L5P - vPMO Overview

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vPMO Suite:
Suite Overview
Suite Components
Screen Shots

Industry Commentary

"By 2003, Global 2000 CIOs' need to enhance enterprise value will increase IT portfolio management usage, with 50% using it as a communication tool, 25% using it sporadically for risk/reward-based decision support, and only 3% employing it consistently to manage the entire enterprise as a single portfolio. Through 2006, these numbers will increase most rapidly in the first and second groups, to 80%+ and 40% respectively, but because of the organizational maturity and discipline required, only 6% will achieve consistent enterprisewide IT portfolio management."
- Meta Group

"Whether you are seeking to become proficient in forecasting or simply trying to determine which legacy systems should get the ax, a critical next step for IT leaders is to get your portfolio management houses in order."
- Computer World

Level 5 Partners developed the Virtual Program Management Office (vPMO) suite to give organizations a jump-start toward project delivery excellence. The vPMO components work smoothly together in an integrated portal environment.

A technology initiative’s progress through the project delivery lifecycle begins with the Portfolio Management Center (pre-initiative analysis), moves to the Project Delivery Center (project specification, planning, and implementation) and finally reaches the Project Continuum (system support). All aspects of the system delivery process are integrated with the Human Asset Management component (addressing staff optimization) and the GURU which is a Best Practices and knowledge management utility.

Suite Components

•	The Portfolio Management Center (PMC) is a tool for evaluating, prioritizing, and approving initiatives and bringing them inline with business strategy and IT resource constraints. The PMC is used to create a "mini-business plan" for each initiative. The plan includes a project overview, risk management plan, proposed milestones, proposed team members, return on investment analysis, and key contacts repository.
•	The Project Delivery Center (PDC) is a project repository used for project coordination, team collaboration, requirements management, system design, and testing. In essence it is an end-to-end project repository.
•	The Project Continuum (PC) is used to plan post-delivery support and maintenance. Its high-level components include Disaster Recovery Planning, Trouble Call Log, and System Documentation.
•	The Human Asset Management (HAM) is an integrated vPMO component that helps in identifying the right resource for each project role. It includes an inventory of available resources, planned non-working time, resource analysis & forecasting, and time & effort tracking.
•	The GURU Center is an integrated "Best Practices" and "Knowledge Management" reference utility designed to provide the project team with templates, knowledge tidbits, technical standards, product reviews, outside resources and links. This mind-share is valuable for promoting cross-project synergy and knowledge reuse.

What to look for in a Program Management Tool

When Level 5 Partners started helping organizations achieve delivery excellence, it became clear that an easy-to-use, comprehensive, integrated delivery toolset would drastically increase their delivery capability. We determined that a toolset that truly helped our clients would have to meet the following criteria:

•	Support Best Practices - The toolset had to support cross-methodology best practices that are at the core of all of the modern development methodologies. Examples of these best practices include frequent iterations, artifact revision control, risk management, stakeholder collaboration, early testing, and project task accountability.
•	Methodology Agnostic - The toolset had to work with all of the modern development methodologies. It had to work just as well with "Waterfall" methodology as with more recent processes such as Rational Unified Process, Extreme Programming and Agile Modeling. We designed a toolset that is able to coexist with your current process as well as work smoothly with new processes you may want to add later.
•	Economical - By far the biggest obstacle our clients had for not implementing a better delivery environment was the perceived cost. While some tools can be very expensive, we have created an extremely economical integrated PMO solution that will save you a serious amount in delivery costs.
•	Turn-Key Deployment Model - The second largest reason organizations give for not raising their delivery capability to the next level, is the effort involved in acquiring, installing, and training users on the new tools and processes. Our vPMO solution can be deployed in an ASP model, so it is usable by anyone who has an Internet connection and a browser. The integrated GURU component ensures that your users can use the tool with minimal training.
•	Non-Proprietary - While we believe that the vPMO system is the best PMO system on the market, one of the risk management best practices we promote is to avoid proprietary technologies. For this reason, the vPMO suite has been designed with a Microsoft Office export capability. All services can be directly exported to MS-Excel, MS-Word, and MS-Project(where appropriate).
•	Intuitive - In order to support the Turnkey Deployment model, the vPMO system had to be intuitive. With the context-sensitive GURU component, most users can learn to use the vPMO system with little or no training.
•	Collaborative - Users should be able to collaboratively share ideas and concepts by using the tool. This helps to reduce delivery risk by minimizing feedback time and promoting team buy-in. To meet this requirement, each data record in the vPMO system has a threaded discussion option. This enables stakeholders to continually refine requirements specification without the dreaded email threads and never-ending functional requirements document modification.
•	Customizable - Each component of the vPMO can be activated and deactivated according to your organization's needs. Each user can also be enabled or disabled for each component service. With this customization, specific information can be provided to each member of the team as needed. For example, a business stakeholder may only want to see requirements specification and status reports, but may not need to see database designs and resource forecasts.

The screen shots give a better idea of the kind of problems this tool can help you solve. If you wish, contact us to get more information. There are efficiencies to be gained in your organization, and we are here to help you realize them.