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Month: March 2022

Ace Up Strategic Decisions Using Kovair PPM
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Introduction


Time, cost, and resource are the biggest management challenges in any project. Cost and effort estimation becomes a gamble without proper insights on project progress. Too often, managers make decisions based on the ongoing customer inputs or the instructions provided by business heads. It is important that decision makers get proper factual data to make the right investment decisions regarding critical information about the portfolios, projects, resources, budget, cost, and risks
  • Which project to invest based on the current availability of time, budget, and resource?
  • Are the project goals realistic and aligned with current IT investments?
  • How to track and measure plan vs. execution details?
  • How is the flow of supply of resources against the demands of resources by different Projects?
  • What is the trend of risks vs ROI (Return on Investment) in the different projects undertaken to align with the strategic initiatives of the organization?
Decision making becomes extremely difficult and goes haywire if resources, time, and cost are used in wrong and unplanned initiatives. Hence portfolio decisions have to be taken based on real-time project data to avoid deadlines slippage, severe project failures and major financial loss.

Kovair Project Portfolio Management

Kovair Project Portfolio Management is a one-stop solution to optimize your project portfolios, furnish demands on available capacity, define plans, and allocate resources for project execution. Defining strategic initiatives, deciding and approving appropriate projects, providing deeper insights into projects and portfolios through Earned Value Management – EVMs, displaying health of projects in terms of cost and effort are some of the key capabilities of Kovair PPM. It provides you with real-time data and increased visibility to help you make correct investment decisions aligning with the strategic goals of the organization.
Through its single unified platform, Kovair PPM allows to manage budget, schedule, resources, and actuals, connecting the dots of planning to execution. It enables Portfolio Managers to optimize project portfolios, balance capacity against project demands, and links plans and resources to the actual project execution.
Kovair’s unified and comprehensive PPM helps you analyze and prioritize for the market in delivering quality products on time and within budget.
Kovair's unified and comprehensive PPM

Bridging the Gulf of PPM and ALM

In a typical scenario, Project & Portfolio Managers use disparate systems to monitor and report on overall progress and delivery of Projects. Without synergy among these tools, consolidated and meaningful reporting becomes difficult and hence create constraints in taking portfolio decisions to address key market requirements.
Beyond PPM capabilities, Kovair also manages application lifecycle from ideation to development to delivery stages. With its built-in Application Lifecycle Management – ALM capabilities, Kovair provides an integrated PPM – ALM solution for organizations that want to manage their enterprise portfolio, projects, and products from a centralized application. Kovair PPM and ALM combined together provide an integrated work environment for managing Project, Program, Portfolio, Requirements, Test Cases, Defects, Tasks, Timesheets, Risks, Releases, Help Desk and IT operations – the end-to-end governance on portfolio, project and application lifecycle and effectively manages the ongoing micro-and macro level changes across the projects and application lifecycle as a whole.

Kovair PPM Key Features

Pre-Project Initiation Phase, Approval and Feedbacks

Kovair PPM provides complete visibility to the Portfolio of Objects – Programs, Project Ideas / Opportunities, Proposals, and Contracts. Specific users from the resource pool are assigned to the Program. On one hand it allows to gather, track and manage internal Project Ideas from various sources and on the other allows to track opportunities from external Prospects and Customers.
Entity Hierarchy at the Portfolio Level
Entity Hierarchy at the Portfolio Level
Every Project Idea / Opportunity moves through an approval process. Kovair PPM provides Task based workflow mechanisms by which the various teams can engage to do reviews and provide approval. Kovair provides an entity management framework that allows to define appropriate entities to record all customer inputs, feedbacks, market / tech landscape, etc. while going through the execution of a Project.
Workflow for Project Idea Review and Approval
Workflow for Project Idea Review and Approval

Project Planning and Recording the Time Spent

Kovair PPM has a built-in Task Scheduler that allows Project managers to create a Project Plan, allocate resources to each of the WBS items defined in the Project Plan. The Scheduler is tightly coupled with Project Calendar honoring company holidays and weekend day-offs. A visual representation of the Project Plan is replicated through the built in Gantt and Pert charts. It enables defining Task Dependencies and enable auto assignment of Planned dates of the WBS Items. It is extremely flexible in doing automatic synching of Actual Dates and Duration in Task Scheduler based on the timesheet entries done by the Task Owners and provide a single visibility to Project Manager to compare plans vs actuals.
Project Plan in Kovair Task Scheduler
Project Plan in Kovair Task Scheduler
Kovair PPM provides a web-based timesheet module to record time entries for individual resources. Time entries against each Task can be provided on a day-wise basis along with percentage complete to indicate the progress of work done per Task. It allows managers to manage their subordinates’ Timesheets, as well as their own. Time entries submitted, approved, or rejected are clearly depicted by different color indicators.
Kovair PPM provides a web-based timesheet module to record time entries for individual resources. Time entries against each Task can be provided on a day-wise basis along with percentage complete to indicate the progress of work done per Task. It allows managers to manage their subordinates’ Timesheets, as well as their own. Time entries submitted, approved, or rejected are clearly depicted by different color indicators.
Time Entries and Approval in Kovair Timesheet
Time Entries and Approval in Kovair Timesheet
Time Entries and Approval in Kovair Timesheet

Resource Allocation and Overloading

Kovair PPM provides a dedicated Resource Availability page that shows resource wise the no. of open Tasks, hours required to complete the open tasks, the earliest available date when the resource can be available and the list of Projects they are assigned to.
Resources Availability
Resources Availability
During the allocation of resources, Kovair PPM automatically alerts the Project Manager when resources get overloaded. The system indicates against those WBS items for which the assigned resource got overloaded. It shows on a day wise basis, the hours of work each resource has. For example, if a resource has 8 hours of work or less in a day it is shown in green but if more than 8 hours of work is allotted to a resource, it is shown in red, indicating that the resource is overloaded.
Resources Workload by Days
Resources Workload by Days

Top View Management for Project Monitoring

Kovair PPM provides built-in graphical and textual reports in Word, Excel, PDF formats and dashboards with real-time drilldown data access, allowing users to configure KPIs as per organizational needs and give access to different users based on their roles and responsibilities. Dashboards in Kovair PPM can be organized to portray the health of projects running under different Programs with respect to cost and effort.
Kovair Dashboards with PPM Reports & Metrics
Kovair Dashboards with PPM Reports & Metrics
Kovair Dashboards with PPM Reports & Metrics
Kovair Dashboards with PPM Reports & Metrics

Business Benefits

Ensure PMO Success

Kovair PPM comes with Integrated Project Management capabilities ensuring PMO success. Starting from project initiation to project closure, all the activities are effectively and efficiently managed using Kovair PPM using EVM metrics.

Reusability

Kovair PPM functionality of project templatization provides standardization of project creation and enforces all projects belonging to a specific type follow the same structure, artifacts, and processes. It allows faster creation of projects so that the team does not have to invest much time in arranging specific objects to build the project with.

Demand & Capacity Management

Kovair PPM comes with built-in resource forecasting capability based on the project plans created by the project managers. It facilitates in the effective and optimized allocation of resources with respect to different project demands on one hand and the availability of resources on the other. It not only helps in identifying over-allocation of resources but also helps in identifying under-utilized resources.

Single Tool for Task and Time Management

Kovair PPM allows users to track their actual time spent on each of their assigned Tasks using the Timesheet module of Kovair. Once they capture their times, the actuals can be viewed against the planned hours and resource productivity as well as any delays can be seen in a real-time manner.

Support for ALM

Kovair’s PPM – ALM capabilities help organizations combine project plans with requirements management, testing, defect tracking and release data of applications. It keeps product development teams, project teams and business tied together with a single source of information. With the implementation of Kovair PPM, organizations can achieve an end-to-end traceability from Programs to Projects. Using this traceability, the portfolio managers, program managers get accurate data on coverage of various items and provide real-time status updates on the project proceedings. Kovair ALM is completely flexible in supporting various application development methodologies like Waterfall, Agile Scrum, and Kanban.

Process Automation

Omniprocess, the task-based workflow in Kovair PPM, coupled with notification and business rules, enables the project teams to implement and enforce a centralized governance across the different phases resulting in enhanced productivity and quality. It allows people working in different time zones to pass on Tasks from one to the other automatically without resorting to meetings or calls, improving their efficiency and productivity even further.

Integrated Reporting

Unlike other project management tools that offer standard timesheet reporting and project scheduling, Kovair PPM gives top-down project visibility through graphical reports and executive dashboards. The comprehensive reports entangle various stages of application development, application portfolio management, project, program and business portfolio management.

Conclusion

Kovair PPM has helped some large organizations successfully implement a complete Portfolio and Project Management environment. With this implementation, organizations have seen a substantial growth both in quality, productivity and management awareness and real time visibility with easy access to reports and drill down dashboards features built into Kovair. To know more about Kovair products visit www.kovair.com
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Questions & answers and audio interview by Outlook Series on Value Stream Delivery Enables Business Composability

Question from Michael: Welcome Akshay! As CTO for Kovair, having completed over 3 years there as a tech advisor and 2 years now as their CTO, Akshay, what are the key benefits of using Kovair’s VSMP/VSDP: Value Stream Management and Delivery Platform for helping Transition Enterprises towards Business Composability?
Response from Akshay: Thanks for the question…Michael!
Let’s first define Business Composability
According to Gartner:
“Business composability is a combination of mindset, practices, and tools that enable enterprises to sense and respond to changing business conditions.”
It provides a strong foundation to respond to business volatility. This foundation validates the considerable investment CIOs and CTOs have made to rearchitect the enterprise’s information and technology (IT) with operations technology (OT), and that work has started to deliver business results by boosting business agility. Transformation often involves breaking monolithic and highly complex systems into components and microservices that are scalable and customizable. Composable IT and OT capabilities are complicated and costly. Many times, these underlying capabilities require persuading the CEO or CFO to fund them without seeing an immediate impact on business performance.
From the recent 2022 Gartner CIO Agenda Pilot, they found that a significant portion of enterprises sampled have reached the point where they can now boost business composability — the ability to rapidly rearrange business capabilities to meet changing market conditions. This ability enabled these enterprises to outperform non-composable peers during the pandemic. The survey findings show what enterprise leaders can expect from their business composability investments and provide evidence to help CIOs and CTOs write the business case for composability.
Elements of a Composable Business include:
  • Composable thinking: Leaders at my organization encourage the creation and reuse of modular business capabilities and technologies.
  • Composable business architecture: We combine business elements (e.g., capabilities, products, services, etc.) in multiple ways to create new value.
  • Composable technologies: The work of producing technology capabilities is modularized and automated using APIs, microservices and other modular components.
Composable technologies
In a nutshell it’s like have a team analogous to Lego Blocks vs a team analogous to a monolithic building.
Kovair is uniquely positioned for Business Composability service enablement and management.
First: Kovair’s PPM: Project and Portfolio Management solution within it’s VSMP/VSDP solution set can provide stakeholders a unified platform to manage budgets, schedules, resources, risk and hazard management, and field data through a single interface, along with Revenue Management, and the Logistics of Payment/Invoice Management, which is always needed in any Industrial setting.
Secondly: Kovair’s Workflow Engine, can make the Processes Automated and Actionable with Management Dashboards. Kovair allows IT to develop it’s software as a product using Kovair DevOps and ALM solutions, manage the delivery of it using Kovair’s CI/CD functions in the Cloud or on-prem, manage the lifecycle for the product, “ideate” it’s API’s and process workflows to the product with Kovair’s Gartner Cool Vendor Awarded Omnibus, as an Enterprise Service Bus to the product, with Role-based and Policy-controls, and now provide Revenue Management functions too within Kovair’s VSMP/VSDP solutions.
Thirdly: Kovair’s VSMP (Value Stream Management Platform), VSDP (Value Stream Delivery Platform), PPM (Project and Portfolio Management) for DevSecOps, and Omnibus as an iPaaS: integration Platform as a Service helps clients automate and seamlessly manage their workflows and their API’s to the Business, helping enable Business Composability, with product lifecycle management, governance, and process compliance all seamlessly integrated.
Kovair’s value proposition for Business Composability is:
  • Kovair manages all flows using open communication standards and exposes the data through standard APIs and web services, with security engineered in.
  • Kovair’s solutions enable the development of business applications and business analytics software on top of Enterprise Service Bus middleware which can compute the information collected from millions of devices, and enable newer services with Drag-and-Drop Agility of Certified Solutions!
Question from Michael: Akshay, When it comes to S/W teams, how do they embark on this journey transitioning to Business Composability?
Response from Akshay: Good Question, Michael,
The recommendations for CIOs, CTOs, and IT leaders include the following:
  • First, They need to form a Business Composability Tiger Team structure that identifies the Organization’s Processes, Tools, Methods, mindset, technologies, and a set of operating capabilities that enable organizations to innovate and adapt quickly to changing business needs. It is built on applying the key principle of modularity to business assets to achieve the scale and pace required of business ambition.
    • scope-of-composable-business
  • Second: They need to identify all the Business Technologies: the digital assets packaged as discrete components that each deliver independent, clear and complete business value, and are designed as building blocks for assembly and reassembly of business processes and application experiences. Components include:
    • Modularity, or the mixing and matching of more granular business functions.
    • Orchestration, connecting and combining modular pieces to achieve the proper outcomes.
    • Discovery, sensing what change needs to happen and when.
    • Autonomy, empowering individual entities to creatively respond.
  • Third: Looking at their Business Applications and making them Composable with API’s, Cloud-based technologies, all Managed as a Service, with Multi-tenancy, and leveraging newer Micro-services
    • Business-Applications-and-making-them-Composable
  • Fourth: Innovations. Looking at newer approaches, newer AI/ML benefits, newer business models, monetization of data, people, processes, services, as well as API’s in newer B2B systems by including contextualization of data exchanges to fuel the right data models together with the right business models. Data and analytics governance for industry organizations engaging in the new Composable Business and it’s ecosystems can harness the full value of information assets, including newer APIs.
    • Composable elements
All of which Kovair provides…and enables
All this should enable a better collaborative environment for better quality, better productivity, better security, and support for better operational resiliency.
Question from Michael: Akshay, innovation is often key to digital transformation and likely is imperative in Composable Businesses. So, how can firms increase innovation with their Business Composability program?
Response from Akshay: Michael, Enterprises are transforming with Digital Transformation moving to the Cloud, looking at Industrial IoT, looking at newer solutions like AI/ML, eKiosks, Mobile Applications, eCommerce, but this will fall flat if no Innovation occurs. This Key Critical Capability needs to be addressed, as they look to transition to Composable Businesses, within newer Ideation Processes.
Think of the new business as being composed of modular “lego” blocks that can be added as desired.
The idea of composable business operates on four basic principles:
  • More speed through discovery
  • Greater agility through modularity
  • Better leadership through orchestration
  • Resilience through autonomy
This type of thinking enables a business to survive, and even flourish, in times of great disruption. From a technical perspective, this type of composability is not new to CIOs. It exists in familiar technology, from APIs to containers. But, it is a new, or perhaps ignored, idea for a CIO’s business counterparts and board of directors. Composable business requires a foundational change in business thinking, architecture and technology.
Now Innovation through Ideation can occur, by adding newer Composable Business Blocks as needed, like Lego Blocks, a car is designed, and wings are added to create a plane, and then a rocket engine is added to fly to space, in a modular manner.
Kovair can enable Business Composability in this journey.
Kovair’s PPM solution delivers greater value to the organization by connecting the entire lifecycle from planning to execution. It enables IT leaders to optimize their project portfolios, manage the capacity of resources against the demands raised from different projects, and connects plans and resources to the actual project execution.
The Kovair PPM solution within it’s VSMP solution set not only provides complete visibility across the entire value stream but also provides complete visibility of the delivery lifecycle from the quintuple perspectives of Revenues, Risk, Resource, Time & Cost, to the C-Level executives as well as to the stakeholders of the projects through role-based real-time reports & dashboards.
With it’s Drag-and-Drop ideation of Workflows, and connections to Industrial applications, newer innovations can occur!
Question from Michael:Thanks, Akshay, to wrap-up, what are the implications to business leaders for Kovair’s VSMP/VSDP for Business Composability announcement recently?
Response from Akshay: There are many competing siloed VSMP/VSDP solutions as well as siloed Business Composability Toolkits and Advisory Services in the market: some with Industrial Applications, some with data lakes and data migration solutions, some with API middleware pre-packaged with Low Code / No Code configuration capabilities, some with siloed ALM (applications lifecycle management) tools support, some with DevOps tools support to migrate to Cloud applications, some with dashboard and analytics data lakes and repositories, but only Kovair packages all of the above within one framework, with workflow automation functions, as well as product lifecycle management functions, for not only Technical Leaders but Business Leaders as well. Only Kovair uniquely offers all of the above with Revenue Management and Payment Invoice Management as an added capability.
As people transition back to work, solutions are needed to allow for continued WFH… with gas heading to $5/gallon… Kovair’s remote, web-based project planning solutions include complete management dashboards, a workflow engine, a task scheduler, project calendar, resource management with invoicing functions, GANTT Charts, workload and risk management platform, along with complete ALM, DevOps, and DevSecOps solutions which collectively allows managers to plan and control the application development from the beginning to the end with complete product lifecycle management….
Question from Michael: TThanks, Akshay, Any final thoughts ? Where can our audience get more information on Improving Business Models with Kovair VSMP/VSDP for Business composability?
Response from Akshay: Thanks Michael, www.kovair.com has a wealth of information there.
  • One final thought, I would highlight from Kovair.com people can try Kovair on the Cloud, as a Proof of Concept trial, and try before you buy. Kovair can support remote management via dashboards showing all the process metrics and statuses to be visualized in real-time, and provides remote control of workflow pipelines via email, with role-based policy controls, it supports multiple databases, across hybrid multi-clouds, including 5G Edge Clouds, and Kovair’s Workflow Process Engine is unique with Task-based models which supports concurrency, which is more representative of real-world teams as teams are likely working on multiple tasks concurrently and remotely, across different environments.
  • These are challenging times now but with newer solutions, and newer thinking, and newer Business Composability, hopefully this will all be alleviated with better solutions from platform providers like Kovair as we discussed. Hopefully the result is better harmony within IT teams, and better business outcomes… from innovations by Kovair…
  • So hopefully this is a Game-changer !
Comment from Michael: Indeed it is! Thank you Akshay!
Source: Outlook Series : Value Stream Delivery Enables Business Composability

Data Migration and its Challenges

Data migration is the process of transferring data from a source application to a target application, The migration could be onetime over a period of time or could be followed by synchronization.
A data migration project can be a challenge because the organization must maintain data integrity, migration duration of the project and various other factors so there is minimal impact to the business. Moreover, projects have to keep an eye on costs of such migrations. Any impediments that occur during the migration will affect the business, so a good data migration plan is a key to ensuring minimal disruption and downtime to the active business processes.

Kovair QuickSync Caters to Your Tools Data Migration Needs

Kovair QuickSync offers a comprehensive solution for the successful migration of structured data from a source to a target tool. It is designed with features that are truly required for any large or very large-scale enterprise-level migration (where migration can be executed across multiple windows stations with a single monitoring interface), ensuring zero data loss and data disparity.

License Model for QuickSync

Kovair brings significant domain experience in Tools data migration through its QuickSync product. Kovair does not offer any License of the QuickSync to any customer. However, Kovair offers a one-stop turnkey solution for all migration endeavours. It is a one-stop, cost-effective, wide-range data migration solution for any enterprise across the industry and is offered as a turnkey solution with the Kovair Team performing the migration tasks in partnership with the end customer and does not require them to purchase or learn any new Tool. In so doing, it makes the customer’s job easy by just having to provide the necessary migration inputs and mapping of migrations and Kovair takes on the entire tasks of data mapping for each project, project configurations for each project, ensuring all migration entities are accounted for and works on the migration over the few days or weeks in collaboration with the end customer and provides verifiable end results. The costs are based on the QuickSync tool pair required, the number of projects to be configured for the migrations, the number of records, attachments, steps and other details for the volume of data to be migrated and time and overheads involved in managing and verifying the process and the data and costs for the customer based on these details.
This means, that unless Kovair is provided with a full response to a questionnaire for such details of the migration, Kovair cannot and will not be able to provide with an approximate cost for such a project. So, Sales personnel that are dealing as third-party agents for migration projects, will not be provided any costs until they are able to provide Kovair Sales and Solutions Teams with project data details. We may offer different methods of doing business in the future, but this is the current method, and all parties need to fully understand that there is no “quick quotation” for any migration project.

Highlights of Kovair QuickSync

Kovair QuickSync is a migration platform from Kovair which works between pair of tools. However, the platform has key features which makes the QuickSync stand out from the other tools.
  • Migration Support for Rich Data-Migration of rich text data like system and custom attributes, comments, and attachments
  • Maintain Traceability –Support transferring of Links and marinating their interrelationship
  • Historical Data – can migrate all the history of changes in a readable matrix column
  • Automated Data Validation Using Data Checker – QuickSync produces an HTML report that will help the users analyse any data discrepancies across migrated data.
  • Batch Migration: The Tool can be configured to run from simultaneous windows stations to perform large to very large-scale migrations in a shorter period of time.
  • Kovair has a good track record of performing migrations for large telecom and banking and other clients for volumes that exceed 3 million records.

Migration Phases

The following diagram shows an eight Phase migration process followed by Kovair.

 

Migration Phases

 

Primary Questions

Following are some of the primary questions from Kovair to determine the project Volume and cost
  • Tools that will be involved in the Migration. Source and Target tool Versions
  • Volume of data that needs to be migrated
  • Volume of Projects in Source tool
  • What kind of timeline the customer is expecting to start and complete the project?
  • Since Migration will be on a turn-key basis, Kovair personnel will be executing the project from Kovair premises-thus will the customer allow VPN/ Web Session for migration, or will it be a physical presence at customer premises? This requirement adds a significant cost of manpower to be deployed at a customer site. So, Kovair recommends the former.