Rather than treating each individual Project for ad-hoc management, Project Portfolio Management (PPM) allows a group of projects to be treated as a Portfolio similar to an investment portfolio of stocks, bonds and mutual funds. Just like a financial portfolio, a Project portfolio performance depends on the performance of each individual component, in this case the individual projects. However, in traditional PPM tools,  the performance of a project is often manually entered either as a Project Manager’s semi-objective view or manually calculated from various metrics of the project which are gathered by different project tools. Due to lack of a meaningful integration between the PPM tool and other tools which are used  for day-to-day operations, often the most important aspects of a PPM tool remains  unused or severely compromised. Kovair Global Lifecycle addresses this serious drawback of PPM tools by having its PPM solution based on its own built-in SDLC & ALM applications and integrating with other third party tools using Kovair’s industry leading Omnibus, Integration Bus for IT™.  Kovair’s built-in Requirements Management, Change Management, Helpdesk Management or ITIL , are the applications used on a daily basis for managing development and IT operations. Having the PPM and the operational applications in the same system with the same interface has an enormous advantage which other tools typically lack. In addition Omnibus, Integration Bus for IT™ allows any other 3rd party operational tools to integrate with Kovair Global Lifecycle and have the same close ties with the Kovair PPM just like its own built-in applications.

The value of Kovair’s PPM solution is apparent in the Project Health Report. This is a “Dash Board” report for management view. Unlike other tools the report shows the metrics calculated real time based on  up to the moment operational data from the Requirements, Changes, Usecases,  and Issues. Using Kovair’s calculated fields, any metrics may be created based on an organizational need.  The colored indicators are set based on the deviation of the current metrics from the   planned threshold values.

The beauty of this report is that each of the Projects in the report is actively clickable. By clicking on a project one can drill-down into a project and further drill-down into each operational item (for example Requirements, Issues, Tests…) included in the Project and determine a problem area that needs to be addressed by the Project Manager or outsourced vendor.

Kovair’s powerful Process Automation Technology allows creating any automated process for the Projects in PPM. Optionally the projects can follow a popular Phase-Gate process as shown below.

It is possible to synchronize the Project level process to the individual processes of the operational items (for example Requirements, Issues, Tests…) included in the Project.