Requirements Management & Analysis

Control Your IT Demand!

Control your IT demand

A Successful Approach to Business Intelligence (BI) is Difficult!

Submitted by Hans Lodder on Tue, 09/12/2008 - 11:47

BI is a multidisciplinary art. In a recent article Forrester presents a BI process overview. Central to this report is a drawing that relates everything to everything, demonstrating the BI process complexity. You should study it carefully!

Goodbye SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), Hello EDA (Event Driven Architecture) (or Hype after Hype, after...

Submitted by Hans Lodder on Tue, 02/12/2008 - 16:36

It seems that SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is out, and the new hype is called EDA (Event Driven Architecture). That makes me wonder in what way this will change the world. 71% of the projects fail, a figure that is rather constant over the years. And EDA is going to change this…

Project Portfolio Management Approach

A standard implementation project for Project Portfolio Management looks like this:

  • Project intake;
  • Extensive assessment;
  • Go / No go milestone;
  • Pathfinder;
  • Roll out program.

Project Portfolio Management Roles, Training, Coaching and Required Experience

Each task to be undertaken needs qualified personnel. A portfolio management project is in this sense not different from others. Important roles are the:

  • Decision maker
  • Project manager
  • Domain expert (one per important domain)
  • Workshop facilitator
  • Workshop scribe
  • Business analyst

How To Start Project Portfolio Management

The best way to start with Portfolio Management is implementing a life example. Otherwise the benefits will remain abstract, and an endless discussion will be the result.

Now there is always a common idea where the benefits would be the largest. So invite the decision maker and the most important persons involved to a kick-off workshop. That makes sure the the persons who suffer most will get enthusiastic by solving a problem that really bothers them.

What Is Project Portfolio Management

Portfolio Management is making sure that you optimize the revenue potential while keeping as low as possible on resource usage.

Project Portfolio Management makes it possible to use your IT as an assessment. It facilitates:

  • Planning;
  • Controlling;
  • Managing;
  • Reporting.

Project Portfolio Management Examples

An example of Project Portfolio Management (PPM) might help to demonstrate the benefits of such a PPM business process. Therefore we present you with some examples:

  • A very large bank and insurance concern spends 2.5 billion Euro's each year on ICT. The question arises if the Return On Investment (ROI) is known for each project. Projects with an ROI of more than 4 years are killed. This is estimated to be 150 million Euro's per year.

Checking and Enhancing Information and Data Quality

Over time business changes. This implies that business processes change, the people as well as the systems. Also, a business is multi-disciplinary, which implies that there are many viewpoints for the same aspect.

This leads slowly to what is called data pollution. Can we solve data pollution? And how?

Business Case Requirements Management

Did you ever realized how many projects fail, and how this occurs?

Forrester reports on poor requirements (2006) a survey of the Standish Group's 1994 Chaos Report. Standish found, querying over 352 companies reporting on over 8,000 software projects, that the top three project impairment factors were:

  • Lack of user input (12.8% of respondents);
  • Incomplete requirements and specifications (12.3%);
  • Changing requirements and specifications (11.8).

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