Subscribe

Business needs process-PPM integration

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Johannesburg, 25 Oct 2012
It can be disastrous for an organisation if PPM and business processes are not integrated, says Kenneth MacGregor, CTO at Eluminary.
It can be disastrous for an organisation if PPM and business processes are not integrated, says Kenneth MacGregor, CTO at Eluminary.

Organisations need to integrate their processes with project portfolio management (PPM) as there have been significant changes to the view of PPM.

So said Kenneth MacGregor, CTO at Eluminary, speaking during a Process, Portfolio and Project Management seminar in Johannesburg yesterday.

Defining a project, MacGregor noted, is a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product, service or result.

"In most companies, the project is 'a container' used to deliver software. Project management is only part of the product lifecycle," he said.

On the other hand, he said a process is a set of interrelated actions and activities performed to achieve a pre-specified product, result, or service.

"Process indicates how things should be done; PPM actually does it. Thus, there is a need an alignment between the two.

Describing how a business process starts until it reaches the stage of maturity, MacGregor said during the initial stages of a process, a business simply repeats certain actions in its operations and in most cases, this is not documented as a company procedure. In the second stage, he added, the process is at least formally documented.

According to MacGregor, in the third stage, the process is defined and confirmed as a standard business process. The fourth stage involves the process being deliberately managed in accordance with agreed upon metrics and in the final stage, process management includes deliberate process optimisation or improvement.

MacGregor also noted that it can be disastrous for an organisation if these two are not integrated mainly because some processes may not be internal and may conform to international requirements. Moreover, he added, standards bodies do not specify a process.

"Every company has processes all of which govern the action of and within the company. These processes may be specified in a manual; workflow mechanism; or in the corporate database."

Nonetheless, he is of the view that irrespective of how is the process is specified, projects still have to follow the 'approved process.'

"They should understand how the process is integrated into the PPM methodology and how compliance is ensured to the process."

However, he pointed out that users are not interested in projects but capabilities, adding that a capability is a user interface with some associated output and is not concerned with where the software exists.

"Today products and projects are constantly being changed," said MacGregor. "According to Gartner, current methodologies are based on large expenditure and long execution time. However, IT must adapt to shorter time spans to execute projects and to recover costs."

Share