The responsibility for providing visibility across every project underway in an Enterprise often falls to the PMO. How many projects are in motion? What phase are they in and which resources are involved? How much are they costing us and how are they tracking to their budget and timelines? More importantly, are we working on the projects that are the highest value to the business?

An entire market has evolved around the methodologies & technologies used to answer those questions (and many others) called Project Portfolio Management (PPM).

“Most PPM Tools and methods attempt to establish a set of values, techniques and technologies that enable visibility, standardization, measurement and process improvement.”

The rising adoption of Agile tools and methodologies though can cause friction between the PMO and Engineering Managers who are both trying to deliver projects and applications but doing it using different methodologies, different tools, and sometimes different standards of measuring progress. This can mean that the Agile projects are incompatible or difficult to integrate with the existing PPM solution which causes blind spots for anyone using just PPM Dashboards to evaluate the portfolio. (One solution requires Agile teams to manually enter data in their Agile Project Management tool and then do it again in the corporate PPM solution. It’s an inefficient, time consuming, error prone jury rig.) As the number of Agile projects in an enterprise has been inevitably increasing, so has the size of the blind spots for PPM tools currently in use.

In just the last 6 months though, a number of PPM vendors and integrators have worked with Rally to solve this problem. The result has been the release of integrations to multiple PPM solutions of various types including Oracle, Daptiv,  Planisware. What does such a bridge provide? As Oracle put it, “The integration enables consistent visibility into the entire project portfolio minimizing unwelcome surprises, fostering better decisions, managing risk, and tracking progress.”

Rally was the first Agile solution to be integrated with all of these PPM tools and has the most integrations of any Agile vendor. This week at Agile2011, the trend continues with AgileEVM announcing their integration to Rally and our announcement that next month we will release an integration with CA Clarity.

You can read more of the topic of Agile, PPM and the PMO in recently released reports and white papers such as:

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