra uses a single integrated database to hold all data appertaining to resources, their availability, their commitments and their capabilities and it uses a subtractive process to allocate resources to ensure that they are never accidentally over committed. In legacy project management applications project managers have often seen resource histograms flashing 200%. They have seen were resources have been entered for example as ‘James S' on one line and ‘James Smith' on another - and that's implying they have more resources than they actually have! Organisations want to ensure that staff are confident what they are planning is realistic and achievable, this is with Hydra."

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Full visibility of project activities

"With Hydra, project reporting cycles are dramatically reduced, for example organisations may choose to enter timesheets close of play on Friday. Monday morning they are accepted, processed and authorised. Project leaders can then manipulate the plans and provide senior executives with management reports, which include traffic light coding for progress against; programs, projects and key milestones. They have confidence in managing the accuracy of their projects, work performance and resource allocation. The system holds common business rules and data from individual project plans is consistent, including the naming and numbering of tasks and projects, which removes the need to manually monitor key program and project criteria. Therefore, weekly reporting cycles are reduced to a fraction of time, project leaders can now spend their time leading projects rather than administering plans! They can establish a healthy balance of high value investments and ensure that projects are aligned with the strategic objectives of the organisation. They can also obtain a trail of work being carried out; where it's being done, by whom, and the associated timescales. Hydra's unique delegation function allows program managers to drill down through to individual projects, through to work packages and if required right down to individual work plans and timesheets instantly."

• Obtain full visibility of project activity and performance
• Eliminate unproductive administration tasks
• Improve cost control through streamlined processes
• Build portfolios of high value investments
• Ensure that investments are aligned with strategic objectives
• Improve management information and alerting
• Enable virtual project teams to collaborate more effectively

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