Team Collaboration, Better Resource Management and Analytics,
Growth of SaaS Put Spotlight on On-Demand Project Portfolio Management Applications in 2008

Emerging as a “Must Have” Application for Mid-size and Large Enterprises

Key trends emerging in late 2007 and 2008 include the increased need for collaboration inside and outside the enterprise; the desire for deeper real-time resource management and analysis; and the continued and explosive growth of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. These trends place the spotlight on on-demand Project Portfolio Management (PPM), which is emerging as a must-have enterprise application in 2008, says Keith Carlson, CEO of on-demand PPM provider Innotas (www.innotas.com).

On-demand PPM applications are changing the way organizations approve, plan and deliver projects inside and outside the enterprise, and are significantly increasing and improving ROI on project investments.

“PPM has followed in the footsteps of CRM and ERP by transitioning from a ‘nice to have’ into a ‘must have.’ In the private sector, PPM has become a competitive necessity, especially within industries where time-to-market, quality and cost control are key success factors. In the public sector, PPM improves financial accountability for programs and projects, and gives management a new level of visibility into project and resource status,” says Carlson.

For 2008, Carlson identifies seven key trends that will drive the continued growth of on-demand PPM applications in mid-size and large enterprises:

1. Team Collaboration: SaaS PPM applications are designed from scratch to operate securely over the web, which means that teams within and across different organizational boundaries can easily access their application and real-time information. PPM applications also provide appropriate levels of user visibility and controls without sacrificing security - important advantages of using a PPM solution instead of a traditional Project Management solution.

2. Collaboration across Organizations: Projects often require the participation of different organizations with different reporting structures. This can create significant challenges to a project, and to the project portfolio. SaaS PPM is ideally suited to solve these challenges because new team members can be added easily, and can be assigned unlimited hierarchy levels to support both simple and complex organizations and reporting requirements. Moreover, PPM solutions are beginning to drive more and more collaborative capabilities that are fully integrated into the work plan and reporting systems, so that the solution captures knowledge and information and makes it available to broader audiences in real time.

3. PPM Domains and Standardized Implementations: Similar to the fact that there are best practices for configuring a chart of accounts for financial accounting, best practices are now emerging for implementing PPM applications that mitigate both risk and cost. One emerging best practice is the ability to break down PPM into “domains” that enable organizations to manage, prioritize, and deliver projects more efficiently.

4. Deeper Analytics: PPM applications now provide more meaningful analytics to all layers of management. In 2008 look for SaaS PPM to incorporate push automation so that all team members will have access to the PPM information that is most meaningful to them.

5. Web Services: PPM applications need to integrate with other applications in order to house and communicate all project information – status, financial, resource, etc. – to key project constituents. Web Services provide a compelling alternative to traditional integration approaches because they enable new applications to be connected to PPM apps via a single API, they are publicly available over the Internet, and they are highly standardized. Web Services style integration over the public Internet will remove a great deal of the idiosyncratic nature of point-to-point integration that exists today, reducing cost, improving reliability and accelerating the ability to connect applications in a meaningful way.

6. The Web as a Service: With more and more services coming online every

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