Why IT Service Management and Project Portfolio Management Belong Together

Having Project Portfolio Management and IT Service Management on a single, codeless platform can bring several benefits, including:

1. Seamless integration: With both PPM and ITSM on the same platform, it becomes easier to integrate processes and data between the two areas. This can reduce duplication of effort and improve collaboration between project teams and IT support staff.

2. Improved visibility: A single platform can provide greater visibility across both PPM and ITSM, enabling organizations to more easily track and manage projects and IT services in one place. This can lead to better decision-making and faster problem resolution.

3. Increased efficiency: By having both PPM and ITSM on the same platform, organizations can streamline processes and eliminate silos. This can improve efficiency and productivity, as well as reduce costs associated with managing multiple tools and platforms.

4. Better resource allocation: With a single platform, organizations can more easily manage and allocate resources across projects and IT services. This can help ensure that resources are being used effectively and efficiently.

5. Improved customer satisfaction: A unified platform can help organizations deliver projects and IT services more quickly and effectively, which can lead to improved customer satisfaction.

One of the most impactful benefits of using a single platform for ITSM and PPM is that you can better understand your resource capabilities and engage in true resource capacity planning.

With resource capacity planning you get a big-picture view of your entire IT organization allowing you to balance workloads across projects and support services, and to see the different types of work that need to be done at any given time.

For example, if you have three IT technicians that need to cover three functional areas of business – like service, projects and operations – you can engage in resource capacity planning and optimize each technician’s workload based on their skill set and their availability. As a result, the work can be completed more effectively and efficiently as each technician is focused on work that plays to their strengths. And because you have a full view of the work and the time it will take; you can avoid overcommitting or underutilizing the resources available.

This approach is especially useful when you have limited resources, but an increase in demand for the support of remote learning and remote workforces. “We don’t have enough IT professionals, anywhere – there’s a huge drain and we’re all experiencing this,” Angela Neria, CIO of Pittsburg State University, said in a recent interview with TeamDynamix.

By having that single view of all projects and resources, companies are better equipped to face these challenges head-on.

At Covenant HealthCare, CIO Frank Fear talks about the importance of transparency, and how combining ITSM and PPM has helped him better his organization, “I have my own CIO dashboard and in one look I can see any negative survey that’s come in the last 24 hours, then pivot over and look at any project that has a status of red that needs my attention, then pivot over and look at what’s going live in the next 30 days, then pivot over and see what critical tickets have come in from the help desk that maybe affect our entire organization.”

Fear also uses the dashboards in daily huddles with his team to set priorities and see what needs to be done, “I can report on our key strategic projects and see which project requests are coming in and be able to report status on those very cleanly and clearly through dashboards. I’m able to communicate to the organization the value that all these IT dollars are delivering.”