IT Departments – Cerri Project

Is your IT department demonstrating business value?

Drive your organization’s success through Information Technology. Strategically align your IT with corporate objectives to ensure the momentum, customer confidence, and competitive edge of your organization. Employ the right tools to better support your organization in delivering higher quality service to its stakeholders.

Get access to all the necessary IT project and portfolio reporting, tracking and execution tools supporting IT Governance, demand management, and service delivery. Get visibility into your project and portfolio lifecycles from demand to successful delivery thanks to Cerri Project’s ability to adapt to your business processes.

How you’ll benefit:

• Improved portfolio, project, and resource visibility
• Streamlined project demand
• Improved quality of service
• Projects being strategically aligned with corporate objectives
• IT Governance support

Is your IT working for you?

IT governance is a structure of processes to direct and control IT decision making and to support risk management and compliance with corporate strategy. The main objective of IT governance is to ensure that IT delivers value and to measure IT performance. IT governance is about managing technology investments; specifically, it is always validating the return on these investments and addressing alignment with organizational strategies and principles and the contribution to the overall strategic objectives.

Cerri Project makes it easy to achieve IT Governance through:

• Project Portfolio (strategic alignment)

• Cost and Budget tracking (value delivery)

• Resource management

• Risk management

• Performance measurement

The bottom line is that Cerri Project believes that the ability to direct and control the enterprise to achieve its goals while balancing risk versus return is paramount to any IT Governance plan. Businesses must make certain that IT and business alignment is achieved via a systematic, comprehensive governance process. The use of automation to reduce costs, improve visibility, and reduce if not eliminate ineffective processes within the technology portfolio is a pivotal component to success.

How do you manage being in demand?

IT departments receive an unbelievable number of requests from a variety of sources and complexities, which makes it difficult to manage priorities. It is imperative to tackle each problem at the root, to sort and define priorities right from the start. There are numerous types of requests; new ideas or project requests, change requests on existing projects, incident reports or issue reports. Cerri Project has IT demand management capabilities that lets you collect and organize these requests and even offers you tools to better define priorities.

IT demand management is, essentially, the way to manage a variety of change requests, issue reports, etc. This function lets you evaluate and rank requests according to their strategic alignment as well as importance to the requestor.

Cerri Project allows for demand management through:

• Project Requests and Workflows

• Request Tracking and Reports

• Change Requests

• Issue Reports

• Configurable Workflow and Email Notifications

Take control of your balancing act

Cerri Project is an ideal project management software for any IT department. It allows you to manage, track and improve IT department performance by providing enhanced project visibility and resource management tools. With Cerri Project, IT departments will be better equipped to face the budget and resource constraints of today by being able to closely monitor forecasted and actual labor and costs.

Cerri Project is a project and project portfolio management software that allows for complete project execution through:

• Project Planning and Scheduling (Gantt Chart)

• Resource Management

• Project Control and Tracking

• Time and Expense Tracking

• Document Management and Collaboration

• Comprehensive Budget and Forecasting

In a single environment, Cerri Project brings a comprehensive vision of your IT activities enabling better managed projects by ensuring complete control over your resource load, costs, and budgets in a collaborative environment. Cerri Project allows for resource scheduling, budget and cost management and tracking; project planning, reporting, and billing; and collaboration and document management capabilities. In addition, IT can effectively plan investments and resources mapped to their unique organizational structure.

Time Management

An IT department’s performance is the sum of its workforce’s activities. The actions of each individual affects customer satisfaction, the quality of work completed and even how well a new business process or software solution is adopted. Cerri Project provides the means to observe and measure individual and team performance through its role-based user interface, promoting participation and mentoring to enhance the overall quality of IT service delivery.

Cerri Project provides real-time views of IT service delivery so that CIOs, IT managers and line-of-business counterparts can understand the impact that IT services have on business operations.

Cerri Project helps you deliver IT services more effectively by:

• Facilitating the tracking of SLAs

• Improve operational efficiency,

• Reduce costs and increase satisfaction with IT services

• Align its services with business-critical objectives

• Record all requests for IT services and tracking

• Managing requests through prioritization, planning and execution

• Offering configurable workflows for pre-approved requests

Organizations that deploy Cerri Project can automate core processes, help control costs and manage risks, all while improving customer satisfaction and IT alignment with the business.

Budget Management

One of the biggest challenges IT department’s face is the ability to align and track budgets to both long term and short term projects. In many cases, IT budgets are attributed for each period (either per quarter or per year). The challenge is to allocate this budget to various projects and items and to divide financing for long term projects over multiple budget periods. This activity is often linked to budget reviews and approvals, which requires the ability to manage different versions of the same budget.

With Cerri Project all the elements necessary for cost and budget management of your projects are at your fingertips. Reporting, managing and the ability to have an overview of the discrepancies, provide a clear and accurate picture of budget status.

Cerri Project allows for:

• Project Cost and Budget Management

• Rate Management

• Cash Flow

• Split budget over several years, budget review

• Budgeting capabilities for IT, with multi-rate and multiple currencies

Cerri Project adapts to your budget management requirements, regardless of whether your budgets are annual, quarterly, or based on one or multiple cost centers. It allows you to track required cash flow for each project period and highlight budget drifts by measuring Project Performance vs. Budgets, Planned vs. Actual, and Expenditures vs. Estimated Work for Completion. In addition, Cerri Project can maintain multiple rate matrices in multiple currencies that establish bill and cost rates for labor, expenses, and materials.

Are you meeting your project goals?

Project performance management is about IT setting project goals, determining the metrics to measure project performance, and finally addressing performance issues and implementing strategies to make improvements. Having the best performance tracking tools at hand allows IT departments to not only deliver the highest quality of service, but also encourages continuous improvement, contributing to your organization’s overall corporate objectives.

Cerri Project empowers IT departments to:

• Track project progress and cost against key critical success factors

• Alerts project managers of pending issues, risks, and project activities

• Measure and track demand

• Track resource’s availability and ability to meet project deadlines

• Setup Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track activities across project

• Measure ROI and strategic alignment of projects and portfolios

Managing the People behind the Code

Probably more than any other project environment, to deliver successful results, software development groups must meticulously monitor, track and document every aspect of their projects. More importantly, the approach through which projects are designed and delivered must include a strategy that incorporates the inevitable reality of emerging issues and changes that are common to most software development projects.

Cerri Project empowers project managers and team leaders who regularly face the challenges of change and visibility into their software development teams and projects. Whether software development projects are core to your business or a segment of your IT activities, Cerri Project delivers an enterprise PPM platform supporting your project and portfolio management strategy. It aligns strategy to the processes and daily activities that occupy your software development team. With Cerri Project you will be able to better manage your software projects from conception to delivery while improving the collaboration among stakeholders all along the way.

Cerri Project will help your software development group:

• Support your software development process, such as Agile and Scrum methodologies

• Manage your portfolio and customer demand

• Track project budgets, costs, activities and assignments

• Optimize resource utilization and loading

• Provide a platform to collaborate and share project information and documents

• Track issue reports and change requests

• Deliver Help Desk support capabilities tied to project activities

Cerri Project’s professional service group delivers best practices in portfolio management, project management, business process management, IT service management, and Agile methodologies. Our services team provides a consultative approach in training and configuring Cerri Project to meet the unique needs of your software development group, ensuring that our PPM solutions map to your business strategies, functions, and activities.