A one-platform approach for IT Service Management and your Project Portfolio Management (PPM) makes the most sense. Within organizations, there are resources and people that work on service, change management and problems, while also working on projects and operational work. It wouldn’t make sense for us to look at a resource as only being useful for one task, whether it be something service-related or project-related.
Consolidation is happening throughout organizations and using one platform for ITSM and PPM is one way to improve service delivery with limited resources.
One significant benefit of bringing the two together is resource management and capacity planning. In a typical IT department, they deal with a variety of things like incidents, service requests, projects and changes. With people working across these four work streams, capacity has to be managed very specifically in order to first, support the needs of the business through the ITSM side, but also, deliver the projects, because that’s what drives business forward.
A project, by nature, either replaces a service, fundamentally changes a service, or is a new service that is being added. So, when you think about the lifecycle of a service, PPM has a large role in it. Acting like ITSM and PPM are unrelated will cause your organization to go through unnecessary steps and lead to wasted time.
The City of Sunnyvale, CA is using a single platform approach and seeing great benefits.
“Before TeamDynamix the work was managed essentially by memory,” Dhiren Gandhi, applications and analytics manager said. Kathleen Boutte, Chief Information Officer, said the system they had in place for ticketing and managing IT assets prior to TeamDynamix was very antiquated.
“It was very difficult for us to understand where our resources were, how we were using our people. We needed better reporting, we needed visibility of staff and resource management, but we also needed better asset management,” she said. “We were managing assets on spreadsheets and different systems, if anyone asked how many PCs we have in the city it would take us a few moments to gather that information and give an answer.”
With TeamDynamix in place, Boutte said they now have all of that information and more at the click of a button.
Hema Nekkanti, project management office manager, touts the benefits of bringing IT Service Management (ITSM) and Project Portfolio Management (PPM) together on a single platform, “With one platform now we can actually see the tickets that are being worked on as well as the projects that are in the pipeline,” she said. “This gives us the ability to actually allocate the resources appropriately, and there’s no resource conflict.”
Eddie Soliven, infrastructure services manager, finds great value in the dashboards provided within the TeamDynamix platform. Nekkanti agrees, “The dashboards are the coolest things in TeamDynamix, I enjoy creating them as well as using them,” she said. Nekkanti said she and her team use the dashboards internally to view projects in the pipeline as well as tickets.
