CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
18 November 2008
Product News
New CA Clarity PPM v12 Delivers Requirements Planning to Address the Most Common Cause of Project Failures
CA introduced a major new version of CA Clarity PPM to help organizations improve IT governance, reduce the high rate of project failures and extend the benefits of project and portfolio management (PPM) into other areas of the enterprise.
CA Clarity PPM v12 adds capabilities to streamline the planning and tracking of requirements, improve collaboration with project and portfolio stakeholders through the most popular collaboration tool, Microsoft SharePoint, and leverage the market-leading functionality of the system outside of IT. Significant improvements in functionality, integration and automation work together to enable IT executives to better engage with their business stakeholders and IT managers to drive greater efficiency within IT, in project planning, resource management and financial accounting.
“Especially in times of economic uncertainty, business leaders aim to gain the most ROI from their mission-critical IT investments,” said Helge Scheil, corporate senior vice president and general manager, Governance Group, CA. “This new version of CA Clarity PPM delivers to all levels of the enterprise—from CIOs and business executives to project managers and team members—unparalleled visibility into portfolios and requirements, improved efficiency in project delivery, and faster time to value.”
Longtime PPM customer Novell, the provider of SUSE Linux Enterprise, has benefited from hands-on testing of CA Clarity PPM v12 as part of the CA beta program.
“Executing projects efficiently and successfully is a top priority for our organization, given the many products we provide our customers,” said Jeff Jaffe, chief technology officer and executive vice presidents of Products, Novell. “After careful evaluation, we already see several new features in CA Clarity PPM v12 that we know will help elevate project success rates. In particular, we're interested in how the requirements planning capability gives our organization the ability to contribute and then know the status of their requirements throughout the life of major projects.”
The most important features of CA Clarity PPM v12 include:
Holistic Requirements Planning
To bridge the gap between strategic planning and project execution, CA has integrated requirements planning into its PPM solution. For the first time, PPM users can capture requirements from their customers, translate business requirements into actionable IT deliverables and detailed product roadmaps, and provide requirements traceability throughout the project lifecycle.
Providing requirements planning in CA Clarity PPM allows organizations to replace the use of multiple spreadsheets and disconnected systems to track requirements, which previously led to poor communication, poor visibility, unrealized expectations and ultimately, failed projects.
Improving the requirements planning process is critical to project success. According to a study by IAG Consulting, companies with poor business analysis and requirements capability will have three times as many project failures as successes. The study also found that companies pay as much as a 60 percent premium on time and budget when they use poor requirements practices on their projects.
Integrations for Business Intelligence
To engage stakeholders and promote improved engagement, CA Clarity PPM v12 now integrates seamlessly with the most popular collaboration tool, Microsoft SharePoint, and with the most popular reporting and business intelligence solution, Business Objects.
With direct integration to SharePoint, project managers, stakeholders and IT executives can seamlessly collaborate atop a familiar Web 2.0 platform to get updates and work together on project scope, plans, documents and action items.
Integration with Business Objects enables users to easily create and tailor BI reports using CA Clarity PPM data in a pre-built environment. CA Clarity PPM v12 ships with pre-configured Business Objects reports and a pre-defined universe for easy custom report creation.
Accelerators to Extend the Adoption of PPM beyond IT
CA Clarity PPM v12 includes modules that facilitate PPM software use outside of the IT department, specifically for new product development (NPD) and for compliance with U.S. federal government mandates.
With pre-configured idea-to-launch and product portfolio management capabilities to develop and create new products efficiently, CA Clarity PPM for NPD accelerates product innovation, optimizes resources and drives product success.
Incorporating advanced earned value management and reporting in CA Clarity PPM v12 helps U.S. federal agencies and their prime contractors comply with mandates for ANSI/EIA-748-A reporting. This new capability in CA’s solution for U.S. federal agencies adds to the existing support for OMB reporting and federal program management.
CA Clarity PPM v12 incorporates numerous enhancements requested by the nearly 1,000 customers actively using the software. The new version will be available to existing and new customers for electronic delivery, and through CA’s new CA Clarity PPM On Demand service, on November 25, 2008.
CA Clarity PPM v12 is another example of how CA Enterprise IT Management solutions help organizations drive business value from IT and effectively improve IT economics. With CA solutions in place, such as CA Clarity PPM v12, customers are able to respond more quickly and efficiently to changing conditions and capitalize on emerging business opportunities. The solutions that CA is announcing at CA World 2008 help lower the total cost of ownership of IT by providing faster time-to-value and reducing IT costs through better integration, automation and control.
About CA Clarity PPM
CA Clarity PPM, an industry-leading project and portfolio management solution, enables public and private sector IT organizations to achieve world-class performance by improving the quality of their engagement with their stakeholders and enhancing their ability to run at peak efficiency. The CA Clarity PPM system features integrated IT portfolio planning, demand management, project management, resource planning and time, cost and earned value management. More than 800,000 users at more than 900 companies depend on CA Clarity PPM to govern IT and, increasingly, to manage new product development (NPD). For more information on CA Clarity PPM, please visit www.myclarity.com.
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