There is no right or wrong answer. In NWC Inc.'s case, we organized projects on the basis of what strategic objective a project served: customer service, supply-chain management support or internal infrastructure support. Determining this structure, however, requires business-IT cooperation.
Although regular IT and business staff don't need to worry about the deeper financial aspects of project management, IT managers and system implementers/administrators will need to configure such things as NPV (net present value) calculations, financial metrics, cost centers and (hey, you, wake up!) discount rates. The assistance of anyone who understands these figures will be necessary and, we anticipate, appreciated.
After taking each product through our scenarios, we gave our Editor's Choice Award to Changepoint's Portfolio Management 8.01. With its out-of-the-box collaboration and the ability to capture intangible benefits, such as customer satisfaction and peer-performance indicators through its survey features, Changepoint's product provided more automation and collaborative benefits than the competition. We not only could automate planning and prioritization, but we also had a mechanism for soliciting feedback from clients. Although all the products we tested will integrate with Microsoft Project for time reporting, Changepoint's IPM (Individual Performance Metrics) offered a method of encouraging compliance with time-reporting policies so as to lead to higher adoption rates and better data quality.
In this product, the eye candy is not only flashy, it's also highly useful. This highly customizable, secure solution offers an easy-to-navigate, well-organized, Web-based user interface for both IT and business staff. We found its fully searchable knowledge-management system extremely useful, too.
Changepoint PM provides a wide variety of customization options, as well as a portal from which clients can interact with the system and the IT department. PM was a clear winner, with its ability to provide alerts and notifications for such details as new requests, approvals, completed tasks and project assignments throughout a project life cycle.
After logging in to the system, the user sees a personalizable "home page" that offers at-a-glance status of projects, assigned tasks--such as approval of requests and project-level items--that need attention, and a menu of options for managing time sheets, expenses and interaction with other IT staff and business counterparts.
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