The Business Driven PMO

This year the Daptiv team attended Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2012 in Orlando for the world’s biggest industry conference focused on IT leaders with over 8,000 senior IT executives (including 2,000 CIOs). Here are some of our takeaways from the Gartner sessions at the event:

(1) Nexus of Forces: Gartner predicted the need for senior IT and business executives to re-imagine business as the result of a powerful nexus of forces — mobile, social, cloud and information. This Nexus of Forces reflects how people want to interact with each other and their information and will make many existing IT architectures, organizational structures and IT strategies obsolete. Gartner forecast that there would be 5 billion mobile devices by 2015 and an 18% annual growth of cloud-based solutions leading up to 2016.

(2) Four Styles of Strategic EPMOs: Donna Fitzgerald from Gartner gave a presentation discussing the four styles of EPMOs: (i) Strategic EPMOs, (ii) Business Transformation Offices, (iii) Reporting PMOs and (iv) Operational PMOs. The styles of PMOs reflect whether the PMO’s business context is business transformation or steady-state, and whether they or facilitating or controlling the resources in an organization. Donna predicted that in the next 24 months 60% of the Fortune 1000 will establish one of the 4 styles of an EMPO driven by financial accountability and continued issues with project coordination across silos.

(3) Gamification: Gartner predicted by 2015, 40% of Global 1000 organizations will use gamification as the primary mechanism to transform business operations. Gamifiication is the use of game mechanics in non-entertainment environments to motivate a change in participant behavior. Tactics include progress bars, rewards for effort, feedback and multiple long-term and short-term aims. Elise Olding gave an example of a digital media company that implemented a gamified project management tool with rewards for entering accurate status of projects in flight.

(5) PPM Tools – A New Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Based PPM Services: Dan Stang discussed the new Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Based PPM Services in the ITxpo theatre. The underlying infrastructure of these services is cloud computing — scalable IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to external customers using Internet technologies. Dan outlined some of the benefits of cloud-based PPM services, including less time-to-value, less financial commitment and risk and the ability to rapidly configure, adopt and consume PPM capabilities. You can view the full Gartner MQ document here.

As you can see in the photo, our booth was front and center in the PPM show floor area. We met almost 200 PPM practitioners at the booth and had great conversations with attendees from all over the world. Our next Gartner event is Symposium/ITxpo in the Gold Coast, Australia 12^th-15^thNovember.

Gartner recently released the 2012 Gartner PPM Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Based Project and Portfolio Management Services. This magic quadrant is focused on the needs of PPM leaders to improve speed, accuracy and agility, while managing risks and costs. It profiles vendors that are providing disruptive technologies — cloud and software as a service (SaaS) — to support these needs.

In addition to the vendor analysis, Gartner identified four key trends they are seeing in the PPM marketplace:

1.    PPM Sweet Spot

Gartner has observed a growing trend of organizations focusing on enhancing the collaboration,communication and reporting that targets the information flow between the project manager (the one responsible for managing and monitoring the work) and the project sponsor (the one asking for the work). Sweet spot communication and reporting require a “just enough” approach to the level of detail required to fit the audience. For instance, key tasks or milestones or phases might be tracked, but the sweet spot does not venture any deeper into more detailed PPM activities.

 2.    PPM and Agile Development Support

With the rise of agile development, PPM applications are supporting some of the communication, collaboration and reporting nuances associated with agile development methods, such as Scrum. A typical project portfolio includes different project types based on a wide range of methodologies, including waterfall, hybrid agile/iterative and more sophisticated agile variants for new product development. PPM solutions are now supporting more integrations to providers such as Atlassian and its issue and bug tracking Jira product, as well as Rally and its products that support agile development.

3.    PPM, Social Networking and Collaboration

Gartner notes that social networking and collaboration in the PPM context seem more like fads that could fade away someday, rather than become a legitimate mainstay PPM capability. Enterprise collaboration and communication tools, including issue tracking, threaded discussions, synchronization, integration to and from email systems and applications, and other mechanisms that have been staples of PPM software products for years. With the rise of Salesforce.com’s Chatter, Jive and Yammer that could change if something more meaningful and useful evolves from this introduction of social networking and collaboration in PPM software.

4.    PPM and Mobile Device Support

Finally, PPM providers are using HTML5 to connect a PPM system to a number of mobile devices, including tablets and smartphones. PPM providers are focused on delivering three main mobile capabilities to their customers early: (1) Time reporting, allowing end users to report their time from mobile devices into the PPM system, (2) The ability to approve items within a process flow of a PPM system, and (3) Executive reporting to mobile devices, so end users (for example, business managers or project managers) can access and view reports and dashboards from their tablets or smartphones.

You can view a full copy of the 2012 Gartner PPM Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Based Project and Portfolio Management Services at http://www.daptiv.com/gartner-ppm-magic-quadrant.htm