Why IT Service Management and Project Portfolio Management Belong Together

A recent market study from TeamDynamix found that 78 percent of organizations surveyed listed resource constraints as one of their top challenges. If you’re familiar with ITSM (IT service management), it’s no surprise that many organizations find self-service and Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS®) to be effective strategies to mitigate this challenge. While both self-service and KCS are sound tools for ITSM, there are other strategies you should consider adding to build out a true 360 platform.

In fact, to gain better control over all IT resources, many organizations use a one platform approach for ITSM and project portfolio management (PPM). Of those surveyed, 61 percent of respondents said they are planning to move to a single platform approach to manage all IT resources.

The benefits of the one platform approach

By bringing ITSM and PPM together on a common platform, you can better understand your resource capabilities and engage in true resource capacity planning.

When you can report on both service and project work, you are getting a big-picture view of your entire IT organization, allowing you to balance workloads across projects and support, and to see the different types of work that needs to be done at any given time.

For example, if you have three IT technicians that need to work across three functional areas of business — like service, projects and operations — you can engage in resource capacity planning and optimize each technician’s workload based on their skill set and their availability. As a result, the work can be completed more effectively and efficiently as each technician is focused on work that plays to their strengths. And because you have a full view of the work and the time it will take to complete, you can avoid overcommitting or underutilizing your resources.

Work better together

There are many benefits to an organization when bringing ITSM and PPM together for proper resource capacity planning, including:

• Improved IT productivity
• Improved quality of service (QoS)
• Improved IT performance measurement and reporting capabilities

  Yet despite these benefits, our market study found an astounding 77 percent of organizations surveyed are NOT currently engaging in resource capacity planning. To build a strong ITSM foundation and move ahead of the pack it is recommended more organizations explore the benefits a one-platform solution can have when building out their ITSM road map.

To learn more about IT resource optimization, check out this on-demand webinar. If you want to see how other organizations are using ITSM and PPM together check out:

• Sunnyvale Gains Single View of Tickets and Projects

In this video, the IT team at the city of Sunnyvale, Calif., talk about why they decided to start using a combined platform for ITSM and project management, and how this has affected their work management strategy. They are able to create their own reporting dashboards to get a clear view of IT work and provide more transparency across the department.

KCS® is a service mark of the Consortium for Service Innovation™.