GOVERN IT MERCURY IT GOVERNANCE CENTER OVERVIEW

MERCURY IT GOVERNANCE CENTER™ GOVERN IT MERCURY IT GOVERNANCE CENTER OVERVIEW Mercury IT Governance Center™ is the most comprehensive transaction s...
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MERCURY IT GOVERNANCE CENTER™

GOVERN IT

MERCURY IT GOVERNANCE CENTER OVERVIEW

Mercury IT Governance Center™ is the most comprehensive transaction system available for IT, covering the broadest spectrum of IT activities, including portfolio management, project visibility and control, IT services automation, and application change management. Mercury IT Governance Center offers the first integrated approach for achieving effective IT Governance, enabling you to digitize, automate, and enforce your IT business processes from demand through production. Its components can be implemented individually, starting with the area of greatest need, then expanded across IT, adding value all the way. Mercury IT Governance Center helps you optimize and align IT strategy and execution with business goals, reduce the cost of day-to-day operations, and improve business value and competitiveness.

Mercury IT Governance Center TM

MERCURY IT GOVERNANCE CENTER IT GOVERNANCE DASHBOARD

Demand Management

Portfolio Management

Program Management

Project Management

Resource Management

Time Management

Financial Management

Change Management

IT GOVERNANCE FOUNDATION • Workflow • Respository



• Execution • Administration



• Security • Scheduling

MERCURY SERVICES Managed • Consulting • Education • Support



• Reporting • Open APIs

GOVERN IT

MERCURY IT GOVERNANCE CENTER Are all your IT investments aligned with business objectives? Are you executing your processes within IT as efficiently as possible? Do you have visibility and control over what your people are working on?

Information Technology has become an integral driver of daily

applications and processes are provided cost effectively and with

business operations, making business technology optimization

maximum value add.

(BTO) essential for business success. Savvy IT executives and CIOs are responding by using effective IT governance strategies and software to optimize and align the priorities, processes, and people required to run IT like a business. Effective IT Governance means reducing the cost of day-to-day operations while, at the same time, delivering more strategic initiatives in less time to improve business value and competitiveness.

Mercury IT Governance Center™ is used by CIOs and IT executives to govern and manage the priorities, processes, and people required to run IT like a business. The first and most comprehensive transaction system for IT, Mercury IT Governance Center combines software, services, and best practices to digitize, automate, and enforce IT business processes from demand to production. It helps you align IT investment with business objectives by optimizing your

Mercury’s approach to IT Governance focuses on digitizing and

strategic IT Portfolio of proposals, projects, and applications. And it

automating IT business processes from demand through

reduces the cost and risk of “keep-the-lights-on” IT activities by

production, enabling you to optimize and align IT strategy and

providing real-time visibility and control over demand, resources,

execution with business goals, reduce the cost of day-to-day

finances, projects, application changes, and more.

operations, and improve business value and competitiveness.

Mercury IT Governance Center helps you comply with regulations

On the strategic front, Mercury provides portfolio management

such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II. And it supports quality

capabilities that enable business and IT execs to prioritize strategic

programs and process control frameworks such as Six-Sigma,

IT initiatives. Benefits, costs, resource availability, and business

CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration), ITIL (IT Infrastructure

objectives are taken into account in a transparent process to

Library), ISO-9000, and CobiT (Control objectives for information

ensure IT focuses on the most important and valuable initiatives. On

and related Technologies).

the operations side, demand and project management capabilities help IT manage demand for services while more successfully

Mercury also offers a number of services to help you implement and realize the full benefits of Mercury IT Governance Center.

delivering on its existing commitments. And, change management and services automation capabilities ensure business critical

Learn more about the key components of Mercury IT Governance Center.

MERCURY IT GOVERNANCE DASHBOARD Mercury IT Governance Dashboard™ provides role-based, exceptionoriented visibility into IT trends, status, and deliverables so that you can make and execute real-time decisions. Running a major IT operation today without real-time visibility into

Real-Time Visibility and Control

performance and status information is like flying a jet fighter without

IT Governance Dashboard automatically captures and displays

instruments — in fog. Unless you have visibility and control, before

real-time information as part of Mercury IT Governance Center™. As

long something bad is going to happen. Technology projects are

activities are performed within the Center, updates are captured

increasingly critical to business success, and executives across

immediately and reflected in IT Governance Dashboard views. By

the organization want to be sure their projects are staying on track.

providing real-time updates, users gain access to the most accurate

So, of course, do IT leaders who are trying to align their operations

information available at any time, eliminating the need for e-mail

with business strategies and deliver more value to the business.

updates, phone calls, or meetings to gain insight and control over

In this environment, stale IT data and opaque operations are a

what is going on.

ticket to failure.

Personalized and Role-Base Information Mercury IT Governance Dashboard gives you a comprehensive real-

IT Governance Dashboard offers a personalized interface providing

time view of all your IT initiatives and operations though a single

relevant information to each user. Individual users specify the

point of access. This powerful product provides the centralized

information they want and how they want it displayed using

visibility and control essential to building a high-performance IT

“portlets,” with each portlet providing information on broad topics

organization. IT Governance Dashboard helps IT partner with the

like overall program status or specific topics, including processes

business to execute business strategy, gain control across multiple

about to trigger SLA violations. Individual portlets are grouped

initiatives, and make effective decisions regarding IT operations.

together to form dashboard pages or role-based views so groups of users can have a common frame of reference. With IT Governance Dashboard, valuable IT information can be easily and cost effectively shared, eliminating the need to sift through a whole project plan or status report to find the exceptions you need to take action on. In addition, access to information is controllable, based on the role and security profile of each user.

Mercury IT Governance Dashboard presents real-time information pulled from Mercury IT Governance Center.

Quick Access to Information

How it Works

To enable you to quickly identify and resolve issues at hand, IT

IT Governance Dashboard provides direct-access to Mercury IT

Governance Dashboard provides drill-down capability to any level

Governance Center information stored within the Center’s relational

of detail. For example, you can create a portlet to view the number

database, providing the clearest window available into the status of

of projects outstanding for a particular department, organized by

your IT initiatives and operations.

project type and priority. You simply click on a particular project from that list to open a new portlet detailing the underlying tasks that comprise that project. This consistent interface at all levels of project information enables comparative views of status information across multiple projects, in fact across all of IT with the proper security. Information can also be printed or downloaded to Excel at the click of a button for remote meetings, offline analysis, or extensive reports.

IT Governance Dashboard is easily configurable, so you see the most pertinent information for your needs. You view multiple portlets within each dashboard page, specifying what portlets you want to see and what information each portlet should contain. You can sort columns on the fly and filter selected criteria so only specific information of interest is displayed. You can pre-populate dashboard pages and publish them with predefined filter criteria or distribute them with adjustable criteria as appropriate. In this way, IT management can ensure stakeholders will have apples-to-apples information without worrying that they have adjusted their dashboards and lost their critical to-do action lists. You can also easily create custom portlets to access any information within Mercury IT Governance Center or in another database. Stakeholders, executives, managers, and staff all need accurate, up-to-the-minute information on the projects, assignments, and deliverables with which they are involved. With IT Governance Dashboard, team members know where they stand, and powerful yet flexible security ensures information is appropriately available. Managers gain real-time insight into progress and problems in

Mercury IT Governance Dashboard presents real-time, role-based exception data so management and employees can focus on the most important activities.

projects under their purview. Executives view all initiatives from an IT value perspective at a high level, ensuring alignment with the company’s overall strategic direction. IT Governance Dashboard

Make Effective Decisions To increase efficiency and productivity, IT Governance Dashboard enables “exception-based” viewing and reporting. When you set up conditions and benchmarks, visual updates of project risk and

provides the holistic view of enterprise IT activities and interdependencies you need to effectively manage the priorities, processes, and people of IT. Don’t fly blind — get visibility and control over IT with Mercury IT Governance Dashboard.

status are generated. These visual indicators display the severity of project risk using color codes, making it easy to recognize missed dates, out-of-scope activities, and other anomalies that need attention. With exceptions highlighted in real-time and up-to-date supporting information just clicks away, decision makers require less time to make effective decisions and keep IT aligned with and supporting business priorities.

FEATURES AND BENEFITS • Optimized IT strategy and execution: Reduces IT staffing costs by 15 to 25 percent, and improves productivity by 20 to 30 percent. • Real-time monitoring and control: Provides dashboard visibility for realtime decision-making and eliminates dependency on e-mail, phone calls, and meetings for project updates. Enables management by exception. • Risk assessment and resolution: Displays risk severity through visual indicators. Highlights missed dates/activities for quick action.

MERCURY DEMAND MANAGEMENT Mercury Demand Management™ allows you to consolidate, prioritize, and fulfill both strategic projects and day-to-day activities — so you can manage all the demand placed on IT. In today’s IT environment of growing demand and tight resources,

asked of IT. Web-based requests capture high-volume and routine

it’s difficult for IT organizations to be fully responsive to requests

demand to complex and strategic demand. Workflow processes

from the business. How can an organization know whether IT is

control how requests are resolved so every request can be

working on the highest business priorities? How many systems are

appropriately evaluated, prioritized, scheduled, and fulfilled. When

used to collect, track, and resolve all IT service requests? With

you use Demand Management, you no longer need multiple point

limited IT resources, organizations need to focus their resources on

tools to collect, track, and resolve service requests, software

the most important items and put an end to “back-door” requests

defects, project risks, and strategic initiatives.

that eat up staff time without delivering much business value.

Consolidate All Demand On IT

Mercury Demand Management captures requests across the

Demand Management captures all requests on IT so you’ll know

business so each can be evaluated and prioritized based on its

what the organization is asking for and have the information to

relative merit. This lets you control the “front door” to IT, an

focus your valuable IT resources on the highest business priorities.

important step to achieving business technology optimization (BTO). Unlike traditional help-desk applications, Demand Management is an integrated solution for managing what is being

Users and stakeholders have a comprehensive picture of past, present, and future demand grouped by demand category so demand can be prioritized, assigned, viewed, and “sliced-and-diced” across multiple dimensions to identify trends.

Digitize the Complete IT Demand Lifecycle After each request is captured, Demand Management processes the request based upon the best practice process and business rules digitized for that type of request. The process behind each request is modeled, automated, enforced, and measured — what Mercury refers to as “digitizing.” Digitized out-of-the-box best-practice processes including new project request, product bug, product enhancement, application upgrade, vacation, operations request, and others are easily configured to support your company’s specific best practices with a drag-and-drop process modeler. By digitizing View of the “front door” to IT by type of request.

the demand lifecycle, business processes are enforced and the time required to resolve requests is slashed by 50 percent or more.

Integrate with Existing Tools

When priorities change, cycle times are exceeded, or other

With Demand Management, IT can respond in an instant to

requirements are not met, Demand Management can trigger an

changing priorities by redeploying resources to take on new

escalation process. Everything that happens to the request can also

demands. And, if you need to integrate with an existing help-desk or

be viewed and reported on with an extensive audit trail and

demand-capture solution, Demand Management supports you with

transaction history capability. With this level of visibility and control,

APIs and flexible interface tables.

you focus on the highest-priority requests and spend your time making decisions and resolving exceptions.

How it Works End users complete a configurable request form using a standard Web browser. Each request type has a workflow associated with it that specifies the process for reviewing, evaluating, prioritizing, scheduling, and resolving the request. Based on the workflow, the reviewer can assign the request to a person or team for scheduling and delivery. Notifications defined as part of the process can be activated at any step in the process to indicate work is to be done, hasn’t been done, is being escalated, or most any other reason. And, the included Web-based IT Governance Dashboard delivers the right information to anyone with a browser. Managers assign tasks and users view and work on tasks assigned to them while end-users can check the status of submitted requests through their Web browsers. Service-level agreements are updated in real-time and changes are captured for a complete audit trail.

FEATURES AND BENEFITS Digitized best practice workflow process.

Manage Status, Service Levels, and Trends Demand Management provides the digitized processes and data necessary to effectively manage status, service-level agreements, and trends. Web-based dashboards provide real-time visibility into request status, priority, next steps, and summary views. Service-level agreements are updated automatically as each request is processed. Business rules define when to send notifications so Demand Management will monitor the processes in real time and alert you when something needs your attention. Flexible reporting makes it easy to identify trends across request type, response times, escalations, and priority to ensure your resources remain focused.

• Shared demand repository: Demand Management consolidates and stores all IT demand in a central repository for better reporting, visibility, and control. • Unlimited demand categories: Demand categories such as business initiative, business unit, department, application, group, assigned to user, and others can be configured to meet your organization’s needs for reporting, scheduling, and more detailed management. • Demand scheduling and prioritization: Requests can be scheduled by priority, date, contribution, or other metric. Priorities can be adjusted to reflect current or expected business needs. • Drag-and-drop process modeling: Out-of-the-box processes can be adjusted and new processes created in minutes to meet your specific business needs. • Complete audit trail: Every change to every request can be captured for a complete, detailed audit trail.

MERCURY PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT Mercury Portfolio Management™ enables you to govern your portfolio of IT projects, applications, and opportunities in real-time with effective collaborative processes. Today, the competition for IT resources is fiercer than ever in most

Portfolio Management gives you the information and process to

companies. How can organizations prioritize the needs of different

make effective portfolio decisions. From proposal initiation,

business units and other internal customers? How can they make

justification, and review to project initiation, execution, deployment,

the tough decisions about what to take on? And how do they share

and benefits realization, Portfolio Management uses automatic

those decisions with the business leadership?

real-time updates and an enforced process to keep stakeholders

Mercury Portfolio Management gives you the real-time governance

involved.

process you need for effective portfolio management. From the

Unlike other systems, Portfolio Management provides real-time

existing applications that run your business to the new initiatives that

visibility into resources, budgets, costs, programs, projects, and

grow and transform your business, Portfolio Management is the only

overall IT demand — without costly integrations to multiple data

application that lets business and IT stakeholders collaboratively

sources or fire drill exercises to update the data. You get the

govern your entire IT portfolio, with “apples-to-apples” comparisons

clearest view of how to deliver maximum value to the business, a

and multiple levels of input, review, and approval.

process at the heart of business technology optimization (BTO).

Enforce and Automate Governance Processes Mercury Portfolio Management provides you with the processes required for effective portfolio management. Individual and team involvement is built (digitized) into the portfolio management process — ensuring and enforcing that the right people are involved at the right time. For example, the portfolio governance process starts when a business user requests or suggests a new capability. The request is automatically routed to a gatekeeper, then to a business analyst or team for an initial business case before being routed to the operations council and the architecture standards committee for review and scoring. The business council then evaluates the prioritized, ranked projects to determine the proper portfolio mix and whether to accept the recent request. Mercury IT Governance Dashboard displays portfolio information, giving IT and business leaders real-time views of portfolio performance to aid in decision making.

Included best-practice processes can be used out-of-the-box with minimal configuration, or you can configure the application to support your processes with an included graphical, drag-and-drop process modeler.

Provide IT Guidance to the Business

business objective and technology risk — creating a strong IT

With Portfolio Management, the IT portfolio is aligned to support

portfolio becomes much easier. And, because the data is always

business strategy. As projects are proposed, business stakeholders

current, you can reevaluate the portfolio without needing outside

are directly involved in deciding which projects are accepted

consultants to update the data.

and receive guidance on the status of projects as they are being delivered.

Once a project is complete, the value of Portfolio Management doesn’t end; actual benefits are collected as well. With this information, stakeholders compare actual benefits with estimates, enabling them to better manage the portfolio going forward.

How it Works Portfolio Management provides the processes, entities, and analysis capabilities to manage your IT Portfolio. Quantitative information including financial budgets, resources, schedules, and others along with qualitative information including strategic fit, alignment, complexity, and others is collected to enable apples-to-apples comparisons across the portfolio. Digitized processes enforce when information is required, ensuring information is available and consistent across pending or proposed projects, active projects, and production applications. And, instead of manual data entry or expensive integration, portfolio status flows seamlessly in real-time from our IT transaction system for both project information and “keep-the-lights-on” activities. CIOs and portfolio decision makers always see the portfolio’s real-time Portfolio Management what-if scenarios enable you to analyze your portfolio and assess the business contribution of each proposal, project, or application to the entire portfolio.

Portfolios are visible in real-time on the included Mercury IT Governance Dashboard, with the ability to “slice-and-dice” the portfolio by the attributes relevant to each stakeholder. Project data is available so authorized users can get a complete, clear picture of the IT portfolio or any individual request from anywhere with an Internet connection. It also automatically keeps an audit trail of all changes and approvals to comply with a range of regulatory requirements. Portfolio Management helps you maximize the value of IT to stakeholders and your business. Estimated project benefits are projected as part of the project initiation process, and project managers or sponsors can be required to reevaluate the estimates when the project changes. With multiple criteria to rank and rate portfolio candidates — from net present value (NPV) and return on investment (ROI) to qualitative criteria, including supported

status, and enjoy immediate access to detailed information on which to base decisions.

FEATURES AND BENEFITS • Real-time management: Captures real-time IT status automatically, so that accurate, up-to-date information is always available for difficult portfolio decisions. You can run multiple “what-if” scenarios, capture the portfolio’s real-time status, assess value and mix of current and proposed projects, rank and rate projects according to business value and risk, and quickly execute portfolio decisions. • Enforced, automated processes: Governs the entire portfolio lifecycle from proposal initiation, justification, and review to project initiation, execution, deployment, and benefits realization. Features include out-of-the-box best-practice processes, and digitized processes to help you enforce and automate process execution. • Improved IT guidance: Aligns your IT portfolio to support business strategy. As projects are proposed, business stakeholders are directly involved in deciding which projects are accepted and receive guidance on the status of projects as they are being delivered. You can better manage IT complexity and monitor the realization of benefits.

MERCURY PROGRAM MANAGEMENT Mercury Program Management™ enables you to collaboratively manage your programs from concept to completion. It digitizes processes for managing scope, risk, quality, issues, and schedules. Delivering complex programs on time and on budget is a major

projects and tasks across your IT portfolio, Program Management

challenge for any organization. With diverse but interrelated

improves your PMO governance and execution. From business

projects, resources, and processes, conflicts are inevitable and

sponsors to program directors, project managers, software

success is often elusive. IT organizations would like to be able to

engineers, and QA personnel, Program Management provides the

say they know which of their programs are in trouble at any given

collaborative processes, visibility, and control to keep your PMO

time, and how they will get them back on track. Yet it is difficult to

humming on schedule and on budget.

manage complicated program management processes. That’s why many companies have implemented program management offices (PMOs).

With Program Management, you no longer need multiple point tools and paper manuals to manage program initiation, approval, scope changes, risks, issue resolution, resources, or status. Mercury’s best-

Mercury Program Management is the best way to optimize the

practice PMO processes let you model and enforce corporate PMO

value your program management office (PMO) delivers to your

standards while keeping stakeholders and team members aligned at

business while reducing risk. From large programs to individual

every step, a critical requirement for achieving business technology optimization (BTO).

Provide Visibility and Control Across Projects Each week, PMO staff members spend hours or even days compiling status reports from multiple data sources. Program Management frees up staff time by capturing all this information in a single repository and automatically rolling it up in the included Mercury IT Governance Dashboard™. Program Management makes real-time project status available to all project participants and stake holders using personalized IT Governance Dashboard pages. Red, yellow, and green indicators indicate program health, with updates occurring in real-time and notifications for exception conditions. Managers reviewing a program’s summary project status can drill into project details and even down to individual tasks or outstanding issues. Many views Real-time Program Summary Dashboard showing program status with drill-down capability into the details.

enable you to directly act on the information, reducing the time lag

and overhead associated with approvals, status updates, and

common processes for “apples-to-apples” comparisons and

priority changes.

reduced risk. As benefits are realized, they are collected and

Using an intuitive user interface, you can model your programs in Program Management, specify which projects roll up to each

communicated so stakeholders always know what is going on from start to finish — a proof point on the road to BTO.

program, and link projects to multiple programs. The end result is

How it Works

real-time access to all aspects of your complex programs.

Mercury Program Management provides the structure and out-of-

Ensure Collaboration and Stakeholder Alignment Program Management provides the shared repository, visibility, and security to feed all interested parties the information they need, plus the best practice processes to involve the right people at the right time. Resource requests and allocations follow a

the-box processes for managing scope changes, risk, quality, issues, schedules, resources, releases, and costs. You elect which you want to use out-of-the-box without losing the ability to adapt and extend these processes as your business changes with the Mercury IT Governance Foundation™ drag-and-drop process modeler.

codified process so managers and stakeholders gain real-time

Program Management’s out-of-the-box program initiation process

visibility into resource requirements and the prioritized projects that

gets you started with forms specifying what data is required, the

generated them.

requisite approval steps and established Program Dashboards providing visibility and real-time status. The process includes enforcing that the required data is collected, and that approvals and change requests are appropriately handled. Program budgets, schedules, and resources are created as part of the initiation process. Projects and project plans can be tied to a program for detailed work breakdown structures, task management, or summary milestone reporting. Resource management is also easier — you can view and request resources by skill and/or by name, ensuring you have all resource requests in one place.

FEATURES AND BENEFITS • Digitized complex PMO processes: Provides and enforces processes for managing scope changes, risk, quality, issues, schedules, resources, releases, and costs. Program cost metrics covering planned value, earned value, budgeted costs, actual costs, and projected actuals among others.

• Out-of-the-box best-practice processes: Offers best-practice processes right out-of-the-box so you can implement them quickly. You can also adapt and extend these processes using a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Program Management enables you to work with dependencies,

• Visibility and control across projects: Real-time information enables managers to monitor complex, multi-project programs and drill into current project details at any time.

linking tasks, or even entire projects that affect another particular project or task. Mercury’s powerful scheduling engine automatically takes these dependencies into account so project views are kept up to date, providing stakeholders consistent views into program and project lifecycle status so tradeoffs can be made based on up-to-date information. Our best-practice processes for managing risk, scope changes, resource requests, and issues guarantee that programs share

• Collaboration and stakeholder alignment: Resource and cost visibility across programs, projects, and keep-the-lights-on activities coupled with a stage gate project lifecycle enables collaborative decisions on what takes priority. Detailed cost and schedule metrics from program initiation through delivery keeps stakeholders informed and aligned on costs, schedules, expected benefits, and realized benefits.

MERCURY PROJECT MANAGEMENT Mercury Project Management™ enables collaborative project management for both repetitive projects and one-time projects. You can accelerate project delivery while reducing project costs. Successful projects can make or break an IT organization. A

Mercury Project Management integrates project management and

leading IT research firm states that nearly 90 percent of IT projects

process control to reduce project complexity, accelerate project

are delivered late and 50 percent are over-budget. To change this

delivery, and reduce costs. Unlike traditional project management

situation, companies need a robust solution that integrates

software that only plans, schedules, and reports on project status,

project management and process control, allows staff to

Project Management can use task-level workflows to augment a

collaborate on project management, and provides real-time

work breakdown structure and leverage best-practice processes to

visibility into project status.

accelerate project delivery. Project Management supports collaborative project management for both repetitive and one-time projects. In addition to project templates, baselines, costs, budgets, earned value, and reports, Mercury enables you to establish project-to-project dependencies and manage by exception, capabilities far beyond the manual approaches of less integrated, less real-time projectmanagement tools.

Collaborate on Project Management Mercury Project Management provides a platform for project collaboration between team members and stakeholders with realtime visibility into resources, processes, status, and inter-project dependencies. The solution encompasses out-of-the-box tools and processes that enable you to effectively initiate projects; plan and track phases, Project status, milestones, and cost summaries are available within the included Mercury IT Governance Dashboard to keep stakeholders informed and projects on track.

milestones and tasks; schedule and assign resources; and conduct high-level planning. Stakeholders subscribe to the projects that concern them, and project managers don’t have to waste time building project status reports or portals as real-time project-status views are provided through Mercury IT Governance Dashboard™.

Integrate Project and Process Control

Real-Time Project Visibility

Effective project management requires more than just good project

Without Project Management, you can spend a considerable

managers; you also need effective processes. Mercury Project

amount of time preparing status reports and updating project

Management provides a unique combination of project and process

portals. Mercury helps ensure current project status, health, and

control to help you manage complexity, reduce risk, and maximize

deliverables are available in real-time without extra effort.

the value of your projects.

Project Management includes Gantt charts to visually measure

Project Management enables you to link tasks to workflow-driven

project progress and schedules. Each time a project is scheduled,

processes (requests) to automate repeatable, process-based tasks.

the critical path is calculated and highlighted to provide visibility

For example, when new report development follows a standard

into the most important tasks in the project.

process, Project Management enables you to link the process to the task so appropriate steps are always followed. To support the automation of task-level workflows, Mercury includes a graphical

As tasks are assigned to resources, they automatically appear on each user's IT Governance Dashboard. As users update their status, this is automatically rolled-up through the project hierarchy so that project managers and stakeholders see current project status in real time, all the time. In addition, Project Management facilitates managing by exception. Color indicators identify project health by cost and schedule, making it easy to identify problems.

FEATURES AND BENEFITS Project Overview (Gantt)

workflow/process modeler that allows you to digitize your best practices by modeling, automating, enforcing, and measuring them. Templates are another way Mercury enforces best practices — either through templates provided by Mercury or templates you create from scratch, import from Microsoft Project, or copy from existing projects. Project Management also helps you measure objective project performance through the use of project baselines, created at userspecified time intervals. Standard screens and reports allow you to view variances between the current project plan and any of the saved baselines.

• Real-time monitoring and control: Provides real-time project visibility into your project resources, processes, status, and dependencies to improve communication and productivity. • Integrated projects and processes: In addition to standard baseline, milestone, critical path, and project-template capabilities, digitized best-practice task processes (task-level workflows) can drive tasks so participants are engaged at the appropriate time with the appropriate information. Project managers can utilize existing processes or have new ones digitized to meet their specific needs. • Project collaboration: Supports inter-project dependencies to keep external tasks and/or projects from pushing deadlines without stakeholders knowing about it as project status is continually updated in real-time. Also allows project managers to leverage existing software investments and knowledge with flexible APIs, bi-directional interface to Microsoft Project, and process control. • Detailed resource and financial management: Mercury Project Management includes Mercury Resource Management™ and Mercury Financial Management™. • Optimized IT strategy and execution: Enables you to focus on highestpriority items and ensure resources are being allocated to the most important and strategic projects.

MERCURY FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT Mercury Financial Management™ manages your company’s IT portfolio with real-time visibility into financial performance without costly integrations to multiple data sources. ROI, NPV, cost of capital, earned value, charge backs. Few IT

Mercury Financial Management is the only application that enables

organizations operate with “blank checks” these days. Limited

your company to manage its IT portfolio of proposals, projects, and

budgets require tough decisions on what IT commits to — focused

“keep-the-lights-on” applications with real-time visibility into financial

projects that maximize IT business value, optimize IT service

performance. It provides you with the required information and

delivery, and reduce costs. To make the best decisions, managers

processes to make effective portfolio decisions.

need real-time visibility into project budgets and actual costs, of course. But that’s not enough for success. They also need simultaneous visibility into project progress, status, and the value being realized from projects — both projects that keep the business running and initiatives that grow and transform the business. Only one product offering provides all of this: Mercury IT Governance Center™.

Track and Compare Actuals to Budgets One of the keys to effectively managing a portfolio is ready access to both expected costs (budgets) and actual costs. With Mercury, you have out-of-the box visual comparisons of budgets to actual costs across your entire portfolio or any combination of individual projects or applications. You also have out-of-the-box earned value analysis for assessing the health of active projects. Configurable exception conditions let you flag projects as red, yellow, or green based on cost performance and schedule performance. These views enable project managers and IT executives to manage more effectively by exception and priority rather than haphazardly reviewing projects in the portfolio.

Align IT Budgets, Activities, and Costs Using current information and unlimited “what-if” scenarios, Financial Management increases the capabilities of Mercury IT Governance Center applications. For example, Mercury Portfolio Management™ makes it easy to evaluate your pending or proposed projects against active projects and production applications. User-defined categories allow you to “slice and dice” your portfolio across multiple categories including capital budget, operating Portfolio view of NPV vs. risk for all projects by project class.

budget, resources, expected benefit, realized benefit, project class, and asset class. In addition, just a few mouse clicks let you view the breakdown of the portfolio by type of project, sponsoring group, or business objective.

With Financial Management, you have real-time visibility into

sources. Budgets are created for labor costs and non-labor charges

financial performance of your IT projects. Whether you’re interested

as well as capital and operational expenditures. Actual labor hours

in a single project or the entire portfolio, configurable portlets allow

from time sheets, project entries, or staffing profiles are used with

you to “subscribe” to the data that’s relevant to you. Whether it’s

defined resource rates by skill set, individual, or other rule to

earned value, resource costs by task, project or skill, benefits by

calculate actual labor costs.

sponsoring organization or realized savings or expenditures to date — Financial Management can provide the information.

Financial Management not only provides detailed views of project health, it helps you establish and manage IT budgeting — from

In addition, Financial Management helps you manage projects and

project proposal, justification, and review to project initiation,

activities and balance your project portfolio in real-time. Because

execution, deployment, and benefits realization. Costs are

Mercury IT Governance Center is a real–time application, updates

calculated automatically where possible and otherwise entered

affecting performance metrics are always available (no more three-

manually through the intuitive Mercury interface to take advantage

week delays while status reports are built manually from multiple

of existing financial system investments.

data sources). You have the ability to shift projects in the portfolio based on performance and/or the availability of new funds or re-allocation of existing funds. This means you can concentrate on making decisions rather than gathering data. And, when someone asks what value you could deliver with another 20 million — you can give him or her an answer with confidence.

The Bottom Line It’s a fact of life today: Business stakeholders want more from IT and they want to pay less for it. Mercury Financial Management and Mercury IT Governance Center let business stakeholders and IT effectively discuss and co-own priorities and deliverables. With Mercury, they can have objective conversations on what can and should be done — enabling them to focus resources on the highestpriority, highest-value projects while saying goodbye to redundant and under-performing projects. Welcome to effective IT Governance and business technology optimization (BTO) from Mercury.

FEATURES AND BENEFITS • Visibility and governance: Provides financial visibility and governance throughout the IT lifecycle process, enabling organizations to manage IT like a business, manage IT costs by exception, and improve accuracy of estimates. Budget summary views by portfolio scenario.

Manage Risks Financial Management also delivers valuable risk management processes for projects and programs. These processes enable you to capture, document, and manage risks as they are identified. Each risk is assigned a severity and probability that should go down over time as the risk is mitigated. By capturing and tracking all risks, project managers and financial managers can better assess the true state of project health and better decide what type of corrective action would be appropriate if necessary.

How it Works Financial Management provides real-time visibility into budgets, costs (both labor and non-labor), programs, projects, risks, and overall IT demand — without costly integrations to multiple data

• Both strategic and “keep-the-lights-on” activities: Becomes the touchstone for monitoring cost performance of all IT operations. Business stakeholders see in real time the value that IT is delivering to them. • Earned value analysis: Automatically tracks and calculates earned value including both labor and non-labor metrics. Because this analysis is performed automatically for you, your organization can begin managing by earned value without the time and expense required to capture and calculate the necessary values the old way. • Breadth of financial coverage: Establishes and manages IT budgets (with both capital and expense items), expected and realized benefits, risks and risk probabilities, actual cost calculations, actual to budget comparisons, and visual monitors of financial performance to enable real-time analysis of IT transactions and defendable charge backs. • Real-time, all-the-time: Offers real-time, 24x7 information through Mercury IT Governance Dashboard™.

MERCURY RESOURCE MANAGEMENT Mercury Resource Management™ effectively manages resource capacity and allocation. It balances your resource supply, giving you full visibility and control over project demand. Skilled IT workers are more important than ever to business

Mercury Resource Management provides real-time visibility and

success. Putting the right people on the right projects is often the

control over your resources to help you make the best decisions.

difference between meeting business expectations or falling short.

It is the only application that lets you optimize resource

Plus, today’s tight budgets punish resourcing mistakes that can

effectiveness across both the existing “keep-the-lights-on”

delay projects and reduce worker productivity. Mercury Resource

activities that run your business and the new initiatives that grow

Management addresses the following questions: Is too much of my

and transform your business.

capacity consumed by ad hoc projects versus strategic projects or routine “keep-the-lights-on” activities? Am I effectively utilizing my most valuable resources? When will I have resources to start that strategic project?

Manage All Resources Resource Management provides a clear picture of resource supply, including resource skills and skill levels, across the entire organization. It also captures resource demand from projects and “keep-the-lights-on” activities that drive IT in real time, ensuring up-to-date visibility into what resources and skills are required and when. This level of visibility into resource supply and demand gives you the information to make better decisions about where IT staff members should spend their time. To fulfill demand you can allocate resources by name, skill, or group and then track the effort against any work item. CIOs and portfolio decision makers enjoy both realtime status displays and immediate access to detailed resource information on which to base decisions.

Plan and Schedule Resources Resource Management makes it easy to plan and schedule your resources. Its staffing profiles capture high-level resource requirements from a skills perspective — without requiring the actual resource to be named (unless you want to). Resource pools are used to model resource supply by company, division, group, or program — so you can plan alternate staffing scenarios to see which Real-time visibility into resource load, with multiple views by active vs. proposed, load by skill, department, project, resource, and over/under allocations.

would be most effective. Using both, you can easily identify the

need for more Java developers or DBAs before you worry about

availability by skill. You can also map your organization structure

who would be assigned to a project six or 12 months in the future —

and the resources within it to drive application security — reducing

improving overall planning and decision-making.

maintenance requirements and simplifying administration. And,

Similarly you can evaluate new project requests quickly (and adjust their scope) without spending weeks on detailed project planning. And, once projects or activities are approved, you can build detailed assignments that specify the exact resources and dates for a set of

thanks to standard integration with LDAP, you can leverage thirdparty systems to map resource attributes including skill sets, manager, organization, and more without re-keying data to minimize costs and increase your return on investment.

tasks or activities. These assignments then show up against the

How it Works

resources and ensure they aren’t allocated to another activity

Individual resources with skills, proficiencies, work calendars, rates,

unless it is warranted.

and productivity metrics are entered into the system or maintained via LDAP. Resource pools reflecting groups of resource supply are created to meet demand from staffing profiles, project plans, and “keep-the-lights-on” activities. Automatic real-time updates and an enforced process ensure resource allocations and utilizations are up to date for effective high-level resource budgeting and detailed project planning, execution, deployment, and benefits realization. And, unlike other systems, Resource Management provides real-time visibility into capacity, assignments, utilization, programs, projects, costs, and overall IT demand — without the need for costly integrations to multiple data sources. Resource Management gives you the power to maximize the value your resources deliver to the business.

FEATURES AND BENEFITS • Resource visibility: Provides supply-and-demand visibility into resources and resource skill levels across the organization, giving you the insight to use valuable resources more wisely and improving overall productivity.

Resource information including skills, cost rate, load, and assignments.

Optimize Resource Effectiveness Resource Management enables you to analyze resource utilization, availability, and capacity in real time on the Mercury IT Governance Dashboard™. Because Resource Management provides visibility over both operational tasks and mission-critical strategic projects, you can allocate resources to the highest-priority activities across groups and organization units, without worrying that something is being overlooked or disrupting the schedule. Mercury’s skills database enables you to assign one or more skills to each resource, assign proficiencies for each skill, and then track utilization and

• Resource modeling: Enables you to easily model resource supply and demand to quickly evaluate the fit of a new project request and budget for named resources and skills. Resources can be mapped to your organizational structure and resource utilization, availability, and capacity tracked by resource and as you see fit. • Resource search: Resource attributes and resource search help you find the right resource to assign to a specific project or task if you don’t already have someone in mind who is available. • Optimized resource effectiveness: Provides the visibility and processes to allocate resources to the highest-priority activities across groups or organization units. You no longer need to worry that something important is being overlooked or something minor disrupting your schedule. • Real-time transactions: Captures the transactions that drive IT in real time, so resource utilization and status is always up-to-date. • LDAP integration: Enables you to map resource attributes such as skills, proficiencies, rates, manager, organization, and more.

MERCURY CHANGE MANAGEMENT Mercury Change Management™ accelerates deployment of changes to your applications portfolio to lower your risk and increase your ROI. Mercury digitizes best practice software change management processes. In many companies today, IT is under siege as never before. On

processes, the solution performs all tasks required to install

one hand, the business needs continuing improvements in strategic

software changes correctly across your system landscape.

functionality to improve its competitiveness. On the other hand, cost pressures keep squeezing IT budgets, and the bulk of existing resources are tied up maintaining existing systems. Some companies are looking to save money by outsourcing or sending routine work offshore, but risks and hidden costs can quickly erode savings. There is a better first step toward more strategic, cost-effective IT: automating manual IT tasks. By automating previously manual tasks, you can reduce costs and free up valuable resources for strategic projects without putting your application availability at risk.

With Change Management, packages are deployed automatically, eliminating errors inherent in manual processes. Change Management’s detailed audit trail helps you pinpoint problems quickly and roll back changes if necessary. By automating formerly manual tasks, Change Management lets you accomplish more with less and dramatically lessen the risk of “broken” deployment.

Digitized Best Practices Change Management provides the best practices required for effective change management, enabling you to govern and

Mercury Change Management automates and manages the

automate the entire change and deployment process. You use

migration and deployment of application changes for packaged

our processes to define and enforce reviews, approvals, and quality

applications, custom applications, legacy systems, Web content,

standards, which in turn reduce manual touch-points, latency, and

and more. Leveraging and enforcing best-practice deployment

mistakes. Or, you can digitize and automate your own processes. This provides a consistent, repeatable way to manage development, QA, build, release, and deployment. Change Management also helps you digitize and enforce application development methodologies such as CMM and Six Sigma. And, a full audit trail ensures you can measure performance and troubleshoot bottlenecks.

Automate Releases and Deployments Most IT resources are focused on keeping the business running. Change Management automates many of these manual processes, freeing up resources for more value-added activities. Change Management automates all phases of software deployment, eliminating costly delays and errors. You can schedule deployments Drag-and-drop workflow engine for automating deployment processes.

to execute automatically during off-peak hours; if human

intervention is required, e-mail or pager notifications are sent to

platform. It automates the migration and deployment of software

the appropriate people.

changes across your entire system landscape. It can deploy code,

You define environments in Change Management to match your actual promotion landscapes, and environment groups allow

configuration, and content changes to enterprise applications, custom and legacy systems, Web sites, and networks.

workflows to migrate to one or more servers in the group, rather

Developers attach changes as package lines within a package.

than just a single target.

Each package line uses an object type to tell the system what type

Change Management enables you to deploy individual changes via individual packages, or you can group changes into releases using our release management capabilities for deployment as a single logical unit. Change Management also supports the re-sequencing of packages and package lines within a release to ensure changes are applied in the proper order.

of a change it has. Packages follow a digitized process to ensure they are appropriately handled with reviews and approvals. Based on the process, each package line or change is deployed to the environments defined by that process. By automating deployments to the development, test, production, and any other defined environment, the risk of out-of-sync conditions or operator error is significantly reduced. With Change Management, production access can be restricted to further reduce the likelihood of unintended changes, in effect “locking down” production environments. In addition, it leverages a powerful workflow and execution engine that can communicate directly with all leading platforms including Unix, Linux, Windows, and through services — even mainframes. Optional Change Management Extensions provide out-of-the-box best practices and automation for managing changes to leading packaged applications, including those from Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and Siebel. Mercury Change Management Extensions digitize

Package of objects being deployed via the enforced workflow process to fix order entry.

change management best practices for configurations, customizations, patches, upgrades, and more.

Ensure Visibility Change Management gives you instant visibility across the entire process, including all relevant point tools. It maintains detailed audit trails of all current and past software changes with clear and comprehensive reports, enabling you to quickly spot bottlenecks. Data can be further analyzed on the Mercury IT Governance Dashboard or exported to spreadsheet applications. In the event of a failure, the audit trail helps quickly pinpoint the cause and speed resolution. By managing all changes through Change Management, you have a single repository of changes that can be used to determine impact analysis as new changes are requested. Change Management includes reports to compare changes or configurations across environments or databases. Change Management automates and accelerates change deployment to keep you in control of change — lowering costs and improving reliability. And that’s a change for the better.

How it Works Change Management is a comprehensive solution for managing changes to all applications, across all environments, on any

FEATURES AND BENEFITS • Improved efficiency: Reduces deployment time by 85 percent or more and rework by 50 to 70 percent — lowering overall deployment cost and risk. • Uniform change management: Manages all changes to all applications, across all environments and platforms. Change Management automates migrations and deployments of software changes, and offers optional Extensions that provide out-of-the-box best practices for leading applications. • Digitized best practices: Codifies, automates, and governs the entire change and deployment cycle with best-practice processes for effective change management and to enforce application development methodologies. • Automated releases and deployments: Automates implementations, upgrades, patches, change requests, configurations, instance consolidations, and migrations to avoid costly delays and errors. Managing multiple deployment environments becomes easy with full control over individual changes and groups of changes or releases. Change Management also supports the re-sequencing of packages and package lines containing changes to ensure the changes are applied in the proper sequence. • Complete visibility: Provides system of record audit trail for visibility across the entire change process with comprehensive reports and a real-time dashboard.

MERCURY TIME MANAGEMENT Mercury Time Management™ helps your company focus on value-added activities by streamlining time collection and improving accuracy across the wide range of work performed by IT. Managing valuable IT resources is difficult enough without having to

and deployments. Time Management helps you manage both the

track where resources spend their time. While many organizations

work-demanded and time-expended sides of the equation in a

desire strong time management, few are able to do it well because

common system. It gives your IT organization the resources it

of the challenge of synchronizing timesheets with the appropriate

needs to overcome the challenges of time collection and focus on

projects, budgets, and requests. To succeed, companies need a

improving productivity and execution.

solution that not only performs time-accounting basics, but also supports a wide range of IT activities and integrates time management with work management.

Ease of Use: Integrating Time and Work Management Time Management uses a simple, intuitive, Web-based user interface that requires little training. The solution also provides for

Mercury Time Management helps your company focus on value-

easy administration by pulling project IDs directly from work items —

added activities by streamlining time collection and improving

eliminating the additional setup that makes other solutions difficult.

accuracy across the wide range of work performed by IT.

Managers and accountants will appreciate that work items and time

Streamlining the end-to-end time collection and reporting process,

collection never get out of synch due to missing project IDs and

it bridges the gap between work management and time manage-

other pitfalls, saving the time and cost associated with manual

ment across a range of items, including projects, tasks, requests,

reconciliation. Also, by performing timesheet entry through the same interface that you use across IT to create and manage requests, projects, and tasks, integrated work management and time management can become a reality.

Real-Time Visibility and Management All timesheet entry and approval actions are performed using the Mercury Web interface, and items automatically appear on your Mercury IT Governance Dashboard™ and can also appear via e-mail as they are ready for action. Personalized dashboards enable you to view your own work items and/or approvals, as well as actualversus-budgeted time information. Enter time against work items and defined item categories.

Role-based views are also available, enabling the display of

Billing and Financial Reporting

information relevant to each role, such as work items, work

Data captured in Time Management can be transferred easily to

allocation, budgeted time, actual time, and total work hours by

various billing and financial systems for charge-back, project

work item — all updated in real-time.

accounting, and other financial-reporting activities. You can also

Flexibility Through Configuration Mercury Time Management allows for flexibility to meet your specific needs. For example, you can easily configure variables such

configure charge codes at various levels, including work item, type of work item, department, and job role to simplify time entry and reporting.

as time periods (i.e., start and end dates, period duration, etc.),

How it Works

approval hierarchies, work classifications, charge codes, and

Employees enter time as lines in a timesheet against generic

time-entry options so each department can set up timesheets as

classifications or specific work items. Time Management does not

it wishes.

limit the number of work classifications, but it can limit which users

In terms of security, you control which users can perform timesheet entry and approval actions, as well as which users can see timesheets and other data. You can also configure allocations to control which users can enter time against specific work items.

can bill time against which classifications. When entering a time, you can select charge codes to allocate time across multiple groups or to override billing information for that line. To save time, you can copy timesheets from previous periods or use business rules to define default timesheets. Each user and approver is defined within the application and can include billing rates, skills, delegation rules, and linked charge codes or business rules. Once you enter time on a timesheet, you release the timesheet for review. Released timesheets immediately become available for review by the designated approver, who can return the timesheet if additional information is required. Approvals are conducted online and can be reviewed in either a summary or detail mode.

Filters can automatically populate Time Sheet activities.

Throughout the process, dashboards provide fast role-specific views of the information. Timesheet approvers and managers include summaries by team, work type, or group in addition to detailed views into all areas. Estimated effort can also be captured, enabling estimate vs. actual views and views of all items exceeding estimates.

FEATURES AND BENEFITS • Optimized IT strategy and execution: Provides stakeholders with essential, up-to-the minute data — enabling your company to manage valuable IT resources in a complex environment. • Integrated time and work management: Synchronizes project IDs, request IDs, and other chargeable work items across a common work and timemanagement system, minimizing errors and lowering reconciliation costs. The Dashboard offers configurable summary views by role.

• Enforced review and approval process: Improves accuracy by collecting time as work is performed and enforcing business-rule-based timesheet review and approvals.

MERCURY IT GOVERNANCE CENTER SERVICES Mercury offers a number of services focused on products, people, and processes to help you implement and realize the full benefits of Mercury IT Governance Center. Mercury offers a number of consulting services and a hosted

engagement manager who assures ongoing successful Mercury IT

service to help you implement and realize the full benefits of

Governance Center implementation.

Mercury IT Governance Center™.

Mercury Custom Consulting Services™: In addition to our packaged

Mercury Consulting Services

offerings, our consultants can work with you to deliver a custom ™

Mercury Change Management Services : We install and configure ™

Mercury Change Management , as well as Mercury IT Governance

solution that meets your specific needs. Product and process experts deliver these services using Mercury Best Practices and

Dashboard and Mercury IT Governance Foundation . We configure

proven Services Methodology to help you meet your business goals.

our best practices and establish the following processes: patch

Our experts will drive your success through unmatched

management, instance management, and service delivery lifecycle.

implementation planning, risk management, process configuration,

We also provide knowledge transfer for organizational design,

implementation, rollout, and support, as well as the knowledge

product operation, continual process improvement, and ROI

transfer to your team.





measurement to ensure your implementation drives continual value. ™

Mercury Managed Services

Mercury Portfolio Management FastStart : We provide a fully

Mercury Hosted Service for IT Governance Center™: We’ll configure

functioning portfolio view of your most important 50 to 75 projects

and host your IT Governance Center implementation using our

in as little as two weeks. Based on insights gained from thousands

infrastructure. This ensures continual availability while your team

of hours of consulting and industry best practices, the Mercury

continues to use and benefit from the Center applications. Mercury

FastStart Program was designed to deliver rapid value to IT

operates Centers for thousands of customers, leveraging our

executives and managers responsible for creating proposals,

experienced resources, best practices, and scalable and robust

business cases, and budgets and to decision makers who

infrastructure. Deploying Mercury Managed Services will enable you

participate in the prioritization, evaluation, and justification of IT

to generate value quickly while reducing total cost of ownership

projects. Customers of the Mercury FastStart Program can get

(TCO) for center implementation and operation.

started immediately. Mercury provides the software licenses and services to support a team of 15 portfolio managers and analysts to populate the top 50 to 75 projects in their IT portfolio.

FEATURES AND BENEFITS • Receive hands-on training and knowledge transfer.

Mercury Assured Deployment Service™: We create an ongoing

• Achieve ROI and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

mentoring and best-practice relationship between Mercury and you

• Minimize risk of new deployment or upgrade.

to ensure target ROI is achieved. The service includes and onsite

• Validate and optimize the capacity of your overall system.

Mercury Interactive is the global leader in business technology optimization (BTO). We are committed to helping customers optimize the business value of IT. WWW.MERCURY.COM © 2004 Mercury Interactive Corporation. Patents pending. All rights reserved. Mercury Interactive, the Mercury Interactive logo, the Mercury logo, Mercury IT Governance Center, Mercury Change Management, Mercury Demand Management, Mercury Financial Management, Mercury IT Governance Dashboard, Mercury IT Governance Foundation, Mercury Portfolio Management, Mercury Program Management, Mercury Project Management, Mercury Resource Management, and Mercury Time Management are trademarks or registered trademarks of Mercury Interactive Corporation in the United States and/or other foreign countries. All other company, brand, and product names are marks of their respective holders. OV-0938-0904