What advice do you have for others considering Micro Focus Project and Portfolio Management (PPM)?

While OpenText Project and Portfolio Management is a good project and portfolio management tool and performs well, I would recommend it to others. However, it is not a perfect ten. My overall rating of this solution is nine out of ten.

The solution has the same level of integration capabilities as competitor tools. OpenText Project and Portfolio Management exhibit wide capabilities for reporting. The product has an AI engine that allows an user to create reports in varying formats from a remote location. There are also certain configuration capabilities in the product that mimic BI tools. In comparison to other tools in the market, OpenText Project and Portfolio Management is one of the most flexible and powerful tools available. The product also has a robust dashboard and recording features. The reports in the tool can be created and exported in almost any relevant format such as Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Word and HTML. Native corporate designs, dashboards and additional customizations can be integrated in the tool as well. I would overall rate the product an eight out of ten. I think it's very important to have clear processes defined in the organization in order to experience a smooth product transition and there should be support from the management executive to implement tools like OpenText Project and Portfolio Management. It's common for any kind of digital transformation and tool implementation to fail without executive support. There should be proper collaboration and agreement within the organization using OpenText Project and Portfolio Management. For instance, to implement the product in reality, there can be some kind of resistance, and this is why the right tool adoption is crucial. Regarding the implementation of OpenText Project and Portfolio Management, I would suggest others be onboard in an incremental process by focusing on the quick wins and urgent challenges and keep improving. I believe that, as per the market trend, every PPM tool will embed artificial intelligence. OpenText has already onboarded the trend and announced the release of a massive AI cloud. The vendor has its own AI engine embedded in OpenText Project and Portfolio Management and other tools from the vendor as well. The product brings multiple benefits to an organization through increased transparency, visibility on projects, tasks, and capacity, and also showcases financial spending patterns or budget savings. OpenText Project and Portfolio Management is able to increase the overall productivity of the organization and also measure it through certain benchmarks.

I rate Micro Focus Project and Portfolio Management a seven out of ten. Every organization needs a project management tool. However, you should apply a cost-benefit analysis before adopting any product. Micro Focus PPM might be too expensive for some organizations, but it's flexible and offers customized hybrid configurations.

I rate Micro Focus PPM a nine out of ten. To implement PPM, you need a dedicated team to learn and provide support. They need to build knowledge and work hand in hand with the partner vendor. In our case, its configurations and other highly technical aspects stay with a partner vendor because they are the experts. We left the development and configuration to them. Our support team, which I belong to, focuses on the end-user experience, and we support them. We act as consultants to the end users. I think that's a good model. If we take on the technical part in-house, we would need to build those technical capabilities again when there are changes within the team, like people leaving or moving to other roles. Instead, we rely on the partner vendor for expertise.

We have integrated the solution with Jira and it was easy to do and use the two platforms. We have also integrated it with Micro Focus ALM for application life cycle management and that was easy as well. We are new to the Agile process so we're still in the testing phase of this transformation. But management has embraced it. My advice is to build your procedures and workflows well from day one so that you don't face any issues with the modules. Changes in the workflows take time.

Micro Focus Project and Portfolio Management offers great functionality in the project management space and other end-to-end functionality. Whatever you, as an organization, need for the implementation of project management, PPM offers it, so go ahead and use this tool. But as far as reporting is concerned, implementing project management is not sufficient, you will have to report the data from it to senior management. Don't rely on PPM for reporting. You will have to come up with an external tool or some other platform to build reports on.

I've had several other groups come to me about using PPM and the ability to customize it and make it work for them could make it a great solution, depending on what their processes are. I normally push them towards it, if they're looking to automate and get away from any kind of paper-based processes, or to get them out of using multiple systems. PPM is a great tool, but it's like exercise or eating: You get out of it what you put into it. There's a fine level of detail that you could put into it that can make the solution really work for you. If you're not going to apply that, you're not going to get the most viable solution. PPM is one of those tools where more is better, in the beginning, to allow you to do less once you have everything implemented.

Use it out of the box in the beginning, and don't change it too much or make it too complex. On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Micro Focus Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) at eight.

I would suggest that in the first year of implementation try to keep it simple and keep close to best practices. One of the main mistakes companies have made in the past is to replace the best industrial-based practices with their own technics and this doesn't always work and they end up migrating problems and issues, that may be part of the internal culture moved to the new platform. I would advise soft adoption and incrementally in distributing the use of the tool across the company. Every solution can be improved so I would rate this product an eight out of 10.