IBM: Jazz for Software Project Management

 01 Jun 2009

At the 2009 Rational Software Conference, IBM detailed new products and services to help organizations more effectively align their business strategies with their investments in software. The new offerings are designed to help clients lower costs and reduce risks by providing increased visibility into the status of software projects and the ability to monitor and improve the performance of these investments. Additionally, IBM will be previewing several of its software delivery products in a cloud environment, giving clients an early look at how they can minimize costs while freeing up resources for investments in new projects.

With the Jazz technology platform serving as the basis for implementing today’s new products and enhancements, IBM continues to help clients deploy flexible business processes to improve cross-organizational collaboration.

In challenging economic times, making uninformed decisions can lead to costly mistakes that businesses can’t afford to fix. Yet 77% of managers continue to be aware of bad decisions being made due to a lack of access to accurate information.* To prevent this from continuing, organizations need to view their investments in software as strategic business assets, and therefore make better informed decisions based on the current status of these software projects and the evolving needs of their businesses.

With these client needs in mind, IBM today is introducing IBM Rational Insight, a new investment and project management solution designed to help business leaders measure and manage team performance and project results across an entire organization. Built using IBM Cognos software, Rational Insight provides metrics and dashboards that help businesses quickly find and focus on cross-organizational issues that delay or derail software and systems projects, ensure the right people are collaborating, and then take real-time action to continuously improve results.

However, having measurable and manageable capabilities means nothing if organizations can’t apply improved visibility and governance to turn insights into actionable results. Today, 59% of business projects fail to achieve one cost, time or scope objective, or fail entirely. In an effort to help organizations better deliver desired business outcomes, IBM is introducing a beta program for IBM Rational Focal Point for Project Management, a new solution designed to reduce the delays and mistakes that hinder software projects from meeting the needs of the business. With Jazz serving as the underlying platform, Rational Focal Point for Project Management can improve business outcomes and manage changing priorities by enabling communications, workflow and collaboration across geographical and organizational boundaries.

According to a recent survey, only 22% of executives felt that their IT and business strategies were tightly integrated. Organizations must enable their IT and product development teams to more effectively execute against strategic plans at lower cost and risk to their business so they are better able to satisfy stakeholders. Through new enhancements and integrations to IBM Rational Focal Point for Product and Portfolio Management, IBM Rational Requirements Composer, IBM Rational Team Concert, and IBM Rational System Architect, IBM is helping a broad set of constituents -- from business leaders to software delivery teams -- prioritize projects and related IT investments. New upgrades to IBM Rational Team Concert also help an organization efficiently execute on their improved plans, regardless of the organizational and geographical boundaries of its team.

Additionally, with IBM’s new Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF), organizations can also take actions to continuously improve on results by learning from past experiences. Through MCIF, IBM provides organizations with an end-to-end framework that enables them to measure results and manage projects so they can incrementally improve their software delivery capability.

“In today’s economic climate, businesses are looking for new ways to derive greater value from their investments in software,” said Dr. Daniel Sabbah, general manager, IBM Rational Software. “Up until this point, organizations have been lax in measuring the business value and discipline of the processes they use to deliver software assets. Classic metrics in software engineering largely ignore the importance of actual business outcomes. Our clients are now beginning to realize that the software they build or assemble must be treated as a strategic business asset. IBM is committed to helping them make the right decisions and improve the successful outcomes of this newly emerging business process discipline.”

As IBM expands its cloud computing capabilities, it will also be previewing a new set of Rational services that help design, test and deploy software assets into the cloud. IBM Rational Software Delivery Services for the Cloud will provide all the benefits of software as a service, including lower total cost of ownership, instant scalability, faster deployment, and increased productivity, with the added benefit of Cloud virtualization and flexible pricing. Several demonstrations of these new services will be shown at the Rational Software Conference, with formal technology previews planned for late June.