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A good IT project and portfolio management solution can be the key to successful data centre consolidation during mergers

As IT organisations integrate multiple back-end systems after mergers or acquisitions, they often overlook the equally important challenge of turning their combined IT assets into a cohesive portfolio focussed on business goals.

Making disparate systems talk to one another is just one of IT’s tasks after a merger. Other important functions are:

• Giving employees – from line of business and IT executives to project managers and developers – visibility into key metrics, issues and risks across the IT portfolio
• Selecting projects based on the value of their potential contribution to business goals
• Giving decision makers insight into IT supply and demand so they can map the work to current resource allocations and available skill sets
• Automating, implementing and enforcing best practices and processes for managing day-to-day IT work and providing a solid foundation for regulatory compliance
• Improving budget forecasting and project execution against budget
• Automating project management processes so that IT groups can complete even the most complex IT projects on time and within budget

All of these critical functions can be handled with the help of a full-featured portfolio and project management solution, such as the HP Project and Portfolio Management Centre.

Cases in point: A European packaging and high-performance materials leader is growing its business through acquisitions and targeted divestments. It recently implemented the HP Project and Portfolio Management Centre to optimise operations, improve process efficiency and maximise profit margins in the face of ongoing change.

Before the implementation, 40 percent of the company’s IT budget went to activities not aligned with business goals. Less than a year later, non-strategic expenditures had dropped by 10 percent.

The firm attributed more than $270,000 in savings to the HP Project and Portfolio Management Centre. The software also improved project-management efficiencies enough to eliminate the need to hire new project managers, streamlined project status reporting and reduced IT labour capitalisation effort by 75 percent.

Another company, an energy firm, used HP PPM Centre to sustain regulatory compliance while consolidating 13 legacy financial systems brought in by acquisitions. The solution helped reduce audit sample points by more than 95 percent, delivering recurring savings of more than US$1 million per year.

Both cases illustrate an important point: Managing projects and the overall portfolio effectively during mergers and acquisitions is the best way to accelerate IT efforts, reduce costs and make sure the outcome is beneficial to the business.